So What? Core Web Vitals and 2021 SEO Planning

Hey everyone, and welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show from Trust Insights. I'm Katie Robert, joined by John Wall and Chris Penn. This week, we are talking about some more advanced SEO techniques that you probably want to use in whatever you're doing now, or if you're starting your 2021 planning, which I know a lot of marketers are. Um, this is gonna be some really good tips for you. So today we're talking about core web vitals, which when Chris first said that, I said, I don't know what that is.

So this is gonna be a great episode. Uh so hopefully you guys will get something out of it. Uh so Chris, John, I turn it over to you, gentlemen. All right, folks, uh a reminder, if you are watching this on Facebook, you need to authenticate with StreamYard.com slash Facebook so we can see your comments. Otherwise, we see nothing.

Let's talk about core web vitals. This is something that uh if you're unfamiliar, was introduced by Google in Search Console. This the piece of software that you everyone should be using to track how Google sees your website. If you're unfamiliar with Search Console, this would be a good time to get familiar with it because it's probably one of the most important pieces of software you could be using. And the reason for this is that unlike other SEO tools, which we love, we absolutely love all these different SEO tools, Search Console is what Google sees.

And for 70% of the searches online, Google is the final word. So you've seen Search Console probably, and it looks like this. And a few months ago, you probably notice, hey, what's this new thing down here called Core Web Vitals? Core Web Vitals are three sets of diagnostics that Google does on your website that measure the uh the user experience on your site. Now, if we click into this, uh, it begins by showing you, you know, just a fairly straightforward report and three separate metrics that have these really bizarre names.

Like what does that even mean? I don't, what is it? What is this LCP thing? Before we get into the vitals, let's talk about why this matters. Core Web Vitals are about three types of user experience.

They are fundamentally about um does the page load quickly? Does it responsive to the user? And does it look the way it's supposed to look as quickly as possible? And Google this has said we want to see more web pages deliver a better user experience, particularly when it comes to mobile devices. You again may have seen in your in your Search Console for over the last year, Google's saying, Hey, congratulations, your site has been moved to mobile first indexing, meaning that uh it sees your site through the lens of a mobile device first.

Now, why do we care about this? What's the point of this conversation? Well, a few months ago, on their webmaster blog, Google said, it is we we know this is important. We know user experience itself is important. We need to make sure that you're delivering a good user experience.

And so this is going to be part of your ranking for how you rank in search. Core Web Vitals is going to be part of how we decide who gets a higher listing. And what they've said in various webmaster chats and things is that given two pages of equal relevance, the site with the better core web vitals ranks higher. So we have to be on the ball to do this. Now, when does this take effect?

It was supposed to be this year, but 2020. So what Google has said, and they promised in this blog post is that we are going to be monitoring how people roll this thing out, and we're going to let you know with uh substantial notice. In our webmaster uh chat, they said we'll give you six months of notice before the ranking signal goes live. They haven't given us a notice yet. So you're it's what October, so you're probably talking at least not till April of next year.

It gives you six months at least to get your website in order. So, Chris, I have a quick question for you. So I I guess I I hear you saying two things. One is that Google is now going to be looking for websites that are designed mobile first, desktop second, and it has introduced all of these new core web vitals. And so I can see underneath, and I know that's not the topic of today's show, is the mobile usability, but it sounds like both of those things are going to be really important in order to keep your uh website very well indexed with Google.

Yeah, it's it's gonna come down to really two or three big things. One is Google's whole angle of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Uh, is your site's content and your reputation online good, right? And that is that first until now, really has been the Lion's share of ranking signals. So to say, hey, by things like inbound links and by the content you've written and the structure of your pages, are you the best result for any given search term?

