Latest / The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection / Episode 8: Part 1 - Talking Website Optimization for Everyone with Tech Director Justin Ferrell

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Episode 8: Part 1 - Talking Website Optimization for Everyone with Tech Director Justin Ferrell · The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: Hey there.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Same Side, a digital marketing podcast rooted in human connection.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Jonathan Dance, Director of AdOps and Analytics at Digital Relativity, a full service marketing agency.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Today's episode is part one of a web optimization series for non-techie folks, and joining me is our technical director here at DR, Justin Farrell.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: We recorded this over Google Meet as a test, and although the sound quality reflects that, the concepts still come through loud and clear.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: In this episode, you'll get to know Justin, why you should listen to him, and then we'll dig into one of the easiest optimizations just about anyone can do: image optimization.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: Hey Justin.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: How's it going?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's good, man.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's good.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I just saw you.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: You did, you did.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: One of our thousand meetings of the day.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, man, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to join today.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the reasons I wanted to get you on, at least this time, I think we'll do this probably more than once, but I'd love to start off with you kind of giving an overview of your time here at DR, sort of your origin story, what I like to refer to as DR deep time.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: So let's start there.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then for those listening, know that we're going to be getting into some really basic website optimizations that you can do without having to be a developer yourself.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: But to start off with to kind of give Justin's context and uh why you should listen to him, uh, the origin story is super key.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_03: So anyway, go ahead, take it away.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I'm I'm just gonna say it.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me on here.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, long time listener, first time caller.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's always it's very cool to uh to be on here.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: But no, as as you said, I am uh one of one of DR's OGs.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: I uh was the first employee when DR started, and it was a much different shape at the time, as as was my role at DR at the time.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Pat was just starting things then, and uh he had that office that was in an apartment.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I came on, at least at the time, with the uh the intention of doing app development.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I can remember asking him, like, what kind of apps do you mean?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Do you mean like mobile apps?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: This was the time when like Farmville was huge on Facebook, and I was like, Do you mean mobile apps or do you mean like Facebook apps?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he just kind of stroked and went, Apps.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I was uh mostly doing mobile apps at the time.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: That was right around like the app store boom.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was right after the launch of the app store, but as with so many things, that transitioned to web as more and more people realized that maybe an app wasn't the best use of their time or money.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe mafia wars wasn't the the way to the future.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: All those farm bucks that people had accumulated from their crops, the the yields grew fewer and fewer as the years went on.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: That became more and more web development.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And uh then obviously as as the company grew and the kinds of things that we did for folks grew, so did kind of what I was doing, but it's still mostly web development.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: How old were you when you started at DR?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was 18 when I started at digital relativity.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I've known Pat for a very long time.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: He likes to remind me that uh when him and his wife Lisa got married, that I signed their guest book.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to assume I was so young that the letters were like three inches tall that they were uh honestly probably not that different from my handwriting now, if you ask my wife.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: But um, I've known Pat for a really long time.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: At the time I was living in Virginia, and Pat sent me a message.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming this was Facebook, but I guess given the time, it could have been my space.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: But he literally just sent me a message online and was like, Would you ever move back home for a job?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time I was like, no.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I don't think I said that to him, but in conversations with my family, like I was in school, I had my own place.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I'm I'm not really in a position to like drop everything and move to West Virginia.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then after having conversations with Pat and kind of seeing what it was that he was building, what he had in mind for digital relativity, it was, I think I met with Pat twice, and after that second meeting, it was like Thanksgiving.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: It would have been Thanksgiving 2010.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: My entire family was gathered around.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Well, everyone, I'm dropping out of college and I'm moving back to Western, which was like the last thing that everyone expected to hear.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: But among two or three others, probably one of the best decisions I've ever made.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Nice, yeah.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, one of the things I admire about Pat, I and I know that's not what this podcast is about, but is his ability to spot talent in raw forms.