Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
WPInnovator podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi, and welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee, and in today’s episode, we’ve got for you Brian Jackson from KeyCDN. Now, this is a freaking awesome episode packed full of a really good advice, really good plugins, and I do encourage you to check out the two blog posts that Brian mentions about speeds. One’s about page insights and one is about speeding up WordPress with some really, really good advice and good code snippets
Lee Matthew Jackson:
and some good plugins.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, throughout today’s episode, Brian is going to be dropping really good ideas as
Lee Matthew Jackson:
well and good plugins.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So. So I recommend make good notes, check out the show notes and follow his advice. I’ve done the very same on leejacksondev.com and I’m amazed already at the results. I’ve not even finished doing everything that he’s recommended and I’m already getting incredible results and seeing much faster performance on the leejacksondev.com website. So I know you guys are going to get great value out of this. Now, if you too have your own stories, your own success stories about speeding up WordPress, we’d love to hear from you. So head on over to the facebook [email protected] group and you’ll be redirected there to the private Facebook group. So until then, enjoy the show.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi, this is your host with the most, Lee Jackson. But actually today it’s not with the most because we have a guy on the phone who is also called Lee Jackson, throwing the name Brian in front of. But unfortunately he’s got way more hair than me. Looking at his emoticons and at his pictures. Mate, I actually Facebook stalked you. Is that weird?
Brian Jackson:
No, no, that’s totally fine.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I was like Googling Brian. Brian Jackson. Brian Lee Jackson. I couldn’t find you on Facebook. Eventually I found yours. Look, there he is. Oh, my gosh. We can’t have been separated at birth because look at all that hair.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Nice dark black hair. And there’s me, the bald guy. So anyway, sorry, guys. So we’ve got Brian Lee Jackson. How cool is that? We kind of share a name, kind of. Lee Jackson. Lee Jackson is kind of weird.
Brian Jackson:
No, that is pretty cool. When I actually, I don’t. I don’t remember how I found you or where. I think it was on Twitter. That’s where we first connected. And yeah, that, that first popped out to me. Lee Jackson. I’ve never had anyone share two of my names before.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, it’s weird. And share a love of WordPress.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah. And that’s. You’re in the same niche kind of that I know. So it’s weird. It’s very strange and cool at the same time.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
There’s a gif of a guy kind of doing the whole mind blown animation thing. I really love that. I’m not sure if I tweeted that to you, but I was kind of mind blown at the fact that, I mean, hey, I mean this, what, 6 billion people in the world. I guess it’s probably not unusual, I don’t know, but it kind of felt. It kind of felt unusual and cool all at the same time to kind of have this in common. Anyway, guys, enough of that. Brian Lee Jackson is the man about town when it comes to WordPress because he’s involved in so many cool things. One of the most exciting things he’s up to at the moment is looking after all of the inbound marketing for key CDN.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s the CDN service which I guess secures and speeds up your WordPress website to the nth degree. So he’s managing all that, but he also has a whole load of other projects in the wings, including a little old blog you may or may not have heard of called workup, which is double O, that’s workup.com and I believe you’re the main blogger. Are you on that along with your brother?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, and actually my brother does. He does some of the plugins you see on there. They’re custom. He actually doesn’t blog at all on there. He’s actually a WordPress developer full time. So some of the magic that happens behind the scenes on some of our sites, he does that kind of stuff.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So he’s like the full on geek. Do you do any coding yourself?
Brian Jackson:
I mean, I know php, but if I was trying it myself, it would take me an hour compared to what my brother could do in five minutes. So I can do things, but I can tell you that is not my forte.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No worries. So mate, could you just give us a little bit of background then about yourself? Anyway, about you, how you Both got into WordPress as well. Might as well talk about your brother here as well. So how did you know? A bit of background about you away from and how you guys got into WordPress would be freaking awesome to learn.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, I think I’ve been kind of an entrepreneur since a very, very young age. I think I started drop shipping CDs and DVDs back in the dial up days, I think it was back in fifth or sixth grade and ever since I realized you could make money on the Internet, I mean I was literally hooked up and ever since then I’ve been, I guess you could say, doing the hustle lifestyle, kind of always working, always blogging, always trying to make more money on the Internet. I’ve been using WordPress I think for eight or nine years. I mean since originally, since it became very popular. I feel like I’ve kind of grown with WordPress as it’s developed over the years and I think I originally, I don’t even remember how I stumbled across WordPress to begin with but you know, it was probably when I was making one of my websites. I decided to use WordPress and I kind of same with the Internet marketing thing, I was hooked and I’ve been doing WordPress ever since. I never really gone down the Joomla Drupal Magento path. Always stuck with WordPress for like the last eight or nine years.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I’ll probably have to be pull those out now. They’re swear words, aren’t they?
Brian Jackson:
So yeah, I’m just, I love WordPress. I love the community. It’s a great community of people.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Brian Jackson:
And I mean it constantly gets better. It makes my life easier and so yeah, it’s great all around product.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And how did you and your brother kind of both connect on WordPress together?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, well I went to the university for I guess web and graphic design which was really the closest thing they had to my major. They really need to come up with some like Internet marketing entrepreneur degrees or something. I think I took some business classes but nothing really hits on kind of even what, what you and I are doing. And so you know, if I had to redo it I probably would have skipped school altogether to be honest. Save myself some money. But you know, I kind of got into more stuff there and got into different jobs. I first got a web developer job out here in Scottsdale, Arizona and was doing more the development side of things and not, not so much PHP but more graphics kind of things with WordPress. And then I started getting really more into the marketing realm and I joined a, an agency that did websites for medical companies.
