Description text goes here ****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

(Music - shark theme)

Kenneth Kinney 0:16

Hello and welcome back to A Shark's Perspective.

Kenneth Kinney 0:18

PageSpeed is not on the minds of most marketers focused on conversion rate optimization. But a slow loading page can be a really important piece of the puzzle that not enough people ever pay attention to, because they so often focus just on the graphics type fonts, content, etc. But your page speed matters a great deal to the consumers visiting your pages.

Kenneth Kinney 0:39

Lukas Haensch is the founder of Path Monk and a former UX manager at Google.

Kenneth Kinney 0:43

And on this episode, we'll discuss PageSpeed smartcards scripts, plugins, JPEGs, opening doors, monk's tag managers lazy loading hackathons, 5g, bratwurst and beer, and a lot lot more.

Kenneth Kinney 0:56

So let's tune into a path monk with a speedy shark on the right path on this episode of A Shark's Perspective.

[intro music]

Kenneth Kinney 1:08

Lucas, thank you so much for joining us today on A Shark's Perspective, I heard you on several podcasts as well. But I wish you tell us a little bit about your background and your career to date.

Lukas Haensch 1:18

Yeah, sure, sure. So I'm Lucas originally hailed from Germany. And then I've been working all over the place San Francisco, in Dublin, Ireland in Berlin, actually quite a bit. And I've been spending around four years at Google, working on different products or with different products. And then finally worked in a team called the mobile page optimization team, which is a place where we basically worked with Google's primary or larger clients in the UK, and it's time to optimize their websites for PageSpeed. And it's a couple of years back now, and the topic has been obviously gaining much more attention since. So that's something I've been spending quite some time on PageSpeed optimization, mobile conversion rate optimisation within, within Google with Google, Google's clients. And then I moved on and worked with Workday, another big Silicon Valley firm, Silicon Valley firm that is taking on SAP and Oracle and the likes as a lead designer, so when even more in the UX field there and then at some point, moved out to build out Path Monk, which is a company that I'm building up with a team with a remote team. And we're looking on into, you know, increasing people's conversion rates, meaning booking sets, meetings that they book from the website, demos, and so on and so forth. So that's been the journey on they're very, very sort of super, super speed, speed up version. Sure.

Kenneth Kinney 2:49

A good a good optimized Page Speed, overview of your career. How's that? Good. So, so, you know, I think for most of us who are in any form of marketing or advertising, or at least I sure hope they do they understand why PageSpeed matters. But I also think a lot of us live in a bubble. And there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have heard some of this. But you know, if you're not necessarily selling, if you will, the, you know, the Google mantra, but I'm going to put your own consumer slash entrepreneur hat on with your own company, why should PageSpeed matter to people?

Lukas Haensch 3:29

Yeah, so So I think it's really important to look at the overall experience that a user goes through when they're, you know, picking a product or picking a service. And there's a couple of steps in the journey, right. One of the steps is the discovery, that they end up on your website, and actually, you know, think this is the right place to investigate further with your content, information, materials, whatever it is. And I think that journey has a couple of Acts, right. And one of the acts is that they're entering your world to your shop, your store, your website, and PageSpeed is, in essence, the sliding door for somebody to enter your shop. Right? If you are not opening your door fast enough for somebody who wants to step in, sure, there's gonna be a significant amount of people that are not actually doing the final step to wait in front of your door or until the doors open and then go in. So if you put that it's a nice analogy, just a normal, you know, retail store, if the door would be opening super, super slow. A lot of people would pass it. And I think it's the same with PageSpeed. It's just an element of next to all the other effects, you know, on SEO and so on and so forth. But in essence, it's an element of improving your conversion rate, by the pure fact that you're letting somebody in because around what is it like 53% of the users would leave a page if if the page isn't loaded, loaded within three seconds. So I think that's my take on it. I don't think it's the end all and be all conversions obviously not. But I think it's one very significant element, which is, you know, letting people coming into your business and not letting them jump away after you just hit on a article that they liked or an ad, even worse, if you paid for it.

Kenneth Kinney 5:14

Agreed. And if it's conversion, that's a catnip topic for me, because I think so many people focus on the advertisement as you were referencing and everything else, and then forget about all the traffic that they lost. Once they get to a page, and it is just, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's hard enough to get people to go to where you want them to go. But then when they when you lose them because of something as simple as PageSpeed. It's, it's just an abomination, I think half the time, but is PageSpeed necessarily the right metric. I mean, you quoted the 53% of her that I've seen a lot of times when Neil Patel, who you probably know, in the space talks about, a lot of times he'll reference Walmart, every time they increase, you know, PageSpeed, by a second thing increase conversion by X percent, I forget what number he references, but is PageSpeed necessarily the right metric that we need to measure always.

