Category: General Blogging

Introduction -Understanding Largest Contentful Paint

In the digital age, where attention spans are short and competition is fierce, website performance plays a pivotal role in delivering a seamless user experience. Slow-loading websites can frustrate users and deter them from engaging with your content or products. To address this issue and help developers optimize their websites, Google introduced a set of user-centric performance metrics, one of which is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). In this blog post, we’ll explore what LCP is, why it matters, and how to improve it to give you a thorough understanding largest contentful paint.

What is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a crucial performance metric used to measure how fast the largest and most important content element becomes visible on a web page during its loading process. This content element is often a text block, image, or video – something that holds significance for the user experience. LCP provides valuable insights into the perceived loading speed of a webpage, helping developers identify and address performance bottlenecks.

Why does LCP matter?

1. User Experience: LCP is directly related to the user’s perception of a webpage’s loading speed. A fast LCP contributes to a positive user experience, while a slow LCP can lead to frustration and increased bounce rates. Users expect websites to load quickly, and a delay in rendering critical content can deter them from staying on your site.
2. SEO Impact: Search engines like Google consider page speed as a ranking factor. Websites with faster loading times, including a quick LCP, are more likely to rank higher in search results. Therefore, optimizing LCP can have a positive impact on your website’s search engine visibility.
3. Conversion Rates: Slow-loading pages can significantly affect conversion rates. Whether you’re running an e-commerce site or trying to capture leads, a quick LCP can help increase conversions by keeping visitors engaged and interested in your content or products.

How is LCP measured?

LCP is measured using real user data, making it a user-centric performance metric. The key elements in determining LCP include:

1. Rendering: LCP is measured during the page rendering process. It tracks the time it takes for the largest content element to render on the user’s screen.
2. Element Selection: The browser identifies the largest content element based on its layout dimensions (width and height) on the viewport.
3. Time Measurement: LCP is measured in seconds, and the ideal LCP time should be below 2.5 seconds to ensure a smooth user experience.

How to Improve LCP

To enhance LCP and overall website performance, consider the following strategies:

1. Optimize Images and Videos: Compress and resize images and videos to reduce their loading time. Use responsive images to ensure they adapt to various screen sizes.
2. Prioritize Critical Resources: Load critical resources (CSS, JavaScript) as early as possible to speed up rendering. Eliminate render-blocking resources that can hinder LCP.
3. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): CDNs distribute content across multiple servers globally, reducing the physical distance between users and the server, thus decreasing load times.
4. Minimize Server Response Times: Optimize server response times by using efficient hosting, content caching, and reducing server-side processing.
5. Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for non-critical content, ensuring that resources are loaded only when they are needed.
6. Efficient Web Design: Design your website with performance in mind. Use efficient code, limit the use of third-party scripts, and avoid excessive ads.

Conclusion

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a vital metric for assessing and improving website performance. By focusing on optimizing LCP, you can enhance user experiences, boost SEO rankings, and increase conversion rates. Keep in mind that LCP is just one part of a broader effort to deliver fast-loading, responsive websites, but it’s a key indicator of your site’s overall performance. Stay vigilant, regularly test your website’s performance, and employ the best practices mentioned above to ensure a smooth and efficient online experience for your users.

Why not book a free speed audit to see what your current LCP score is.

Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash

I recently added WooCommerce to a site and part of the build was to use WooCommerce Fulfilment by Amazon I thought a case study to explain what that is all about would be useful.

What Is FBA?

Fulfilment by Amazon is a service unsurprisingly offered by Amazon, in brief you put your products in their warehouses and they will pick and ship your items for you when you send them an order.

The charge a fee for storage of your stock and another fee for shipping and handling, the prices are here if you are interested.

Let’s ignore their shocking staffing policies and realise that Amazon are pretty awesome at getting physical stuff from their warehouses to your door, so this seems to be a no brainer if you are looking to outsource your shipping and handling of products.