Brian Jackson:
They did different marketing for people like back pain and they had different clinics where they’d have doctors and we had everything on WordPress there. You know, we had 25 plus different websites all running WordPress. And actually that’s where my brother still works is with that company. And so going into there. That was more a pay per click kind of stuff with WordPress. So, you know, I’m doing stuff on WordPress, I’m doing landing pages, call to actions and then doing the pay per click side of things going forward from there. I really wanted to do more search engine optimization. That’s really my love.
Brian Jackson:
So got into the inbound marketing kind of the realm and that’s really where I kind of started developing a love just for pure content and really the power that content can do. And so eventually I joined the team at Key CDN and been doing content for them ever since basically. And then of course I do stuff on workup too. That is all organic traffic. You know, I’ve raised in that. It’s currently, I think it gets, it gets a little over 80,000 visitors a month.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What?
Brian Jackson:
It’s a hundred percent organic traffic. So it’s.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’d wear a badge if I, if I’d achieved that, I would actually make a badge or a T shirt.
Brian Jackson:
I mean, I wear it every day.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Brian Jackson:
I’m not gonna lie. This is not easy work at all. I mean, I spend, you know, many, many nights into the wee hours writing things and optimizing things. It’s. Some people think, you know, it’s, oh, you can just put content out there and it’ll just work. It’s not like that at all. I mean you have to do keyword research, you have to do competitor research. It’s.
Brian Jackson:
There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it. But I, WordPress has really helped, I think me become successful. I would not have be where I am at today actually without WordPress, so.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Amen, brother. Well, my entire business is WordPress.
Brian Jackson:
Yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’d have no business if there was no WordPress and no Internet. I’ve always said to people, I just have to be a laborer. I have no other skill to offer the world. I don’t believe. Anyway, I don’t know what else I’d be doing. It’s insane. Are you, are you kind of at that space where I’m at as well? Where you’ve got, you’re doing, you’re doing WordPress in work, but also when you’ve got spare time, you kind of want to do WordPress stuff?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, no, I’m the exact same way. And it’s funny because I work for KeyCity, which, you know, we’re all about speeding up websites. That’s, that’s our main goal is. And we do other sites too. We do Drupal Magento, we do all, all platforms. But, you know, it’s the same thing with that. When I’m not working with KeyCDN, I’m constantly trying to figure out other ways to speed up WordPress, even in my spare time. Like it’s, it’s actually fun for me, which is great because you got to love your job.
Brian Jackson:
And I feel lucky that I have a great job and great side projects that even when I’m not working, I feel like I want to be working because it’s a lot of fun.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. My wife doesn’t believe me. I’ll get her to listen to this, but when I do have, say, an evening off and she’ll find me coding, she’ll be like, what the hell are you doing? Why are you working? And I’ll be trying to explain to her I’m not. I’ve come up with this really cool plugin idea and I want to see if it’s going to work or I found this really great how to guide and I want to, I want to mess with it and have a play, I guess. I mean, I don’t. If you’re old enough. Do you remember the days when we had. You could like get the magazine which had all the code in it and you could then type the code into your computer.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And make your own games. Yeah.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool.
Brian Jackson:
I remember doing that. I was never much of a coder back in the days, but I remember those going around.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, well, I guess that’s kind of like. It’s kind of that for me still, because I still remember doing that. But then I’m the same with. If I find a blog that says, hey, look, here’s a. Here’s some snippets of code. You could create this then. I’m like that now. I’m copying and pasting and wanting to play with that as well and just have a great time geeking out on WordPress.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So, mate, I mean, I’m intrigued now. So you’ve. You’ve managed to get yourself a great position at Key cdn, one of the leading content delivery networks in the world. I don’t know if that’s true. I just. That sounds good.
Brian Jackson:
It sounds good to me. I’ll let you say that one for me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So, like I said, I’m intrigued you’ve managed to get this great job working with these guys. You also have. You’ve done a course, sorry, university degree in web development, design, etc. How did you get. From creating, say, just a WordPress post, what kind of steps did you take from creating WordPress posts to managing to teach yourself what is essentially a very fine art of things like SEO, content creation, inbound marketing strategies, all those sorts of things. That’s a huge question. I know, but how did you get from like just a guy who liked WordPress, who did a course that maybe wasn’t quite exactly what you wanted to do to being in such a great position right now and, you know, continuing to learn what, what are your kind of little secrets to getting there?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, I mean, the biggest advice I don’t want to. Some people might not agree with this, but for me, like, if I had to redo it, like I said before, I would have skipped school because I think the best way to learn is just by doing it and actually getting jobs where you learn how to do it, like go to community college and do internships. That would be much more cost effective in my opinion, because the best way to learn is by doing, in my opinion. And the way I learned all this SEO and inbound marketing is, you know, it turned, it started, you know, years ago when I just started blogging for fun. And then, you know, you keep blogging like that and you figure out, wait, you can actually change things and change rankings in Google by doing these different strategies. And then it’s. Yeah, there’s all sorts of things that go into it. But I would have to say the biggest piece of advice is, you know, if you’re just starting out, especially if you’re, if you’re younger, you know, get an internship doing something maybe like, say even like a company like yours where it’s a web development agency like it, you know, it’s a, that would be a great place to learn WordPress and have your hands in, you know, the marketing side.