Like, you know, uh marketing analytics uh firm, are you the best result based on what you've presented? Now with mobile usability, which has been part of uh ranking and the core web vitals, Google is also saying, hey, the customer experience is important too. We want to deliver a solid experience. Uh a bunch of us, and we all know this from painful experience, uh, got dinged a couple of years ago when mobile usability first really started jumping in because some of us, me, uh really love pop-ups. And Google has said, hey, on a mobile device, if the pop-up goes more than this amount of the page, we're gonna ding you for a crappy user experience.

And we've all had that experience. I was um I was playing uh on uh playing on this one app and it's pop-up took up it was so funny. The pop-up was one of those embedded web browsers to show you somebody else's webpage, and they had so many ads on their web page you actually couldn't see the page. It was like one sentence, and the rest was this ugly space. And so Google said, Hey, this this is not okay, and they want better mobile experiences for all of us.

So it is core web vitals is an extension of what they've already done with user experience on the mobile usability front. And now for all of us who run sites, we've got to, if we want to rank well, we got to play along. All right. Well, so it sounds like there's a lot to unpack here. So, Chris, what the heck are these core web vitals and these new uh initials of things that we need to pay attention to so we've got three three new acronyms actually they're not acronyms because you can't pronounce them uh three new abbreviations uh lcp f Id and CLS so LCP is largest contentful paint what this means is how long does it take to render the largest content element visible on screen from the moment that you the URL loads so whatever the the biggest chunk of content is on your page typically for a lot of sites um there's actually like a div that contains the whole site um that element how long does it take to create that to render that and Google has said here good is under two and a half seconds mediocre is under four seconds and bad is anything over over four seconds and what you'll see when you're in core web vitals is you'll see things like you know largest content will faint this is this needs improvement you're longer than 2.5 seconds uh however it's not red it's it's only saying uh there's some pages here that uh uh actually no we don't have any that are uh red so LCP is the first thing that that we have to look at and all of these are in Search Console it's just that they didn't put the instructions with it um second is FID first input delay first input delay means the time from when a user first interacts with your page to the time that browser responds to the interaction they click a link tap on a button and stuff like that you ever had the experience when you log onto a website and it's too busy loading pop-up after pop-up and add system after add system, and you know the site's doing all sorts of crazy stuff, and you're like just just let me click on the the blog post I want to read.

And you know, it finally 10 seconds later, you can actually click on the link you wanted that's an input delay. And so Google is saying again, under 100 milliseconds, you're good. It means that when the page loads, it's ready to go. Uh under 300 milliseconds needs improvement, and above 300 milliseconds, bad. You're doing bad.

And the last, of course, is CLS, cumulative layout shift. This is a zero to one score of uh well, it's a between zero and one of how much does a page dance around as it's loading. Again, you've probably been to sites, you know, some of the big news sites do this where there's so much stuff happening, you know, things moving around, videos and pop-ups and all this stuff. And you're like, I I can't click on anything, like stop moving. I hate that.

Remember those ads back in the day, like the punch the monkey head. Um, yeah, the like the total spam where it's like you couldn't get exactly. Um this is like punch the monkey, but with your actual site. Like stop moving so I can click on something. And again, Google's looking for how much does the page shift?

Uh, under point one is good. Uh between point one and point two five, it needs improvement, and above point two five is poor. Now, as you've guessed, you measure this within Search Console, right? You go to your core web vitals, you turn on all three systems to see what is your website look like, and it gives you a sense of here's what's going on on your site. Uh, there for us right now, there are no pages with uh serious LCP problems.

We've got nine pages with some LCP problems and uh 95 pages with CLS problems. So let's click in on one of these for fun and see what we got. So, Chris, as you're digging into that, I know that one of the questions we get asked a lot is adding additional software to your website, does that slow it down? Things like tag manager or HubSpot or any of these other systems or tracking tools on your site. Does that uh impact your FID, your first input delay, for example?

Or is that an old that's a big question I know a lot of people have. Absolutely. Um, in this case, we're looking here at our first issue on our website. Uh, our home page has a long paint time, right? It takes a long time for it to load.