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: And and we've seen that with so many people who've come on board at DR, but I think of you as sort of the uh the alpha, or you know, not by the wrong term, but you know, it's pretty cool.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's a it's a great story.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so Justin's our technical director, as mentioned in the beginning of the episode, and that obviously is more than just crunching code and and making things.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there's more to it than that.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: So when I think of you as technical director, I think of you sort of as this wizard who and fireman.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: So basically you're a fireman with a big pointy hat, and you troubleshoot, you solve problems, you uh advise, you make recommendations, you do all this stuff.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: But that's that's my take.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so tell us a little bit about what a typical day is like for you.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: There is this uh saying in web development that the transition from junior to senior is uh first you're learning how to write code, then you're learning what code to write, and then finally becoming like in a senior position in a development organization.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: The the final evolution, the charizard of the web developer is learning the code not to write.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've now been here so long and been involved in so many of the various things that we've done over the years that I probably have uh you you could argue probably too much institutional knowledge because it's too centralized in me.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um so much of my time to your point is spent uh putting that institutional knowledge into practice, be that technical knowledge about web development, like that works in this really weird way in every browser, and this is why.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but also I would say like institutional knowledge.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like, hey, I know when you're looking at this, this looks weird, but it's weird for a reason.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many folks that we work with, partner organizations, who obviously, like every company on earth, every organization on earth, they have turnover.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And for a handful of the folks that we work with, we really have to become kind of like the knowledge keepers because their teams have turned over over the years.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and a lot of my time does go into doing that, like you said, like the the keeper of this arcane knowledge about like how how is that number generated?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but alongside that, too, like it's it's one thing to be the steward of all of that information.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: But as an organization, as a team that is shipping products and doing work for people, there's also an expectation that things be current, that uh we not be building them the exact same way that we did in 2011.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: You very graciously pointed out how much of a uh a consumer of web development information I am.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say I I appreciate you pointing that out, but I would also say that I don't know that that's a general purpose skill.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think it might be specific to web development.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I can consume information generally.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_03: I guess I guess some of that's probably, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a function of your interest in what you do.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: 100%.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like figuring out how to do it better, figuring out how to not write the code that you don't need to write, all that kind of stuff.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: And there's always so much to keep up with.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, because we focus on WordPress, that helps, right?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: It helps provide some some guardrails for for where you might be looking for stuff.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: But I also see some of the stuff you post in Slack too that that goes well beyond that.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: So you you're not fooling anyone, I'm just saying.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: So there it is.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: There's Justin's very brief origin story.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's like episode one in the series um of Justin's ARC.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: But we did all that so that we can talk about some of the common website issues that we encounter, that you encounter on the regular that can affect how people's sites show up in search.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: It can affect the user experience of people on those sites.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: And what we're gonna do here today is look at those, maybe go through the list to start off with and maybe dig a little deeper into those.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: But just some of these things that you can identify, not you, Justin, but you, the listener, can identify and also probably take care of with yourself or with minimal help from other technically savvy people.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: And so even if you're not a tech whiz or fireman like Justin, you should still be able to walk away from this episode with a few things that you can look at to help your website be better.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so with that, I was my next question is you know, what are some of the things that even those without dev experience or who are on the low end of the tech savvy spectrum, which isn't really a thing, I think I just invented that, um, can do to help their site perform better and show up in search results better.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: So this is uh this is kind of a running joke internally.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I know you and I have made this joke at each other before that it does kind of feel like voodoo.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: It does kind of feel like black magic, like organic traffic went up.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you like try to like reverse engineer that into the thing that actually helped, it is a little bit like so much changed on the website that it's kind of hard to say what helped.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I do think there is a little bit of that, because again, in a technical sense, these ranking algorithms are black boxes.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Google's never going to tell you, like, we just love small images, like they will put out what they feel are their best practices, and you can kind of extrapolate from that what will help a website perform in search.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the inverse of that, and I I think this is true in everything, not just web development and SEO, but it's probably true in human relationships too.