Brian Jackson:
Or maybe you’re more of a coder. Learn by doing is my biggest piece of advice.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think such a good phrase. The best way to learn is by doing. I did drama and then somehow ended up in working with computers. So I’m not quite sure how that worked. So I, like you would have probably not gone and wasted any time. Yeah, I should have just gone straight into computers. But for me it was learning by doing and I did. You know, I have worked with freelancers, for example, in the past who are very, very technical and know their stuff.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But we’ve, we’ve had issues because they’ve got their way of working and maybe they think they’re superior and stuff like that. And it’s always got awkward. However, when I found that I was able to bring out on an intern for myself, and she became an apprentice. That’s Larissa. She’s was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. She had absolutely no programming experience or WordPress experience, but, you know, she literally started from scratch. And within just six months, she was already, you know, doing. She knew HTML like the back of her hand and was already building basic WordPress themes as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Because every day she was just doing stuff. She was reading books, she was looking at magazines about WordPress and also doing stuff through blog posts, etc. And just experimenting for six months. And she’s now really, really good at what she does. She’s got a, you know, a long journey ahead of her, but for her, it’s been great. She’s gone age 17, joined a WordPress company, and boom, hit the ground running.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, no, that’s great. I mean, I wish I could go back in time and change it and do exactly what she’s doing because it would save me time. And I think we all want to achieve something, and especially in the WordPress community, it seems like we’re all striving for these goals and it probably would have been a faster way to get there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No, I totally agree, buddy. So you’re currently. Are you working full time at qcdn or are you, like, on a contract and you’re doing your other work? I mean, are you earning money in other ways other than QCDN through things like workup through, like, affiliate marketing or anything like that?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, no, I’m actually full time at qcdn and then I do my other projects on the side and, you know, they’re great about, you know, that they love all my projects and they all kind of intertwine together, which is really, really nice because I really love web performance. I always have. And so, you know, a lot of stuff on workup even is about web performance. And so, you know, sometimes it ties back into key CDN and, you know, it all flows together because, yeah, I would say speeding up WordPress is just. It’s really fun for me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. And I’m imagining it’s a passion because I’ve had WordPress installs where it’s taken, you know, like 30 seconds for the WP admin to load and I’m crying.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
All right, well, obviously your expertise is in speed. So off the top of your head, if I could put you on the spot for the top three tips, are there top three tips that you would give to someone right now who feels like their WordPress website is going just a tad slow and they could improve it in some way. Would you have a top three tips?
Brian Jackson:
The first one, and this is going to be a shout out for qcdn, but is get a CDN provider. It’s not qcdn. You’ll look up the other ones. But get a, get a cdn on your WordPress site and I’ll just do some quick math for you because I think there’s, there’s a lot of misconceptions about what a CDN actually is and how much it costs. I think Even in the WordPress community I see it every single day. People think, you know, CDN is very technical and it costs a lot of money to put on your site. That’s, that’s not true by any means. And some quick numbers here.
Brian Jackson:
I think one of my other sites gets about 65,000 visitors a month. And for, I just looked it up a couple of minutes ago, but if I was to run, you know, KeyCDN running on there, it only costs about maybe like $3 a month to run it on there for 60,000 visitors a month. Now it depends, it very depends on if you’re serving big files and all. There’s a whole bunch of other scenarios. But if for just general traffic and speeding up images and stuff on your website, a CDN is very, very cheap. And the main reason you want a CDN is obviously it takes a copy of all your stuff and it puts it on servers around the world. So you know, for people that don’t know how web hosting really works is, you know, you always have your stuff on one server. And so people over say someone in England wants to visit my website, normally when they hit my site it’s going to have to look it up from the server in Dallas, Texas, which is where my website is hosted.
Brian Jackson:
But with the cdn, you know, there’s a server that keeps a copy of all my content on it right there in London over there. So when they look it up, it does a query to my website, but then it grabs all the Images, all the CSS, all the JavaScript right there from London. So it’s very, very snappy, very, very quick. So it reduces all the latency, all the, all the slowness. So that would be my first tip I guess, is use the cdn. Doesn’t matter how small you are, if you have one little website, use a cdn. It can help with your SEO, helps with your speed. Google loves speed.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And if you’ve got a small website as well, it’s going to be even cheaper than $3.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah. To run Most have minimums, minimum charges, which we also do, but you know, you’re looking at like a couple dollars a month. So it really, in the long run for what it, what it gives you, it’s just, it’s so cheap and, you know, medium businesses I see a lot like, they don’t utilize CDNs. And you know, I think they definitely, you know, could afford two to three dollars. And they’re trying to do all these other things to speed their website up when really a CDN could jumpstart and fast track them to success with that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I suppose what we should say as well right now, I believe you’re running an offer on WP Coupons IO.