Uh, it takes 3.6 seconds for our home page to load. So we have to go to our website then and go figure out why. What did we do wrong here? That it's taking a little too long to load. And you can see that based on like the bar moving, some stuff actually did take longer to load.

So, our our fix for this is to figure out what happened. Like why are certain things taking longer to load than others? This is where you're gonna want to bring in a website, a good website developer, uh somebody who's got some experience in being able to diagnose what happens when a page loads. Now, in Google's Chrome browser, if you turn on the developer tools, you can actually watch your page load and see all the things that happen as it loads. If I click on performance here, how did you get to that, Chris?

And then refresh. Okay, a page is loaded. So, Chris, how did you get into the web developer tools? Was that sort of like a right-click menu? It's actually in the menu bar.

Go in Chrome, you go to View and Developer Tools. And you'll see conveniently, there's first contentful paint, right? That so Google has actually built this right in, and you can see all the different things that are happening as this page loads. And you can see, yeah, it it took a little while. Um, this tool, which is built into Chrome for free, um, is how you can start to diagnose these things.

You could see like in the frames here, what frame was it that was loading? What are the interactions? Uh, there are animations here that are could potentially be slowing things down. And again, if you're not familiar with you know the innards of web design, this is probably something you're gonna want to hand off to your design team, your UX team, um, your agency if you've got that. When I look here at the uh the pieces that took the longest, the scripting piece took the longest.

Um, so that is an indicator that there's some code things we could be doing to slim that down. One of the things that can fix that, and Katie, you alluded to this, is Google's tag manager. So if you're not familiar with tag manager, it's basically just a container, it's a bucket that you put on your website, and then you put all your scripts inside it. And tag manager loads, then your page loads. And while your page is loading, tag manager is separately running all the things you put in that bucket.

And the reason this is valuable is exactly right here, because instead of the page having to wait for scripts to load, uh tag manager will take care of it on the side while your page does all the work it's supposed to be doing. So this can include things like a Facebook Pixel, a Google Ads Pixel, uh, various pieces of tracking software, your marketing automation system, your CRM, all those snippets even pasting into your HTML, all that should go into Tag Manager as quickly as possible so that you reduce the amount of time that it takes for those scripts to execute and you get to that for uh that largest contentful paint as quickly as possible. Ours and this one here, ugh, that was uh almost two seconds in, right? So that's and and the thing that it's identifying, believe it or not, is that H1 element. That's that is the largest chunk of visual display on our site that had to load in order for for um Google to see it.

So this is the diagnostic tool that you can use to identify for LCP what happened. So, Chris, maybe a possible curveball question for you, but what if someone isn't using Google Chrome? What if they're using Firefox or Internet Explorer? Does it operate roughly the same way? Can you use the web developer tools, or do they do you run into different types of loading um with your largest contentful paint on different types of browsers?

Um the the functioning is going to be the same on all browsers. Only Chrome has developer tools that are compatible with Search Console. If you're not using Chrome, you have to be using Chrome. There is no option on that. Good to know.

For those of you who don't like to use Chrome, I'm sorry. Run it on a burning machine. Um that handles LCP and and how you diagnose it. And honestly, this has been here a while. It's just a lot of people forget to look in in developer tools.

It's built right into Chrome. So please use it. Our second thing that we want to tackle is that first input delay. And again, this is uh where tag manager really shines. Google Tag Manager, you stuff everything, uh anything that you possibly can in there to let it run on the side.

And you don't spend a whole lot of time uh you know put putting stuff on your page. Here's a really easy way to figure out just how much stuff you've got. Go to your page, go to View Page Source, and in your page source, just start searching for pointy bracket script. What you see is 47 scripts here, right? 47 scripts on this page.

This one. Now, what is it? What's a script? Is it is it like a command line in this instance? No, in this case, we're looking at uh so script is literally saying this is a chunk of JavaScript that has to run for this page to load.