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: It is far, far easier to like break that than it is to fix it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: It is uh far, far simpler to do something on a website that makes you catastrophically lose traffic than it is to uh it's far easier to cut your traffic in half than it is to double it.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and I'm I'm glad you brought up that that idea of like, hey, if you if you're pulling levers and pushing buttons, like trying to understand what made what made the difference is really difficult.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: And in a previous episode, I talked about the simpleton's guide to SEO.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I say that because I'm the simpleton in this case.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: If you if you change a bunch of stuff all at once, I said that in the episode, like you won't know like, well, what was the thing that did it?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: So like it's a long game, right?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: And you don't necessarily don't necessarily need to try everything at once.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: You have the time to do one thing, see if it does anything.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's not to say that we always do that because sometimes the partner is is asking us to do uh multiple things, but I think that is something I I like to hit on as much as possible.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: I was also talking about that in reference to search campaigns where if you start changing bids and ads and all this kind of stuff, you'll you'll never know what worked and what didn't.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: With organic search, too, and I I completely agree, it isn't even just that you don't have to do it all at once.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: You are better suited not to do it all at once.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the things will be easier to measure, easier to reproduce.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I know some of uh some of the folks who listen to this podcast are anxiously waiting for me to make a metaphor or an analogy, and I'm about to.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there is uh this joke comes up in the dev team a lot about uh what we call like grandma's roast.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: So there are these uh things, these these practices that we all kind of do, and they may not necessarily be literally cutting the ends off a roast, but cutting the ends off the roast is what we talk about.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you grew up, you know, making whatever making pork roast, beef roast in the oven, you always cut the ends of it off.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And your mom did it, her mom did it, and we in this family we cut the ends off the roast.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when someone is finally like, why do we do that?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, that's how we make them.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: We cut the ends off the roast.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, like the original knowledge is lost that grandma's pan was just too small for the average pork loin, and she she just had to cut the ends off the roast to make it fit.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: That part almost doesn't matter anymore.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: It it has now just become like inherited knowledge that we cut the ends off the roast.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And grandma's grandma's pan has has long since been lost to the ages.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: But this this idea of like, well, I mean, these are just things we do, we just do that.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in the dev team, we we always call those cutting the ends off the roast.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: No one really knows why we do them, we just do them because we've always done them.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's it's easy, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Because there's a there's a comfort level with it.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's you know, having some parameters is always like, yes, this is the sequence, do this.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: And it becomes more of a ritual almost than a best practice.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: It super does.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I'm guilty of this myself.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I can think of one very recent example, which was AMP, the accelerated mobile pages project.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm old enough to remember when AMP came out in like 2016, and it was uh before Google got sued for giving AMP preferential treatment in search.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it and it was like, oh, this this is just a traffic button.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I press this button, the line goes up.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like it it was that simple.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And as time went on, they got more and more complicated to the point that you know, Google obviously, as a result of that antitrust lawsuit, was no longer to say that AMP gets preferential treatment in search.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: But for a long time they did say, well, we don't give AMP preferential treatment, but we do give faster pages preferential treatment, and there's no way to make a page faster than doing it with AMP.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And even once I think the kind of conventional wisdom, even once Google itself was like, seriously, guys, we're really not giving preference to AMP anymore.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was there every every website launch, cutting the ends off the roast because, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna make the line go down.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be the first person in my bloodline to screw up the roast.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: For sure, right?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of a lot of responsibility there.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: What are some of like the the basic things that you've seen that not necessarily that people do, but maybe that they don't do, but that they or they could be doing to help themselves for what's our performance?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: So with performance in search specifically, there are I would say probably four or five like really good, really concrete things that I can point at.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: This first one, this is something that uh you both do and don't do.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: I I keep making reference like internal things at DR and I'm trying to explain them so it doesn't just sound like I'm making a bunch of inside jokes, but it it is kind of a running joke at digital relativity, how much this bothers me personally because I I feel like this is this is such a gross inefficiency in terms of like content creation, content delivery, and marketing performance that like it it costs one person's time to do this correctly, and failing to do it costs uh hundreds, maybe even thousands of people's time because of the nature of this work, and that is optimizing images, um, uploading images to websites that are just far too large.