Lukas Haensch 6:10

Gotcha. So I think, obviously, that those big numbers, those big examples, there's also a big scale behind them, which makes those small effects much more tangible. Right? Obviously, you have you have, you know, much less traffic, it's a little bit more difficult to feel the effect. But if you actually looking into your conversion rates, right, if we precisely measuring those rates, meaning also, you know, people then actually, from the ad clicking through to your page, then I would say PageSpeed is one very significant metrics. In that step. I don't think it's the only one because you know, conversion rate, ultimately, is the end effect of all of those metrics that we just talked about before. But I think what is important, if we're talking about PageSpeed, and you're asking me about metrics, one important thing is to distinguish what are we even talking about? Right? Because there is, there's tons of metrics that somehow represent PageSpeed, right, there is the scores that you have on the different pages, then you have, you know, you can be looking at the full load time, you can be looking at the first time to the first byte, you can be looking at starting to render. And that's maybe something I took away from Google is something to look at speed index, which is basically a metric that represents your first paint on the screen, meaning above the fold, how quickly do you actually see content, meaningful content, your headline, your hero image, your call to action? In a way, what is what is, if we stay in the picture? What is the first impression a person has, when they step into your one step into your store? What do they see? And everything else after this behind that can be optimized after but that first impression is important to keep them? So? To answer your question, I don't think it's the one and only metric that is moving conversions, there's so much more going into conversion rate optimisation. And you know, booking more demos or getting more trials from your website. But PageSpeed is one that is often overlooked and not being really paid attention to. While on the other hand, there's sometimes quick fixes that can give you, you know, small gains, here and there that add up

Kenneth Kinney 8:19

over time. So when you go in to work with a client, do you necessarily mean for your own KPI when working with somebody? Is it necessarily setting an acceptable speed? Or is it just running through all the scripts, you know, the critical rendering path and everything else is that really where you're focused on is looking at all the scripts and possibly removing those, or you basically trying to set up an optimal acceptance of speed.

Lukas Haensch 8:48

So I think what you said goes hand in hand. So basically, Page Speed Index is a really good outcome metric of having gone through all which we just mentioned, the critical rendering path, the different scripts that might be impacting. So in PageSpeed index is interesting for the one fact that it really just shows in a meaningful way, what does your user actually see, right? It's not an artificial metric, that sort of, you know, because user doesn't feel the first time to bite. The terms of the first bite, what they feel is what they see on the screen. So those concepts that you mentioned, they are affecting PageSpeed index, and we can obviously go into much more depth, definitely. But PageSpeed index is an interesting way to sort of know, okay, how quickly does somebody on my on my site actually see something meaningful? And just quite naturally, that is quite an important factor. Right? How quickly do they see something meaningful on my website, right, given that a lot of people might leave if they don't see something meaningful after a certain period of time.

Kenneth Kinney 9:53

So what are some of the other critical factors within PageSpeed? And how do we set up the perfect say critical render ring path that starts this down a faster PageSpeed load?

Lukas Haensch 10:04

Yeah. So I think it's number one, it's always starting from your own website, when you look at your own website, put it into PageSpeed tests at org and have a look what's really happening on your page. But ultimately, the core concept is, everything, every file that is on your page can affect how quickly your first, above the fold content is being rendered. And being shown. That means we have to look critically at the JavaScript that is being loaded and downloaded the CSS, the images, the fonts, all of them play a part in this, right, because ultimately, they together make the website. And so to answer your question, again, um, how do we approach this, it's really maybe looking at it from the same angle, then the browser looks at it, right? Because the browser in itself, and you mentioned the critical rendering path there, the browser goes through a couple of steps, until it's able to show something on the screen, right, so they're going through on a very high level, right, they're going through the DOM building, so they don't get the HTML, parse the HTML, go through the CSS, the JavaScript, put all of this together, then they have a layout that they then show to the user. And on that steps that the browser's doing those files, CSS JavaScript, can affect how quickly all of this is happening, right. And so if you have a lot of JavaScript files, this steps going to take longer. If you have a huge CSS file, which you might not need for above the fold content, this step is going to take longer. And all of these effects then how quickly your your websites actually showing any content on the website versus just a blank white screen where the user is waiting for content to be appearing. So it actually ties into each other. So each of the files have a different way of you know, looking at them, optimizing them in order to speed up your perceived PageSpeed. Right, your the time that it takes until they see something meaningful. And we can go through the individual files and what types of tips and tricks out there but from a core concept, that's what it's about?