Brian Jackson:
Oh, yeah. If they want to get some free credits, they can go on workup.com and click into the deal section or go to WP Coupons. IO is actually the first WordPress plugin my brother and I just launched two weeks ago. So we’re excited about that. And yeah, they can go on there and grab the credits too.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sweet. Okay, so it sounds like a plug, but if people wanted to go ahead and check out KeyCDN instead of trying a different CDN, I thought it was worth throwing that in there so that people can have a look. And it’s kind of risk free then, isn’t it? Because not only are they getting, I think you guys do a trial, but also they can get some credits as well to try it out and experiment. Yeah, cool.
Brian Jackson:
Free trial. No credit card either. So, I mean, I encourage everyone to try it out. Do speed tests yourself. Don’t just take my word for it. Launch a webpage test or pingdom and do speed tests from different locations.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. All right, so we’ve got. Number one is CDN. I wish I’d said 10, I’d have been hilarious. Just to like. Here you go. Number eight is. Sorry.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
All right, so number one, cdn. Number two.
Brian Jackson:
I mean, I could have done it, but we would have been here all day.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I was tempted.
Brian Jackson:
Number two, I would really have to say, is optimizing images. This is one thing that such a big pet peeve of mine. Like, I always get so frustrated when I see WordPress sites that don’t compress their images. And this is another little plug here, but it’s all useful information too. So we KeyCDN, you know, has. We own the Optimus WordPress plugin. And it’s, it’s a plugin that, you know, it’s. It’s an image Compression plugin for WordPress which automatically compresses your images when you upload them.
Brian Jackson:
And so we market that, you know, on the side because we love speeding up WordPress and you know, we have a huge love for WordPress, WordPress ad key CDN. But you know, images, I think the last stat that I pulled, you know, images on average are 64% of a web page’s weight, you know, so all these different things like your JavaScript, your CSS, they all make up your total page weight. And 64% on average is all images. So, you know, when you do the priority of what you should be working on, you know, images really should be number one. And then a CDN can help speed up those compressed images.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That makes sense just on images as well, you know, the new format, is it webp? I can’t remember. It’s like a new Google image format.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, can that help? Glad you brought that up. I actually just published a blog post this morning about WebP actually, in fact. But yeah, WebP is Google’s image format and it’s actually been out for a while and actually it’s used quite a few places that people don’t realize. Like on YouTube, if you click on a lot of their thumbnails, they’re actually webp images. So Google’s actually utilizing this kind of secretly behind the scenes to speed up a lot of things. And it only works in certain browsers, like it works in Chrome and Opera. It is not supported by Firefox yet. It might be, but there’s a huge discussion that’s a whole nother fiasco with that topic.
Brian Jackson:
But you know, I think Chrome holds a majority of the market share anyways for browsers, so. But yeah, WebP is, it’s on average, I think if you Compare it to PNGs, you know, it’s on average like 26% smaller. So it’s actually a very significantly smaller file size.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Especially if you add up all the images that you’re going to have on a website as well. Yeah, yeah, so that’s, that’s per image. You’re saving 26% per image. That adds up to potentially, well, tons.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, with the JPEGs. With the large JPEGs, it can be even more significant. People that are uploading these crazy 1 megabyte JPEGs, which they shouldn’t be, but.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Guilty. I used to do that. Given it was eight years ago, but I used to do that.
Brian Jackson:
I used to do that too, but yeah, it was the same as eight years ago when I didn’t know what I was doing really. But you can save. I’ve seen people save with going from JPEG to compressed to then webp on top of that. I mean, I’ve seen people cut their page weight by over 50%. It’s crazy just by doing image optimization. So, yeah, it’s. I mean, image optimization is very, very crucial. And our Optimus plugin that we run actually converts images to webp for you.
Brian Jackson:
So it’s cool. We’re one of the only. There’s another plugin doing it, but we’re one of the only WordPress plugins that. That actually offers that feature.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So nice on that. Then just technically, if webp isn’t supported by a few browsers, is there some sort of fallback, automatic fallback?
Brian Jackson:
For older browsers there is, and that gets trickier because you have to actually tell WordPress how to fall back. You can have a plugin convert it to WebP, but then you actually have to tell WordPress, oh, if this is Safari, it needs to actually show you a PNG instead of the webp.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So Optimus would be able to convert it, but it would have to keep two copies and then you’d have to update your own code to say, switch to same file name PNG.
Brian Jackson:
If Firefox Keycdn actually has three different WordPress plugins and they’re all web performance plugins. You have a plugin called Cache Enabler, and it’s completely free and it’s very simple to use. In my opinion. It’s one of the easiest to use caching plugins out there. But one of the features is that it actually ties in with Optimus and it does that switching for you, so it’ll do the caching for you, but also it ties in with Optimus and it does the switching of the images for you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I can just hear a whole load of developers just sitting back in their chair right now when you said that.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, and our plugins are very. We try to make them as simple. I mean, in my opinion, they’re dumb, easy to use, like there’s very little settings. And we do that on purpose because we want to, you know, market to not, not just developers, but WordPress users in general. But then I think we have a lot of these powerful features behind the scenes, which actually, you know, they’re fun for us because we’re utilizing all these things like webp that a lot of people aren’t doing yet. And so that’s how we’re seeing faster speeds than a lot of people.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So so far we’ve got CDN and web optimization, and we had a Bit of a geeky talk on WebP. And you’ve managed to plug two services so far. So what’s the last? What’s number three?
Brian Jackson:
This one is a. It’s another paid plugin, but it’s not a key CDN plugin, but it’s actually called Gonzales.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay.