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: We see a lot of folks upload image assets specifically, photographs to websites that are just just enormous.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a photo may never be shown at a size more than let's say 600 pixels.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: You see this a lot, frankly, with email too.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like I know we're talking about website, but you see this in email platforms all the time.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Most emails, designed emails, uh, the content's never wider than it varies from platform to platform, but 600 to 700 pixels.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and you'll see someone drag like a 4,000 pixel wide PNG in the mail chip, and there you are sitting on your iPhone, and you're like, what it feels like 1998.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're watching that logo load line by line on your phone because someone uploaded a billboard that was never going to be shown, you know, again, more than 650 pixels wide.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: So there are two things that that makes me think of.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: One is like mentioning, I I know what is it?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: It were 2026, rolling into 2027, and we still have to remind ourselves that mobile first is where it's at for oh, probably 95% of the websites that we deal with, right?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: I can name the people we work with whose website is viewed more on desktop than mobile because it is such an anomaly that when we see it, it's like, oh, for sure, weird.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: I could I could rattle those names off in my sleep probably because it is so so different and such an outlier.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Far and away, most traffic is on mobile.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And increasingly, I would say a lot of the traffic that we see on mobile, and this wasn't always the case, you know, we used to be able to point at mobile and say, like, Safari on the iPhone, Chrome on Android, and those were the browsers, but increasingly people coming from social platforms, links that open inside those social platforms.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think if if you put a group of web developers together in like a like a CD underground casino and you made them vet like a smoke-filled like card table in a basement somewhere, and you were like, Does Facebook make one of the most popular browsers on the island?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: None of them would be like, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's increasingly not the case.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: We uh we see a ton of traffic, and it's not called Facebook.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: And when you look in Google Analytics, it's a Safari in app, or I think it's called Chrome WebView on Android.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's literally, folks, it's not always Facebook.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: More often than not, it is, but that could be someone coming from X, someone you know, opening a link on LinkedIn, whatever the case may be.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: And those constitute a huge portion of traffic for people.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So even when you're thinking mobile first, I I would challenge a lot of folks to think not just mobile first, but app first, because those do kind of roll up into one.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, granted, most people do not install a browser outside of the default on their phone.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, like Safari is more popular on the iPhone, Chrome is more popular on Android, but more and more we are seeing traffic from these social platforms that is not attributed to either of those.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the other the other thing to keep in mind about that traffic, kind of going full circle all the way back to the conversation about organic search, that is also traffic that was not subjected to the whims of an AI search or like a Google search or a Bing, or I guess it could technically be a chat GPT.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: If if when you click a link in chat GPT, it opens like in the app and doesn't kick you over to whatever your browser is.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: On mobile, yeah, we see more and more traffic from these platforms.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's a very long-winded way of saying that even on mobile, there is some diversity in terms of just like technology and browser capabilities, but it is unequivocally mobile first for most of the people that we work with.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I I I wanted to talk about that a little bit just because I know, and this this goes to the second point I'm about to make, is that a lot of people, a lot of our partners are working on desktop day in and day out, and they're getting their images and and probably I don't know percentage, I'm not even gonna hazard, but it's a it's a for some of our partners, it's a high percentage.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: These are images that were made so that they could do print pieces, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: So they need like that 300 dpi or higher resolution.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: And instead of going, oh, this is a 48 megabyte image, I need to compress this, they don't.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: And so they just like send over the the original image to us to put on the website, or they put it on the website themselves, probably more often is the case.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: And it's fine because they're beautiful images, but they they also really take a toll on your website performance.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I made reference to this earlier, but you're exactly right.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: There are these huge images that we're all proud of in their original quality.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: They are probably ill-suited for the use case.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I made reference to the fact that it costs one person's time at the beginning and thousands of people's time later.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, let's say we have that 50 megabyte photo, you take that 50 megabyte JPEG, Lord help you, you upload a 50 megabyte TIFF to a website.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: You you upload a massive image to a website, you know, again, you saved whatever 90 seconds, two minutes, you not like compressing it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, let's say you sent 10,000 people to that page, and that image added a second of load time to the page.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: You just you just cost the human race 10,000 seconds.