Kenneth Kinney 12:21

Well, I think what, maybe 510 years ago, we probably were more focused on strictly the size of an image. Or maybe how much Flash was on us on a website today. You know, you said something that, that triggered from memories from designing some sites myself, if you've got some JavaScript on there, and I don't know who doesn't have a significant amount of, of scripts on a website anymore? And I don't think most people even understand how much of their hosting load scripts, how many, how many WordPress plugins are lining all this up. But I may be wrong. But are we are you finding that most people understand or have a good understanding of how many scripts are out there that are slowing their site down? Because I think one of the other issues is that for people, if they're wanting to look at their site and possibly redesigning it, or, or fixing this problem, rather, you're not going to find a lot of people who are going to want to totally redesign a site, because as you said, their CSS may be troublesome, they are going to ask you to come in and analyze and break down what can we remove? What can we fix? What can we keep? What do we need to keep? And I think that's probably for a lot of people. It's often what's an acceptable speed versus what is, if we had enough time and money, we could fix everything. But I think there's a lot of people who just need to figure out what is an acceptable speed.

Lukas Haensch 13:55

I think it's a great point, that's actually sort of, you know, in the time within Google, that's, sometimes I was a bit surprised by this idea of we have to throw a lot of money into optimizing our PageSpeed, right, because ultimately, you know, especially in bigger companies, with this idea, it's being you know, deprioritize, for example, you know, it becomes a project rather than a quick fix, right, those those type of things can happen. But actually, if you really, really look at the individual files, right, and you respond to speaking of JavaScript, I'm going to give the example. JavaScript for your whole website is going to be loading. In most cases, if it's not optimized, at the very beginning, it's by default gonna be render blocking, you're going to have a blank screen. So but JavaScript that you might be loading is responsible, maybe for your checkout, is responsible for something much later in the journey. And JavaScript that is not being required at the very beginning can be very simply deferred, or loaded as synchronously just giving you one example here. And this is done by adding one simple tech to the JavaScript file, if there is no sort of dependencies for the first experience that a user has, which means, you know, it's not necessarily about restructuring everything, it's not necessarily about even worse to optimize, you know, your service. Sometimes it can be as simple as is this a JavaScript file that is not even required within the first minutes of the user experience, and then loading that after the page is being loaded? Right. And this, this idea of figuring out the different elements, can we delay them, can we load them at a later point in time, same holds for images with lazy loading. And it's sort of a concept, I think, at least in my experience, having part talking to a lot of companies is sometimes sometimes it's made bigger the topic than it's actually would have been to just, you know, defer the JavaScript files that are not necessarily being used. Obviously, you can always go further right, you can optimize just for the critical CSS, and only show that but even if you don't want to restructure, there's still a lot of small things that you can do to you know, remove. Remove that JavaScript, load that images later, lazy load or load that webform later. So there's a lot of small things without even having to restructure the patient in a major way. So

Kenneth Kinney 16:22

if you've got a full blown it team, I mean, I used to code a lot of websites in the past this is in before Dreamweaver, you know, and things like that, which started to make a lot of things easier. Now, you can sign up with, you know, Squarespace or WordPress, or any of them. And in about two minutes, you've got a site. And I think for a lot of small businesses today, and with you know, individual brands for building out a site, there are a lot of limitations. I mean, if I'm, you know, you mentioned SAP and Oracle, they're not using Squarespace or WordPress necessarily set up a site. But they're not a majority of the websites, majority of the websites that have the slowdown problems are sitting on brand name hosting sites that we all know and love to use, but they have some limitations as far as what the hosting capabilities, what you can and cannot fix. And I'm curious, are you running into that much today? Or is that strictly just left for, you know, individuals that maybe wouldn't necessarily use you to help figure out this problem? I mean, are you pologize, I'm butchering this question, but I think I know, you know what I mean, I'm not every client, you have as a fortune 1000. Client, I'm assuming there are plenty of clients who, who rely on smaller hosted site companies, CMS is to, to, you know, to build out their sites, how do you sort of approach those in optimize those pages?

Lukas Haensch 17:48

Definitely. So obviously, because you refer to our current clients with Path Monk, obviously, we take a different take, right? It's not about PageSpeed optimization, just per se, it's about optimizing the conversion right in there to take the technology in itself can run on those, but I'm sure we're getting into that a little bit later. Looking from a Page Speed angle, the time that I spent in Google on this, I 100%, you're right, there is a lot of limitations in the different platforms there for individual small business to just optimize. But there's always some things that you can do giving you a concrete example, for example might might be a lot of the listeners might be using the WordPress pages. You alluded to it before, there's a lot of plugins being used across the WordPress pages, right, because they enable a lot of different functionality on the page. But that turns into every plugin being loaded on the page, even if it's required on a different part of the of the website. So a very small simple thing is there is basically a plugin organizer for WordPress, where you can conditionally load the plugins for whatever, for whatever token is being required for this particular page. And if you have a development team with a few lines of PHP, this can be even done in a more flexible way. So I 100% 100%, which we've experienced it within Google as well, that there is limitations to a lot of the platforms in regards to that, especially if you don't have the in house development team. But there is always something you can do. It starts from the images. Obviously, we didn't talk too much about this. In the WordPress example. It's for example, in loading, you're loading your plugins conditionally, which then again, takes JavaScript out of the critical rendering path and lets the page load a bit quicker.