Um, and if you can actually see in the source, you actually click through and see if you want what the actual JavaScript is that's that has to run. If you can't read JavaScript, uh you don't need to. Uh, it's not important necessarily for this, but it's just enough to know that there's a lot of code on this page. Now, the question we have to ask ourselves is are there codes on this page, are there scripts uh throughout this document that could be moved into tag manager, right? There, I see a couple things that maybe could be, maybe not.

Um, certainly uh because this is a WordPress site, this is our website, there's a lot of things that are kind of part of the interface. So some things that if if we wanted to fix this for ourselves, we might want to think about is should we look at a simpler theme that uses fewer scripts, right? Um, should those scripts be minified? There's a way uh from a very technical perspective to take a script and slim it down as much as possible. Um, are the screen opportunities to move it into Tag Manager, as we've mentioned before?

And are there plugins for our WordPress site that we don't need anymore? Right? So you if we look through here and we see how many uh of these different uh scripts that are running, do we need all of them? Do we need to have every every bell and widget on our page? Or are there things that we could uh trim down?

That's how we would go about trying to reduce that first input delay. Just put the site on a diet. Um what? I just I don't know. It it it's it's an interesting thing because I think that basically what you're coming to is less is more.

And I think you know, we try to jam so much into our websites because it's essentially our marketing brochure, but that's what ends up hurting us, and that's why people can't necessarily find us because Google's like your website's too complicated, you just you need to like take off one or two accessories, then maybe you can step out and not embarrass yourself. Yep. Uh if you want a fun example, let's go here. One of the most important websites in the world. So this is Berkshire Hathaway's homepage.

You'll notice that everything is done in about 500 milliseconds. Why? Because this page is straight out of 1999. This is all there is to it. You know, this is this is the classic example of do you need a great website designed to be a great company?

No. Does it help? Yes, sometimes, but in in this case, uh, this is not something that uh you need to spend a whole lot of time understanding, you know, how this page is laid out. Now, is this appropriate an appropriate example for everybody? No, but if you want to benchmark um how to use how to see the the developer tools and on a really clean site, run it on Berkshire Hathaway site and then compare it to yours.

How little time, look at this 108 milliseconds for scripting, 10 milliseconds for rendering, you know, 144 milliseconds. And the that 10,000 milliseconds is because it took me a long time to actually hit the go button to refresh the page. That's what a good site looks like in an ideal situation. Super clean, super fast, not necessarily pretty. One thing to hit hard on that is you definitely want to have a site like this because then you can compare to your site because it may be a problem with your content delivery network or your internet connection or some other thing not related to the site.

So if your site's doing bad and you go run Berkshire Hathaway and they're actually doing bad too, then you have a an infrastructure problem. It's not something at the browser level. That's really um an important thing to test. Yep. Now the other thing that you can do to bring some of the speed up uh for LCP and for CLS is to use uh some kind of caching system.

So the system uh, for example, we use is one called Cloudflare. It's free. And what Cloudflare does is it's a content delivery and aggregate work. It intercepts um visitors to your website, and then it essentially makes uh a copy of part of your website and serves that up. You can see for the Trust Insights website, it's cached 70% of the content that people come to our site and has ser has served up you know a tremendous amount of data, of which three quarters of it it has served up in place.

When you have a caching system like this, what it does is it delivers the site much faster than your own web server. We don't get paid for this, we're not uh Cloudflare affiliates because I don't think they have an affiliate program. Um I strongly endorse that you use their services, the free version. Most people can get away with the free version for it's just fine to serve up that caching to streamline your web operations to improve that CLS as best as possible because what it's going to do, particularly on things like uh its speed measurements here. Let's go into optimization, is it can serve up some of your scripts in a smaller version and certain you know, prioritize certain things.