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those people could have been with their families and instead they were watching that JPEG or that TIFF load.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's not even just about the like the I keep joking about like the dimensions, this like 10 mile wide PNG that you've put on the website.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a lot to be said for the formats.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Who who amongst us did not grow up, you know, using Windows 98 where like every single image was like a dot bmp?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And like you don't you don't see a lot of dot bitmap files anymore.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're not really in vogue in the same way the the wheels of time have kind of turned on images on the web.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Where uh when when I see a PNG on the web, like it makes the hair on the back of my text in.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Though because I'm like, there is no good reason on earth for a PNG to go onto the internet.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Please don't ever go to my website, my personal website.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I hear you.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: I hear you.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that's that's attributable too, right?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: To staying up on the trends because if you're not aware of things like WebP and uh SVGs and all that good stuff, right?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And even even there, there can be nuance, but like for the longest time you would upload a PNG or website if you needed transparency.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then I would say at some point in the the medium-term past, WebP came along, and uh you can take a PNG again with transparency and convert it to a WebP, and simply by converting it to a WebP, keep the quality virtually identical to the human eye identical and probably save 95% of the file size.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Every modern browser supports WebP uh for the people, you know, like your Netscape Navigator girlies who may be coming to the website, like they they probably won't reap the benefits from my NNGs, my Netscape Navigator girlies.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: They uh they they probably won't reap the benefits, but WebP specifically is is widely supported, it saves a ton of space.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we do this uh for animated images, gifs historically were the ways to get like an animated graphic onto the web.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna just say it.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not uh it's not in vogue to say this, but like when I see an animated email, like I have the exact same reaction that I do when I see a PNG because I'm like, I know you put a GIF in here, and and you can animate a Web P too, and an animated Web P is the exact same deal.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Most email platforms don't support them sending or receiving, so it is very much a thing on the web, but they are just vastly more efficient than a GIF.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, like if you're putting an animated graphic on the web, get that animated web P on there because you're you're gonna save humanity, you know, 10,000 seconds over the course of that campaign.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: Somewhere, someone won't know why, but they'll have extra time on their hands and they'll be grateful.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so if you had to name one tool that could help uh a non-techie person compress their images, what would you recommend?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: It has a very silly name and it's super good at what it does.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's called squosh.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: That is f u o s.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: But it's it's squosh.app, it runs in the browser, you don't have to install anything.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you are one of those people like me who does enjoy installing like Chrome web apps, so they're actually in your NOC on your Mac, you can install it, but it's not something you have to like go the app's going fine.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: But you can drag an image in there, so take that big TIFF, drop it in there, and uh it will typically save you a good bit of file size, even if you just leave it JPEG.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: But in the lower right corner of the school shaft, there are other file types that you can choose.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it doesn't do SVGs, so it doesn't do anything vector, but like uh if you are really like on the bleeding edge and you're like, I want to squeeze every single kilobyte out of this image that I possibly can.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, there's even a step beyond WebP, which is uh A VIF.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Support for AVIF is very new.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's a chance that like we all of us have a friend whose phone can't view A VIF files.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: We don't we don't know who they are, but they're they're out there.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: But even even that will get you a little further than WebP.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Again, same quality, uh perceptible quality, I should say, to the end user.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: So when in doubt, probably WebP is the way to go.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I would I would say 80% of the time, 90% of the time, WebP is going to get you enough.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: But if you are like this is going to be viewed exclusively by people on like rural dial-up connections, and we have we can make a safe assumption they're probably on a reasonably modern device.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: AVIF will take you further, but webp will be your your everyday most of the time.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: I I think one of the cool things about this app is that when you drag your picture and you get to see it and it's got the slider, right?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: So you can look at it with the naked eye and go, I can't even tell the difference.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: Or I can tell a little bit, but this is going to be on a mobile phone, and no one's probably gonna be able to tell at that screen size.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: So Okay, we'll leave it right there on that web optimization cliffhanger for this episode.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: Join Justin and me next week for more low-hanging fruit that just about everyone can do to get their website humming along both on the search engine side and the user side, regardless of technical experience.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: We'll get into removing unused items, stale content, broken links, and metadata.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_03: Big doings, to be sure.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: I hope you've enjoyed the conversation with Justin so far, and we'll see you next time on the same side.