Kenneth Kinney 19:36

So since you mention images, let's jump to that. How do you look at an optimal size of a graphic for a page? And really, how do you look at the size of all graphics for a page? And again, you know, obviously, it's going to be different for every site. But what are some of the things if I'm starting to create an image for a site that I can start to look at as making it optimal for my site? We're not too not just the rendering of the of the site, but just at the basic whether or not because look, I get advice from people all day long, I got to do JPEG, I got to do do GIF, I got to do JPEG 2000. And you've got 50 different opinions on it what to you? What's the optimal way of producing a graphic and looking at the size of it?

Lukas Haensch 20:21

Very good. One very interesting way Definitely is to use source set, which basically identifies you know, what size of device are here, and you having maybe three resources for a given size, one forgiving size, and then you load the image conditionally based on the size, which means you load a smaller image for your mobile phone, versus a much larger one for your desktop version of the site. And the site is picking up, which device is requesting the information and then sending the according image, which means you don't have to find a one size fits all solution. So there will be a different way of tackling your question. Which lets you basically create the same resource in three different four different sizes, whatever you think is the right thresholds for your page. And then you can show Chodos versions. So that makes that makes that piece a little bit easier. It's called Source Set. And that's, I think it's a very good, good way to do this relatively easily easy. Easily done with CSS, you said source sets, you refer to the three versions of the images and then being loaded. So that's one one way I think to tackle it.

Kenneth Kinney 21:33

So from a family of scripts, do you find anything that tends to slow pages down that people throw in the abundance of too many is it I'm gonna grab, you know, just one is example, heat maps? Is his heatmaps, necessarily more of a slowing down script, if you will, then some other scripts on a page? Or are there other families that maybe are enemies of families in a generic sense, families of scripts that tend to slow websites down a little bit more than others?

Lukas Haensch 22:07

Obviously, we would have to run a particular study, I've seen some interesting studies on for example, different impacts of different chat plugins, right. And there have been various, definitely very different results within the group of chat plugins, even so it's very difficult to say that there's one family, what I can say, from the experience that I've been, I've been making a couple of things. What tends to happen specifically with a little bit larger companies is the script is installed, maybe in a B testing script, right for one project. And then it's not being used anymore. And it's not running actively, right. Still, though, all of the JavaScript is stand and sitting there, right and effects PageSpeed. So that's one thing, just doing a regular cleanup of tools that are not being used anymore, that will be the first various sounds super simple. But you would be surprised what you sometimes find in the websites. Another one is interesting is to maybe divert a little bit from the family type question is more into what is the value that you're getting through this JavaScript? versus how much are you taking away from your performance? One example we tend to use to tend to talk in Google a lot about was the carousels on the website, which is, you know, flipping images or different marketing messaging on the page. They come with JavaScript in most of the most of the cases in order to make those, you know, functionality to be working. But at the same time, the benefit turned out to be relatively small, right, very low click through rates on the third, fourth, fifth image, at the diluted marketing message specifically on mobile. So they you moving into into its own where the JavaScript in itself doesn't really actually give you the benefit, but it takes away from your performance. So from that stems that there is basically you have some PageSpeed performance budget. And if attack is really, really important for you, because you're doing something really valuable. It might have another, it might have a good reason to survive versus you know, for example, carousels that we found to be continuously not providing good click through rates and continuously adding up on the speed budget. I hope this addresses your question, because I think the family one is the family one is difficult to answer. Because even within one family, it can be. It can be tricky. Obviously, heat maps, and things like those that require to be loading at the very beginning and most of the time, so it's very, very, very easy to defer them. But there might be a lot of other families of JavaScript tools that you can defer and load asynchronously, which means loading after your page has been loading, which sort of takes away their impact on your at least initial load time. So again, there's two ways to look at this. How valuable is the rampage? And can I actually maybe even just defer it?

Kenneth Kinney 24:54

Agreed, you know, and I think the only reason I brought up heat maps was because I specifically remember a case where I is testing too. And I found that they loaded in the same order. And one was written in a way that it was just slower. And without going into too much detail, and I just, you know, ended up chunking it because of that. So, you know, when we look at a B testing for this, and how do you look at testing this and breaking it down so that we can figure out what is wrong with a page? I mean, you basically start with a waterfall approach, I'm assuming, but at what point on the waterfall? Do you start? Is it just at the top and looking at how each one loads as it comes across?