Brian Jackson:
And it’s by a developer. I actually, it’s. It’s by this guy’s. Thomas, can’t pronounce his last name. Dobrzinski. But if you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That was a pretty good, pretty good effort.
Brian Jackson:
If you just Google Gonzalez WordPress plugin, it’ll come up in Google. It’s pretty cheap. But what it actually does. This is another web performance thing which I’m always excited about, but it actually lets you pick and choose which scripts you want to run per post and per page on your WordPress site. So I’ll give you an example. Like on one of my websites, say I have contact form 7 running by default. I don’t know why they do it, but some of these plugins are not developed as well as they should be, in my opinion. Contact form 7 actually loads their JavaScript on every single page of your WordPress site.
Brian Jackson:
Really a plugin should only be loading when it’s actually on the page. So in my opinion, it should be loading on the contact page, not every single page of your site, because that, you know, that contributes to your load time overall. So what Gonzalez actually does is you can pick and choose with this really cool GUI that he has built into the dashboard. You can say, I want to disable the contact form 7 JavaScript from loading everywhere except for on my contact page. So then it doesn’t load their JavaScript anywhere else except for on the contact page.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So.
Brian Jackson:
And you can go through.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Such a good idea.
Brian Jackson:
You can go through and do that for every single plugin that’s running. And so I have, you know, all these things, different things disabled on different pages and then enabled other pages. It’s. It’s crazy. It can get kind of complex, but it’s actually very easy to use.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s got a good GUI in the back, back end as well then. So you can just essentially turn things off or set which pages. There’s no kind of coding involved in
Brian Jackson:
there, no coding at all. It actually, it’s a little dropdown from the top, you know, your, the WordPress toolbar at the top and it actually just like a green light, red light and you can turn them on and off. And basically there’s an enable everywhere disable here, disable Everywhere and Enable here. Those are the four options.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is phenomenal. I don’t know why I’ve never heard of that. That’s incredible.
Brian Jackson:
Especially on your homepage. Like I would say it’s. If you don’t want to do your whole site, use that just on your homepage because that’s what people hit the most. And turn stuff off on your homepage that should not be running well, that’s
Lee Matthew Jackson:
going to save me hours. Because what I tend to do is that frustrates me about a lot of plugins and obviously when we’re building sites we do use third party plugins as well. I’ve had to essentially dequeue scripts and write my own functions to dequeue scripts everywhere apart from specific areas or post types or whatever myself in code, in the functions. It’s a pain because I’ve got to go through the code and then, you know, just I might miss it or. And it takes, it could take me half a day to do that depending on how many, how many scripts are being loaded, etc. So this sounds like a time saver for me as well. So I’m really glad you mentioned that. That’s phenomenal.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, it’s a. So it’s a great, it’s a great plugin. I mean, other examples are like, I use social warfare. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. It’s a social sharing plugin for WordPress. But you know, there’s a lot of different plugins that load their scripts everywhere, which is another pet peeve of me when I’m working in web performance so much. But yeah, the plugin, I’ve seen it decrease, you know, I’ve seen it decrease. Some sites like Aveda, I don’t know if you’ve ever used the Aveda WordPress theme, but it can be quite bulky at times.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yep. In fact, there’s a conversation going on about Aveda right Now on the WP Innovator, Facebook group.com forward/group.
Brian Jackson:
I’ll have to jump into that, but I’ll have to say my brother and I. My brother has some actual Aveda sites and pretty big ones and he’s got them down to loading under 650 milliseconds.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s phenomenal. I think the fastest one I saw was four seconds.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. So we’re more than four times faster than that. So yeah, so you can see you can get Aveda running fast, but it requires doing little tricks like these that you kind of have to learn over time. You know, and a plugin like this definitely comes into play where you can disable things and not have it loading where it shouldn’t be.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. So we’ve got three top tips from you. It’s CDN image optimization and then there’s the Gonzalez plugin. And that is allowing you to essentially turn on and off all the scripts that you don’t need on other pages. So like, like Brian said, if there’s a contact form that’s only on the contact form page, you don’t want it everywhere. You only want that to load on the contact form page. So they’re amazing pieces of advice, mate. Now I’ve got another question for you now, mate.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
People will tend to go to Google Page Insights to get some sort of idea on how their page is performing. And I have no idea whether you recommend people do that. But if you’re gonna check if your website is performing well, other than loading the website and saying, oh, yeah, that seems to load quite fast, what online services or tools do you recommend people use to make sure their WordPress website is performing optimally? If that’s a real word, you know,
Brian Jackson:
you can quite like that one. My best advice would want, first of all, probably actually go to the key CDN blog and search page Speed Insights or Google PageSpeed Insights, because I actually have written a whole tutorial on there of how I took a site to 100 out of 100 score on mobile and desktop. And it’s a WordPress site. And I show, you know, what plugins I’m using. You know, how I went about how to fix all these little warnings you get in PageSpeed Insight. So. So you can’t always do that depending on what your site is, especially like say a site with a Veda, that’s more of a challenge to score that than a smaller WordPress site. But a lot of the tips in there will show you how to fix things like that.