There are some things like this, like rocket loader. Be careful. I broke our website with this. Um there are some scripts uh that it does not work well with, so you'll definitely want to test it ideally off hours, like on a Sunday night uh when nobody's uh around, but or maybe on like a staging server or something, not production exactly. But having that Cloudflare um interceptor in front of your website is an easy way for any website to be able to improve their speed.

Now, other um services, uh depending on who you host with, you may have additional content delivery options. So, like we host with uh WP Engine, and they have a content delivery network too. So you can have multiple layers of caching again to try and speed up the experience as much as possible. But there's some things that you just can't avoid. And so, to the extent that you can um you you can keep things lean in the site design itself, uh, will be to your advantage.

So that's the three types of these web vitals and how they work. One of the things that you need to do as part of your you know, daily, weekly, monthly, however often you do maintenance on your site, is to be in Search Console. There are not alerts set up for it yet for Core Web Vitals. So unless you are in here and you don't you're checking, you don't know that something has gone wrong, right? Um a bunch of stuff went wrong here in uh let's see September 3rd, right?

We had a bunch of pages uh turn red. Why? I don't know, because I wasn't in here on September 3rd, and because I had not checked on that day. So if you are on in like a web team, like a uh web and UI team, this being in here once a day is literally part of your job, right? Um if you are like us and you you know running a small business, set it, it's it's a good Friday afternoon task, right?

Just go you're like, okay, it's Friday afternoon, you know, crack open something to drink and uh and check out your core web vitals. Is it the most exciting thing you can do? No, but you know, once a week it it doesn't hurt to be in here. And while you're in here, it's always good to see if there are any alerts, right? Um, Search Console is really good about saying, hey, uh we noticed there's some things wrong with your site, you might want to fix those.

Um and unlike other SEO tools, this is Google punching you in the face. So when Google tells you to do something, if you want to rank well on Google, you obey the Google. My goodness, obey the Google. So, Chris, on those um, if you can scroll back up, because you pointed out um September 3rd, for example, that we had some issues. Does it give you the ability to look at that particular day?

Or once that day's passed, you can't? Once that day is gone, it's gone. I think that that's really an important point about the frequency and consistency in which you're checking these things, um, especially if you're planning a large campaign or a rebrand or anything else having to do with your website, and you want to make sure that you're not losing traffic or you know, whatever the circumstances, making sure that you're looking at your core web vitals and Search Console on a consistent basis to make sure that there are no issues because you know, we apparently missed a whole bunch of stuff, um, which may or may not have resolved itself. We don't know. Uh, that's true.

Uh you know a big part of SEO and a big part of everything is just having a routine, just having some habits, having a weekly checklist, a flight checklist that you do where you just run through you and and you check on things. And if you don't um you don't have that, that's probably one of the starting places. I would say you need to is build up what your checklist should be that you you know, you're going to check. Here's we're going to check daily, here's going to check weekly, here's we're going to check every month. I'm astonished at the number of people, like business owners who their business website is not the a new tab in their browser.

Like what you can specify a page for you for a new tab in your browser. It's the easiest thing in the world to do. Set that as you a new tab in your browser, make sure that you've excluded it in your IP for so you don't screw up your Google Analytics. But then every time you open up a new tab, you at least know if your website's working. That's a that's a good point.

Um, so Chris, we had a question from someone on Facebook asking for those of us non-dev people who are managing a website or building one from scratch using a common CMS, what can we do to make our sites faster? For non-coders, it seems like we don't have that many options. What do you think about that? So follow the the protocols we said here today so far. Use Google Tag Manager and stuff as much of your tracking and tagging tech stuff in there as you possibly can because it's going to save uh space in your HTML.

Find a good design and and you know that's lightweight and use it. The as you saw when we did Berkshire Hathaway, you don't need to own the website to run this uh the page speed assessment. So what I would suggest you do is if you're evaluating some vendors, right? You turn on your recorder, and then let's go to elegant themes, which is a theme service, right? And for any of these companies that have uh you know all these different things, stop that.