Lukas Haensch 25:36

Yeah, so So the to webpagetest.org is a really great one for this. It's actually done by some Googlers, who've been really sort of, you know, focused on the topic. And it's not an official Google tool, but you can you can use freely available to use. What you see there is something interesting, you see the waterfall alongside filmstrip view of what is loading on your page. And then you can basically move along the waterfall from top down, and alongside your filmstrip view and see, when is the point in time that actually something starts to appear on the screen? You know, until which point is it? Why when does it when does the first font appear? Then you see why does the image not appear and the image appears like three seconds later, and you will be able to correlate what is loading on your page to, to what as to what is loaded in the waterfall in sort of, you know, super, super slow down version, frame by frame. And then you can detect, okay, it seems we have an issue with our fonts because they don't, you know, don't seem to be appearing for a long time. Or we have an issue with our icons, everything is loaded. But our icons, aren't there what's happening. So that's, I think it's a really good way because then you get a good feel for what's actually working and not working on your page.

Kenneth Kinney 26:52

How do you look at Lighthouse? Now I know that was a Google sponsored product.

Lukas Haensch 26:57

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it definitely gives a lot of insightful tips, I can say in my time, there, we worked quite a bit and it but also lighthouse was being built up there. So I think it's super helpful, it gives you a lot of a lot of insights, a lot of the the the things that you would get and figure out are probably very similar to a certain degree. But because if you're optimizing for Page Speed Index that first load, then there's some things that you might be looking at differently when you're looking at the filmstrip view, such as small things like that image is just showing later. Alright, so that's something in the in the time sequence that you wouldn't maybe necessarily realize otherwise. How about

Kenneth Kinney 27:39

the impact of tag managers on load times? Have you run into that much?

Lukas Haensch 27:45

Yes, yes, we've run. Definitely within Google, I've run into that much. There is. I think there's a very, very good sort of knowledge base into that topic. I haven't focused on that to be very frank. So I don't want to make something up here that I haven't really been implementing. So

Kenneth Kinney 28:03

I'd rather you lie to us a little bit. Keep going.

Lukas Haensch 28:08

So yeah, there's there's good resources with other people. Yeah, I don't I don't I can't really say much to this.

Kenneth Kinney 28:15

No, no, that's fine. What are the things that we were talking about earlier, though, if you're a b2c, D to C type brand, and most of your traffic is then is mobile. All of this makes perfect sense, especially since so many people are still 3g and 4g related. But should we approach b2b differently with PageSpeed? I mean, do you run into that in conversation much? Because I think that's a an argument I've heard before. There are a lot of environments, even in b2b that are not being searched on mobile.

Lukas Haensch 28:47

Yeah, so definitely, I mean, conversations that we have with SAS companies. I mean, it depends quite heavily on the on the vertical on whether the mobile or mobile traffic is actually exceeding the traffic for those b2b types of customers. I think there's a couple of things I would take into consideration. The stuff that we're talking here about is quick fixes, right? It's deferring a JavaScript snippet. It is lazy loading an image. It's not restructuring your page. And if you can benefit from this as a b2b company, it's very hard for me to see the big reason why net on why not if you have the resources then available to focus on that. Overall, I think, at least what we experiencing now with Pathmark is there's a lot of other factors that really tie into conversion optimization, getting more trials, getting more demos, I'm happy to talk a bit more about that as well. But I would say I'm going back to what I said before, which is it's not the end all and be all and if you're if your traffic is majority desktop, the impact of you know, squeezing a couple of seconds is going to be smaller obviously. So how Um, I would say, looking at it as a very often there's quick fixes you can do for your page. So why not? Do you know, a day of hackathon like we used to in Google, we actually used to run. Interesting. We used to run daily hackathons, right. So ecommerce companies come together, or I was invited, and they go, they go, and we're invited to one. And sometimes, you know, couple of those quick fixes can be done within a day. And then you have not those major things running on your page anymore, not old texts. No, no, JavaScript is unnecessarily blocking. And you got to win. And you can then measure the data on what's the impact on conversion. So that's one take I have on it. And overall, for b2b, I think there's a lot of other things that are really important. One thing that we found out, which is very interesting, now we talking to a lot of b2b companies, is the idea of what is actually the call to action that you want to prioritize on your page, right, especially b2b companies with having different different tiers of clients, you know, smaller clients that should rather go into the trial version bigger clients that should rather go into a demo. Right? So this is something where we starting to explore very interesting insights, where companies, you know, don't quite know yet what is the one that we want to prioritize? And how do we route the person that is coming maybe from source X, that might be your enterprise client to the right call to action. So that's actually a thing in the b2b context, a very, very interesting field in terms of conversion rate optimization, giving a particular visitor based on what they have been doing on your page based on what they're likely to want to sort of what type of client they are, to give them the right call to action, especially if you have you know, two or three different goals for your website, like trials, webinars, setting up a demo,