Brian Jackson:
And actually one of my other sites, it’s perfmatters IO, it’s kind of a small WordPress site I run just for performance stuff, but IT scores currently 100 out of 100 on mobile and desktop. You can go test it for yourself. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of little tricks like that. But yeah, that there’s a blog or a blog post on the KCN site. Definitely recommend reading through that. It’s very long. So I, you know, I don’t want to go into all of it here because there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it. Some Guy actually last week released a plugin that’s also pretty great about how to host Google Analytics locally and that will fix one of those crazy leverage browser caching issues you have.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, that’s annoying that because it then lists their, their own code and you’re like y so a news just in by the way, I have literally tested you that and perfmatters does register a hundred out of 100 for both. And I promise you it’s not just a blank page. There is actually text and images on. So I am freaking impressed.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah and I have to keep that 100 by 100 because my PCN tutorial links to that as the example. So it’s, you know, whenever I do updates and stuff I always have to make sure I optimize that for that score. But it is possible. I mean it’s about showing that it is possible. And, and actually I even say in the blog post, you know, don’t obsess over the hundred 100 score. But a lot of the advice that it does give you, it is useful advice. And if you go through each individual warning, you will see a faster website when you’re done. Even if you don’t score that perfect score.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s really good. So would you recommend then that people do focus on Google Page Insights as their main, as their priority? Obviously not the holy grail of 100 by 100 but at least a high score. But are there any other tools as well that people should kind of cross reference or cross check with? I think you mentioned was it pingdom earlier on?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, I mean there’s, there’s two sides of that story because working with keycdn is funny because we hit the web developer community and then there’s the non technical kind of, you know, other community especially WordPress sometimes can be a lot of not to, not to knock the WordPress community but a lot of times it’s, it’s less technical people. And so you know, if you’re running the best speed tests in my opinion for more technical people are webpagetest.org and the webpage speed test tool that we have on the KeyCDN site because both of those support HTTP 2, which if you’re a techie person and doing websites, you know what HTTP 2 is and why you should be using it already. But Pingdom GT metrics and PageSpeed insights even don’t support HTTP 2 yet. So you know, a lot of those tools like Pingdom, they’re behind the times in my opinion when it comes to optimizing for all these new cool web server features that are coming out to speed things up. It really depends on your thing. If you’re a not technical person, you don’t Even know what HTTP 2 is. You know, Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights work great too.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
If you’re listening and you’re getting a bit panicky because all of these amazing links or websites are being dropped, don’t worry, we will go through the audio and make sure we get all of these links in the show notes so that you can go and check them out. So mate, we’ve totally gone off the flow because I’ve just. This has definitely become the podcast about how to speed up WordPress because the minute you started talking about KeyCDN it was just like I gotta pick this guy’s brain and be really selfish and get all these tips for myself. But I know we’ve got a community of listeners that really want to know this stuff as well. And I love that blog post. I had a quick look at it whilst you were talking. It’s the Google page insights 100 out of 100. So I definitely want to work my way through that and try and get higher scores, especially on my own website.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m serving podcasts and imagery etc. So I want to speed that up because I know people will send me messages saying it’s quite slow. What are you going to to do to improve it now? Do you mind if we just pick your brain just for a few other plugins? It sounds like you’ve got a lot of plugins that you enjoy using or that add great value to your websites. Are there any other plugins either speed related or just really freaking cool that you love that you think people should go ahead and check out?
Brian Jackson:
One is another plug for qcdn but I use it on all my sites and I would be using it even if I didn’t work at KeyCDN because it’s called CDN Enabler and it it’s a free plugin but you can use it with any CDN provider. You don’t have to use KeyCN. You could be using Max CDN or any of the other CDN providers out there. But completely free, super lightweight and it’s all about just if you have a cdn, here’s how to enable it and enable it super fast. So that will enable your WordPress site to put all your images and JavaScript and CSS on the CDN.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
All right. Anything else? Another plugin, let’s draw these out of your mind.
Brian Jackson:
Another plugin I Actually just started using recently is whenever I find new things I can get rid of on my site, it’s always like the happiest day of my life. Which might sound a little nerdy, but I’m sure there’s some people out there that can relate with that. But it’s called Disable Embeds and it’s actually, it’s a plugin by Pascal Bircher, which some people like, he’s pretty well known in the WordPress community. And what it does is, you know, if I think it was WordPress 4.4 that started, they started including a request to this JavaScript file that, you know, whenever you put in a Tweet or a YouTube, it kind of auto formats it to this nicer looking view whenever.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And it’s really annoying.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, whenever you paste in that URL. And so they had to include another script that loads again on every single page of your website, which is annoying to make that auto thing kind of cool looking. And so the Disable Embeds plugin, you know, it’s completely free and it just gets rid of that functionality and gets rid of that script and you can still embed all your things, you know, the old school way with the simple, you know, embed code from YouTube or the embed code from Twitter. So I use that on all my sites actually, because I’ve always embedded the old way and I guess I kept doing it so it didn’t break anything when I installed the plugins. Another plugin, big one I use is Disable Emojis. I was actually using the code for this for a while, but recently, you know, if there’s a plugin and it’s lightweight, people I think in the WordPress community have this kind of bad perception too if, if you have too many plugins, it can slow your website down. But if the plugin is very lightweight, you can have a lot of WordPress plugins running. It doesn’t matter how many are running.