Um, go through their site. Uh, who's another big theme company? Genesis. All right, let's see what we got here for Genesis themes. Um go into their themes here.

And wow, that does not look great on mobile, does it? Well, and so I guess that's one of the other things is making sure that your site is now moving forward developed mobile first. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So, what we've got now is we've got a couple of sites that we've browsed through with our developer tools.

Compare these sites in their uh I would hope that the vendor has done their best possible implementation of their site for their own site. Now, yeah, we're all in that place of you know cobbless kids have no shoes, but you can see here we've got um the different sites that we've been browsing. If you're evaluating a vendor, run it through this thing and figure out okay, how long did it take for this vendor's site to get through and and what are its benchmarks? It's a lot easier to see, by the way, if you put this on a bigger screen, it's kind of tiny. But this is a really simple way to vet those those sites, those themes.

Like if you load a theme and in test mode here from a the vendor's website, and it takes you know uh 1500 milliseconds just to get through its scripting part, and you're like, well, that's not really an improvement over the problems we've got now, then you know this theme might not be for you, right? So that from a non-technical perspective, you need zero technical skills to use this tool in in Chrome and just test it out on different sites. Likewise, um check out your competitors, right? Run this on your competitors' websites again, totally free. Uh doesn't require any any nefarious you know skulking.

You literally just load the competitor's website because if it's you and a competitor in the search rankings, you might want to know, hey, if we can get our content up to scratch, are we still at a disadvantage because they have a better user experience than we do? Or you say, okay, look, if we are if we are better than them on core web vitals, then all we gotta do is get our content in order, and we're gonna knock them out, right? Um so that would be uh one thing Cloudflare and Tag Manager together can deliver a solid uh knockout punch when it comes to caching. Um, you can use um there's some uh CDN plugins you can use for WordPress as well, uh and for other CMS systems. I recommend Cloudflare because there are plenty of companies that use something other than WordPress, they use um you know uh site core is a popular one.

Uh there's Squarespace and Wix and all these other providers, and with those, they don't necessarily have those plugins, but Cloudflare essentially sits on top of all any site and says, I'm going to intercept as much as I can. So, Chris, going back to the question about uh tag manager and other uh pieces of software within your website slowing it down, is that something that used to happen and it's now just sort of a a carryover myth about how Google's uh tools all work together, or is that something that people sort of concocted as an excuse to not use a service like Tag Manager? It's probably more the latter. Tag manager um does not slow a site down because it literally runs you know sort of its own independent independently within if you look in Chrome, it actually can run as its own thread. Um, and so yeah, it's not going to slow anything down.

In fact, it will speed up just about anything because it's like whatever's in the bucket is going to do its own thing. It is isolated, it's put in the sandboxes, it's on timeout, and you're the rest of your site can get to doing what it needs to do. Now, there are going to be cases where um sometimes you put something in tag manager that can interfere with your website, right? Um, especially if your site is really overweight on ad tracking pixels and this and that, those pixels can still interact with the page itself. Um, that is by design, so that they work correctly.

But that also means that um if you are not careful, um you or somebody in your organization can put something in tag manager that's gonna hose things, right? It's gonna well blow things up. So a part of any good marketing technology organization should be some governance to say who's allowed to mess with our tag manager, right? Who can put things in the bucket? If you're not authorized to put things in the bucket, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be in there.

So uh one basic very practical tip that we recommend for everyone is once a quarter, go into the user management section in Tag Manager and in Google Analytics and remove anybody who's not supposed to be there. Because if there are people who are in there that shouldn't be, they can mess up your site. Yeah, be a little bit more careful about giving out admin credentials to pretty much anyone who asks for them. Um we were uh doing some work yesterday for a client, and there were 31 names inside their Google Analytics. I'm like, do you need all these?

Like and they're like, oh, that they don't work here anymore. They don't work here anymore. That was our agency three agencies ago. I'm like, yes, but that means that your agency from three agencies ago can still see your analytics. Your agency from three agencies ago can still change your analytics and and do stuff to your site.