Kenneth Kinney 31:52

I think people too often look at the entire website, as one narrow point of view on PageSpeed. And with Skaro, as a whole, but you know, a landing page, where somebody is going to fill out a form or say, an E commerce page, where they're going to complete a sale, if they've been driven there from an external website, that page should, I think there are ways to look at to break down sites that you can focus more on those types of pages, the necessarily, you know, all of your blog content, those pages can be broken down more specifically than the rest of your website. And I think sometimes people get so caught up with, here's the first page of our website, here's how quickly it loads. We've got a massive problem, but it may not be that way.

Lukas Haensch 32:46

Yep, I am totally, totally with you, obviously, what a couple of things are key there, right? Looking? Where's your traffic actually going? Where do you get your leads from? Where are you missing leads, right, having a clear picture, and then do not do not try to tackle everything at the same time. Although I have to say that the idea of optimizing for the critical rendering path, in essence, you do that by page, right, you go, you go by page, and you check, okay, on this particular page here where we get, you know, X amount of traffic that is relevant for us. And where we have maybe a high bounce rate, you know, can we fix your something by just, you know, doing whatever of the steps that we just discussed before JavaScript? Anything that is affecting critical rendering, so 100% agree with you. It's not like necessarily have to look at your page in one whole piece, look at the important pages, you know, where you're getting your traffic, and what is the intent, right, if the intent is super high on the page, and you're losing, should be super high on that page. And you losing people because it's loading super slow, because there is a video on mobile there. The top which is check, for example, takes long to load might be look might be worth to explicitly look at that issue, resolve that, and then moving on. So I think it's all about looking explicitly into what is blocking on your page, which pages are important, and then going step by step.

Kenneth Kinney 34:09

So as 5g rolls out across more parts of the country, here in the States and in Europe, and everywhere else, his page speed increases, do you think this will become less of a concern? Or if you kind of had to put your crystal ball and look into it? Do you think we'll just do what we've already done over say the last 10 years? I think we've overtaxed the speed. I mean, we're we're coming up with more ways than the speed can handle right now. And that's why we have PageSpeed problems. Do you think the capabilities of time speeds increases that we'll just continue to do that?

Lukas Haensch 34:49

Yeah. So I think there's I mean, I don't have a crystal ball. I can see. I mean, we know that pages are getting heavier and heavier in terms of JavaScript, right because much, much more capabilities being pushed into the pages, while at the same time, as you mentioned, connections are getting better. I think in the end, it still comes down to what is your client base? Where's your client base coming from? From what type of devices? And what experience do they actually have? So I would think the things that we're discussing here right now, there might be, you know, diminishing in diminishing and its impact on a page PageSpeed. Right, especially you, you see a lot of frameworks appearing ANP, even progressive, progressive web, web apps that are helping you to just, you know, show information quicker and even offline to a user. But I would say, ultimately, today, and when I was in Google, we were still testing on 3g, which was not was not the one that was a the the latest, but it was the one that was the widest spread. So so even though those technologies are emerging, there is a lag, right? Especially with, you know, large, large new economies, spreading their internet usage, the mobile first usage, right, or this has been a big topic within Google as well, obviously, if those countries are your client base, I think it's really important to have that look into how, what's the realistic experience that they have? Yeah, and sometimes it's as easy as you know, going out of the office Wi Fi, or testing on a 3g throttling, 4g throttling, and then get an get a real

Kenneth Kinney 36:31

feel for it. Absolutely. And I could not agree more I use tell people all the time, you know, if you think you don't have a problem, turn off your Wi Fi connect. And that's what the rest of the world is typically seeing when they're trying to load your page. And if you know, I brought up the example earlier, I was just using SAP or Oracle or one of those. I mean, I think a lot of times we think of maybe in the b2b space, a lot of enterprise software, you know, some technology player, somebody looking up, Oracle is not going to have a page load problem. But if you're selling, you know, if you're John Deere, a massive, you know, multi multibillion dollar companies selling farm equipment to farmers in Brazil. I mean, that's, that's a perfect place where you if you're wanting to make million dollar sales, you got to look at how something as simple as PageSpeed is part of the puzzle for conversion. And it's, again, you know, we've we focused a lot on PageSpeed. But it's, it's one of 1000 things, if not more, that you've got to focus on, it all wraps up into the puzzle of, of how we look at conversion. So