Brian Jackson:
It really depends on how, how well the plugin is coded itself. Because really the plugin is just the same code almost that you’re going to put in your functions file anyways.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. And it’s just doing the exact same thing it is.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. So there are a lot of bloated plugins out there, but you know, if the lightweight ones, you know, feel free to go crazy in my opinion. So. Disable Emojis by Ryan heller. He’s another WordPress guy. Great way to get rid another thing that loads on every single page of your website for those stupid Smiley faces.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s only two kilobytes as well. Okay, yes, it’s two kilobytes and about ten lines of code. Just quickly downloaded it and took a look. So that’s definitely not going to screw your website. Yes, speed wise. In fact, it’s going to speed it up because loading the JavaScript would take longer.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah. Again, another one that I use that plugin now instead of the code itself and it’s installed on every single website I run. So another plugin I love and I’ve been using this ever since he launched it, I’ve been with this developer and helped him fix things and report bugs is it’s Discuss Conditional Load. And this is one of my by far favorite plugins. And I know people are gonna hate me for saying this, but I actually have some blog posts where I do case study on workup and you can go read them later. Discuss actually will load faster than native WordPress comments and I know there’s people gasping right now, I didn’t know that. But it’s because. And it really depends on how many comments you have too.
Brian Jackson:
So I’ve seen this happen. If you get an average of like, I’m gonna say eight or more comments per blog post, Disqus will load faster if you use this plugin. And the big reason is, is because the Disqus Conditional Load plugin, it lazy loads Discuss. So obviously there’s the Disqus service for your comments. This Disqus Conditional Load plugin is by a third party developer, Joel James, and it basically lazy loads disgust. But what it means is that it doesn’t load all of those Gravitars for each and every individual picture of those people. So by default WordPress, when you have all these comments, it does an HTTP request for every single picture of a person that comments on your site. And that can add up.
Brian Jackson:
I’ve seen it. Some of my blog posts on Workup have over 80 comments on them. So all of a sudden I had, you know, I had 80 different pictures loading. Just for these stupid little Gravitars, which is ridiculous. And it would actually, it would sometimes quadruple my load time for that page because of all the HTTP requests. And so using Disqus. I love Discuss, by the way, because of spam too, because I have zero spam on my website and Disqus is amazing for that. But when you do Disqus Lazy Load, it only loads when you scroll down.
Brian Jackson:
So that’s basically how it works.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s really cool. You are dropping value galore. I love this.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. Go check my site. You can run this test. Run the test for yourself. You know, if you have a blog with 20 comments, you know, do the speed test beforehand, install the disqual load plugin, and do the speed test afterwards and you’ll see that, wow, it does actually load faster now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I know if your site loads so fast, it actually breaks the theory of relativity. It’s open before I’ve clicked on it.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, thanks for that. And you can right click on the images in there too. And if you’re in Chrome, you should. You should see Webp running, you know.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, I did check and you’re right.
Brian Jackson:
So you know everything.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m not checking on you, by the way, but I’m just like, oh, I’ve got to see this. What does it look like? No way. That’s tiny. It’s a big picture as well.
Brian Jackson:
Yep. So, yeah, discuss Conditional load another. It’s another hidden gem that this guy does a lot of credit because this plugin is amazing. And I know people hate Disqus. I. If you Google disqu, there’s all these hate blogs about. You know, disgust is so slow. And it is.
Brian Jackson:
If you don’t run this plugin, I won’t discuss it’s horrible. Unless you do it this way. The host analytics locally, that’s actually a fairly newer one.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay.
Brian Jackson:
And it’s another free plugin he’s actually been adding things to that I’ve been requesting, which is awesome. So I try to find these plugins as fast as I can, get to know the developer and then it’s nice because then I can have them add features as I request them as well. That’s why I love the WordPress community, because you kind of develop even friendships with a lot of these developers and even with the free guys, if you give them value of like, oh, wow, that would be a value to my plugin. You know, it helps both people. You know, it helps me and it helps them. So that’s one of the things I really love about WordPress.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s amazing. Who’s that one by then?
Brian Jackson:
This is by. It’s another German guy. I don’t know if I’ll pronounce it, but it’s.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Is that Dan Van Den Berg?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, Dan Vandenberg, I think. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
They have such cool names.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. And that one, I actually have a whole other blog post on the Kisian site about that one. If you want to dive into more about how it works and Stuff. Stuff. Otherwise it’s pretty easy to use. You can just, you know, install it. But he’s added things I’ve requested such as using the adjusted Google Analytics bounce rate. That’s not a web performance thing, but it’s more of a marketing kind of thing.
Brian Jackson:
People can Google adjusted bounce rate if they’re curious on what that is. But it’s little cool things like that he’s been adding that adds really other value to the plugin as well, not just performance too.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I feel like I should let you keep going, but we should probably encourage people now to go and check your which. Well, which site would you recommend people go to for more speed advice? Would that be the KeyCDN blog?
Brian Jackson:
I would say go to KeyCDN first because that’s where I have all the in depth articles on web performance if you really want to speed up your site. You know, I have a speed up WordPress blog post on there with over 18 in depth tips on how to speed up your site.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sweet.
Brian Jackson:
And I am actually writing currently a web performance ebook which I will. It’s not going to be free, but I will be selling that and it’s going to be, you know, I’m taking a lot of time on it and I want it to be as good as possible, but it will have, you know, every single tip and hidden trick and everything all in one place that I’ve learned, you know, over the past five or six years.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
The Mind of Brian Jackson in an ebook And I’ve actually coming soon.