So and if things ended badly, that could be really scary. Uh-huh. Yep. Even if they all it takes is one junior person who doesn't know what they're doing, messing around, going, Oh, this must be a demo account and playing with it. And like, you know, listen, senior people can also mess things up, not just junior people.

Let's not let's not fixate on them. That I will grant you that that is true. We've met plenty of people, plenty of pointy-haired bosses who uh are, as they in their own words say, know enough to be dangerous. And when they say that, believe them. Yes, I agree with that.

Uh so Chris, to sort of wrap it all up and tie it together. And John, I would like to know if you have any additional questions, but it sounds like the big thing is focusing mobile first, and then once you've done that, making sure that you are checking the uh speed on your website for various things, such as your images loading, your content loading, if you have uh any particular tricky animations or menus, those kinds of things will hurt you in Google search rankings if you're not paying attention to them and optimizing them just as you would any other piece of content on your website. I don't know that I would say that you do mobile first. They're they're kind of they they you do them together. You have the core web models and mobile should be tackled at the same time.

Okay, well, it was the way that I phrased it, but yes. Cool. How about as far as um obviously putting stuff in tag manager, you're gonna you're taking that out of that whole loop. So that's just anything you put in there is instantly time you're adding back. How about moving scripts further down on the page or doing stuff so that you know you already hit your LCP and FID uh before other scripts start running?

Is it can you do that? Is that still a tactic that people use? You could do that. If it's movable, then you probably should move it into Tag Manager. Um because at that point, a lot of the times when particularly with certain web designs, the scripts are in a certain position because part of the layout is dependent on them.

Um and if they don't execute in the correct order, then you end up with you know it looks like you know, web web page salad. Um, so more than anything, check out the vendor itself to make sure if that you know that particular theme needs to have all those scripts, then um, you know, look for look for a lighter weight theme. There's these days with you know with mobile devices and things, it's it's amazing the number of people who put like super heavy bloated things on their site, like full screen videos um and stuff like that. It's like that's that's a lot for you know someone's gonna be looking at your site on on one of these little devices. They're not looking at your site on uh on a you know 4K 60 inch TV most of the time.

Um it's it's slowly something they're gonna look at in the you know while they're standing in line at the store. So optimize for those things. Optimize for well, check your web analytics, go into Google Analytics, go look under devices and see what percentage of your traffic is mobile device. And if it is more than you know 20% mobile device, you 100% should be optimizing for you know for that form factor because it's not stopping. You know, mobile devices are not going away.

As much as I love my Oculus, I ain't browsing the web on it. I I'm I'm browsing the web more often than not every single day on my mobile device. Cool. Yeah, one other just uh for themes. If you've got a staging server, that's a perfect opportunity to you know keep live running, go over to staging, flip through three or four different themes and check them each out and see what's going on because yeah, you might get really lucky and just find that your theme is so long in the tooth that it's it's starting to kill you now and it's time to upgrade.

Exactly. And if you don't have a staging server because you're on a you know a less expensive host, buy another website and set it to no index so that you don't uh duplicate content and you know use that as a playground. Or uh do what I've done for years. I have a personal website, and that's where I do all the testing for the company first. Like I've been testing the rank math plugin.

Um, the first time I installed it, it blew up my site. Uh it just crashed the whole thing. Like, okay, cool. That that that was fun. Um but I test things on my personal website first because if it goes down for any period of time, I'm not heartbroken about it, right?

You know, no one's gonna come to that site first and drop, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, as opposed to the company website, where you know that is a a genuine possibility. So test in as safe a place as possible. Um thanks to everyone who left comments and stuff this week. Um you be sure to tune in next week and we have some closing information here for you. We'll talk to you next week.

Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at Trust Insights.ai slash TI podcast at our weekly email newsletter at trustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

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