Lukas Haensch 37:36

yeah, this this, this is actually this actually how we started with Pathmark to see okay, there is there is a puzzle. And that puzzle has a lot of steps, right, that puzzle has, how many times has somebody been on the page? What have they been checking out before? So what are they likely to be interested in? What are they doing right now? Are they scrolling down today, you know, gain focus lose focus on the page. Because ultimately, there are there's patterns below that right there's a certain patterns that lead to certain types of actions and certain information that you will have to show into that patterns in order to maximize conversions. This is actually exactly the point where we started off working in building on pattern where we looked at that puzzle, and we saw, okay, it's very interesting, there is not a lot of things out there that help you automatically to figure out what a person is doing on the website and then give content to them, that might help them to convert, it might help you to convert them. So yep, so let's, we started at that same point where the entry door was PageSpeed. And then we saw, okay, there's a lot of pieces below that, but the Behavior Driven, we call that a behavior driven conversion rate optimisation versus optimizing just your store, or just your page.

Kenneth Kinney 38:55

I agree completely. And I'll sort of pay reference to this as well with with the example you brought up, I've consulted with with many accompany on, you know, retargeting their advertising as well. And I think people need to look at the pages that they're driving traffic to, and what loads even more quickly, when somebody's being retargeted. You don't necessarily have to drive them back to the same page, we know, you know that people are doing a lot more research than they did before. And this, you know, kind of to borrow your analogy, the first time they entered the door may have been one page speed, or one speed of the door opening. The second time really needs to be super optimized. And so you've got to look at your your content, your ads, your scripts, everything else. I mean, if if we know that not everybody's jumping on a page automatically in buying or filling out a form. You can give them a secondary landing page as an opportunity or secondary door to enter. And it can really increase and it's something I've worked with with companies before. I don't know if you've ever run into that or not.

Lukas Haensch 39:58

Yeah, so so this is essence, this is what this was what we're working on, right? So we because we learned that if you want to optimize a page stay static at the moment, right? No matter what you do, how often you come to that page, by a large degree, the page is going to stay the same. Right? The page is not going to give you any new information, it's not going to give you more relevant information for the product that you've been checking out. This is sort of where we start with basically analyze all the steps somebody is doing on the website. Every scroll every click every right click every tech select, and basically figure out okay, what path are they on? What type of information should we show them right now on the page? So we basically developed a technology called smartcards. That is, learning all of this. They're learning how often if you've been here, they're learning what product if you checked out what have you just been doing it then we let them slide into the into the page with, you know, a case study for the product that you just checked out, or a testimonial for the product that you've been not checking out three times. And now reading a little bit about? So the idea here is to really understand what has the person been doing? And what piece of content is most likely to lead to a conversion and let them show this piece of content?

Kenneth Kinney 41:18

Great point. No, and I've been checking out smartcards off your site for some time. So Well, Lucas, you're in Dusseldorf, which is far away from any sharks, but I'm a diver and that's part of the reason I swim with sharks. I have to ask every guest I'm gonna see what it is for you. What is your favorite kind of shark? Or is they say in German 'hai'? And why?

Lukas Haensch 41:41

Very cool. Yeah, I really liked this question. So my favorite shark I would say and because we have that saying sometimes, within our you know, we're a startup company, we're coming a lot from a product background. And so sometimes we have to be a little bit more Sharky, right when we are when we're talking to clients. I think the Challenger sale for example, the book The Challenger sale, speaks a lot about you know, how a salesperson can be a bit more challenging, and a bit more Sharky. So I think a couple of guys like Steli Efti, for example, who is running close I O is I would say really good sales shark. So I would go with a sales shark. Yeah,

Kenneth Kinney 42:16

I like it. Well, Lucas, it's a special time in the show. Are you ready? For the five most interesting and important questions you're going to be asked today?

Lukas Haensch 42:25

I'm gonna do my very best. All right.

Kenneth Kinney 42:27

Number one, German bratwurst or German beer.

Lukas Haensch 42:34

It definitely brought first I am closing close to being 90% vegetarian. But I would say I'm going with the bratwurst. Haven't had a beer for a long time, which makes me very unGerman. But I would say I'll go in with a breakfast.

Kenneth Kinney 42:50

Well, that puts you in the gluten free family anyway. So number two, is a search engine question for for a former Googler Bing or duck duck go.

Lukas Haensch 43:03

Duck Duck go. I really followed the story. Yeah, he's quite a bit. I really like the like the story and everyday technical.

Kenneth Kinney 43:12

Alright, number three greatest soccer players of all time. Franz Beckenbauer of Germany or Pele of Brazil.

Lukas Haensch 43:22

So I actually was a soccer player myself for a long period of my youth played for some youth teams here so I would go with Pele because I tend to be more sort of a technical player and I like the art turret brought the den sort of district German way of playing.

Kenneth Kinney 43:39

You gotta ask this a Dios. That's the perfect answer. And good for you. So number four, jpg, or GIF, or GIF, whichever you want saying.