Brian Jackson:
I’ve actually had a lot of people request that because sometimes you know how a blog works. You know, things get scattered and sometimes impressed. Blogs aren’t the best for, you know, categorizing things and finding things even. So I’m really hoping the ebook will kind of bring it all into one place.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, that sounds like something you’ll have to keep up to date, I assume as well. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a great idea. I’ve managed to find that blog though. I’ve had to use the search the speed up WordPress blog, so we’ll get that one in there in the show notes as well. When you do finish that book, could you let us know and we’ll pop it in the WP Innovator? Well, I’ll mention it on one of the shows just to remind people where to go and they can go and grab that if they want it. But also I’ll share it in the WP Innovator Facebook group as well because you know, speed is one of the biggest things that I talk about with my clients, and I know a lot of people who are listening, they’re web agencies or web designers themselves. And it’s one of the biggest things they really want to get to grips with is the speed of WordPress, because WordPress definitely gets a bad rap from clients and you’ve already dropped a whole lot of amazing things that I know we’re going to speed up our sites, but, you know, we’re going to want the mind of Brian Jackson in a book.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, that sounds like. That sounds amazing.
Brian Jackson:
Oh, yeah, I’ll let you. I’m aiming for the end of summer right now. It’s my goal.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
All right, well, this is your accountability then. We’re now expecting to be buying this book at the end of summer. Does that put any pressure on.
Brian Jackson:
I already had a self goal and being an entrepreneur, I set all these goals that I feel bad if I don’t achieve them. So I will hit that goal no matter what. If I have to not sleep some nights, I will hit that goal.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, man, that’s awesome. I’m actually one of those people who lets myself off too easy. So I actually have to tell everybody on social media that I’m going to do it so that I don’t want to let them down. I’m happy to let myself down, but I don’t like laying other people down. So I like. I’ve promised to do a 7 I’m upcoming that we’ve got a planned load of podcasts where we’re doing a podcast every day for seven days. And people don’t realize that a whole lot of work goes into every single episode as it is. So it’s a huge kind of.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
This is big, huge challenge I’ve set myself. And that needs to be done before the end of summer as well. So. But I’ve told everyone I’m doing it now, so I just can’t let anyone. Yeah, if I’d have kept it secret. I just never done it well.
Brian Jackson:
Yep, now my secrets out there too, I guess.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. Well, mate, you’ve given us 40 minutes. 50 minutes. I don’t know. I’ve lost count of time. I’ve just. Just been wanting to pick your brain as I’ve had you spend 50 minutes. You’re giving us 50 minutes of amazing value.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I really, really appreciate you giving us all this time dropping these plugins. I kid you not, I had not heard of about 80% of the plugins that you’ve mentioned. And I thought I was quite good on WordPress site speed. So you’ve shamed my knowledge and I’m so appreciative of you coming on. How could people connect with you, mate? And then we’ll. We’ll say to her, well, yeah, I’ll
Brian Jackson:
be honest, really quick too, that that was probably only 5 or 10% of my tricks. So, I mean, hopefully you could get a lot more value maybe in my ebook or, you know, checking out. Checking out my blog and checking out Kagi CDM blog. There’s so much value. You know, we, yeah, we spend a lot of time trying to share our knowledge and so there’s a lot of good stuff on there. But yeah, people can connect with me on Twitter at. It’s Brian Lee Jackson, B R I A N. And then of course, the same last name as yours.
Brian Jackson:
And then, yeah, keycdn.com workup.com and yeah, pretty much. Pretty much it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. So, Brian, thank you again so much. Go find Brian on Twitter, obviously. Go check out, like, I’m gonna be the KeyCDN blog and the Workup blog, because having looked through, essentially this has been like a call. This has been like free strategy from Brian with me, you know, sitting, looking at all the sites and the plugins as he talks about them. And it’s blown my mind. And I’m pretty sure wherever you’re listening, you’re just dying to go and check all this stuff out. So I recommend keycdn.comworkup was it.com as well, with two O’s and go and check out the show notes.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So, Brian, thank you again for your time. You are a legend. If we’ve only taken 5% of your brain, perhaps when you launch your ebook, we’ll get you on again. So we can take another 5% of your brain and then the 90% that’s left is assumedly in the ebook and people can maybe grab that as well. So if you’re open to that, maybe let’s arrange that in September time. That would be freaking awesome.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, no, that sounds great. I love helping people speed up their websites. So that’s. That’s what my passion is.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And we love you, buddy. Thank you for your time. Have an awesome day and take care of yourself.
Brian Jackson:
Cheers.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So there we have it, the end of episode 30. Next week, episode 31, we have Bob Dunn from Do the Woo, which is a podcast all about WooCommerce. We’re gonna unpack his story of how he got into WordPress, developed his WordPress business, and also find out more about the WooCommerce podcast that he’s running now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Remember, if you want to get involved
Lee Matthew Jackson:
in the Facebook group, head on over to Lee Jackson Description forward slash group.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’ll take you there and you can
Lee Matthew Jackson:
join conversations such as what sort of contracts do you use? Do you use prepackaged WordPress themes, or do you build from scratch? There are all sorts of conversations going on over there. So come along, get involved. Leejacksondev.com group have a freaking awesome week and keep innovating.