Lukas Haensch 43:53

That's very interesting. You can load JPEGs progressively. So I think that's pretty cool. But like, as a GIF, they can be more more conveying much more actually, I think more and more SAS businesses are you know, placing animations very abstract animations on top of the website to explain concepts I think segment is doing it in a very nice way to explain something very abstract in just one GIF. And so I would say I would go with the GIF

Kenneth Kinney 44:24

Number five and the most important question you're gonna be asked today is this American version of it that I'm asking is biscuits or cornbread?

Lukas Haensch 44:36

I mean, I just passed the Christmas period so I go with the the best Chris. At least this would be the have more more German roots for me if I'm hopefully I'm not misunderstanding your biscuits. In Germany, it would be sort of the Christmas bakery, sort of

Kenneth Kinney 44:52

Biscuits are more like your breakfast food were like biscuits and gravy, which is a good Southern tradition type food. Not like a light not like an English cookie.

Lukas Haensch 45:05

So maybe should reverse so can you repeat so it was a biscuit or....

Kenneth Kinney 45:08

biscuits or cornbread

Lukas Haensch 45:12

I stick with the biscuit

Kenneth Kinney 45:14

Good man. So Lucas where can people find out more about you follow your thoughts on PageSpeed and conversion optimization and everything else and a little bit more about Path Monk?

Lukas Haensch 45:25

Yeah, I would say the best way is to go to path monitor comm slash presents. So we're having actually Quick, quick and dirty conversations with SAS CEOs, marketers and founders, how they think about, you know, winning more leads, more demos more, more everything downloads from the from the website. So I'd say that it's a really good place to learn a bit more if that's of interest.

Kenneth Kinney 45:49

Outstanding. Lucas, thank you so much for joining me on A Shark's Perspective.

Lukas Haensch 45:54

Thanks for having me.

[music]

Kenneth Kinney 46:00

So there was my conversation with Lukas Haensch, the founder of Path Monk and a former UX manager at Google. Let's take a look at three key takeaways from my conversation with him.

Kenneth Kinney 46:09

First, so he compares the idea of PageSpeed of a website to adore being slow or difficult to open at a retail store. While not a perfect comparison, it's perfectly suited for this conversation. And he's right. While not an end all be all solution. It is another important part of the conversion optimization experience. Look, you can have an absolutely beautiful website. But if Taipei's, like me have to wait a millisecond more than we bounce and go to one of the many other options that Google provided when I searched for whatever it was I was looking for. And then clicking, we've covered an abundance of CRO techniques on the show. And I'm glad that we're not overlooking this one. And incredibly important to me to point out is make certain that you focus as much attention is possible on landing pages, those have to load super fast. If you're going to pick a door to be slow, then don't let it be the front door, the one that most people are walking through every day, just make certain that you pay a little extra attention to the pages where you're getting more traffic with consumers who have more intent, but look at all of them as well.

Kenneth Kinney 47:06

Second, why does this matter so much? Well, part of this is I'm super glad that he pointed out where it is in the user's journey. So if you're going to page six, for example, in your search, then you might be a little more patient. But if this is the first page, ie the doorway to your business, then forget it, it's just hard to keep someone thinking they'll continue the journey on a super slow site.

Kenneth Kinney 47:27

Third, you first got to know if you have a problem. And I'll add a reminder to the show notes. But go to webpage test.org. And check the speed of your own site. Then remember that everything on your site, the CSS, JavaScript, images, fun hosting, etc. All of that affects the Critical Rendering Path, and how quickly a page loads and the above the fold content. When designing web pages in the past, I used to use the metaphor of measuring weight on it with a scale. So a blank page weighs little to nothing but with each image or JavaScript or anything else, that page starts to weight more and more. And the heavier becomes and where you placed the weights is why it feels heavier when you deconstruct it and look at how to make it way less. The likelihood of you redesigning a site to fix this problem is likely slim. But you need to deconstruct the problem to figure out the solution and you want to be different. Spend more time analyzing also this as a part of the user experience more than what your competitors are doing a faster site is still an important part of the puzzle. This is like anything else in your business or brand, something that starts and then get slowed down by an abundance of stuff you add that doesn't help the consumer. Your Site started as a simple one and then mushroomed into something you cannot change. It gets slow, hard to fix. And then you figure out it's a problem. Once you see bounce rates or jump too high. Get ahead of this beforehand and be proactive for yourself and your consumer.

Kenneth Kinney 48:48

Got a question send me an email to Kenneth at a sharks perspective.com.

Kenneth Kinney 48:52

Thank you again for the privilege of your time.

Kenneth Kinney 48:53

And as Lucas reminded us, let's be a little more Sharky. And I hope that you'll join us on the next episode of A Shark's Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)