You can stock your products in multiple locations so if you sell Europe wide or Across all states in the US you can put your products in the East and West coast locations to speed up delivery time and reduce shipping costs.

You will send your stock into Amazon they will scan it in and store it in their warehouses.

How WooCommerce Fulfilment by Amazon Works

To make this work we need a premium addon for WooCommerce this costs $129 per site

Amazon Fulfillment (MCF) for WooCommerce

The key to making this work is SKU code that matches on FBA and your WooCommerce product, when an order is created in Woo, it is automatically sent to FBA once payment has been approved.

You can switch FBA on and off, so perhaps you only need a few of your major sellers to be fulfilled you can do that,.

The stock levels in FBA and WooCommerce are automatically synced so you don’t create an order that cannot be fulfilled.

A really cool feature of this setup is that your customers can track their package from their account page.  They login to their account and the two way sync of Woo and FBA will show your customers where their package is.

FBA creates a series of email alerts when items are shipped so you always know the status of your fulfilment, a brilliant feature for control freaks like me.

Fulfilment statuses are also synced back to your order dashboard in WooCommerce so you don’t have to login to two dashboard to monitor your orders.

Cancelling an order in Woo will stop the shipment, again only one dashboard is required.

Setup is fairly simple you add a couple of API keys from Amazon into the plugin are all that is required,

What Are The Benefits Of FBA

Time!

It frees up your time to not pack, ship and post your products.

Cost!

It frees you up from having to rent storage space or it gives you back your garage which is currently full of your stock.

Proven Systems!

You know that Amazons are Boss Level at shipping stuff to customers.

Wrap Up – Case Study: WooCommerce Fulfilment by Amazon, Never Lick A Stamp Again

Do people lick stamps anymore or do they all have an adhesive backing?  Am I showing my age?

If you are getting to that point in your eCommerce journey that you are struggling to ship all your orders I would recommend FBA over getting your own storage space and staff to do the shipping and handling.

If you need help setting up a fulfilment or shipping service for your WooCommerce store give me a shout.

Photo by Cameron Venti on Unsplash

If you are a solopreneur, there is more to taking a vacation (holiday as we call it in the UK) than just switching on your out of office message, in this post I’ll show you how to prepare your website for your vacation.

As a solopreneur, everything is on your shoulders, all email responses and communication come from you.  Slow or no replies can come across as unprofessional so in this post I’ll take you through a couple of pointers to ensure you alert people you are not available.

Contact Forms

Where you have contact forms on your site drop in a bold highlighted section saying you are away and will get back to them when you get back before they submit their request, check out my work with me page as an example.

Switch Off Your Ads

OMG a few years back I was running paid ads and left them running when I was in Italy, there’s a couple of hundred quid down the toilet,

If you need to respond to contact from your ads then switch off the ads while you are away.  People coming to you from paid ads are cold traffic and expect a certain level of service which will look poor if you leave them on hold for a week or more.

Disable Email Autoresponder

If you are running an autoresponder to sell your thing consider switching that off if you need to be around to fulfil the sale.  I’m thinking service delivery of if you need to prepare a quote.

If you are selling stuff that doesn’t need you around have at it and leave your ads running and experience that earn while you are on the beach feeling.

Don’t forget to start your Out Of Office Message

I know I said it’s more than just an OOO message, but don’t forget to active it, I use Gmail and they have a great tool under stetting to reply to all emails with a set message.

Lock Your Site Like Your Would Your House

If you use the iTheme security plugin, there is a great feature called away mode.  This stops any logins to your site until a specific time, set this to be your return date and no-one can login to your site until you get back.

 

Solid Security – Password, Two Factor Authentication, and Brute Force Protection

Dude I’m in holiday mode, check out this post to learn how to activate away mode, I can’t be bothered to write more 🙂

https://ithemes.com/tutorials/getting-started-ithemes-security-part-4-away-mode/

Let People Know

A client of mine has a great technique, he switches on his out of office message two weeks early with a warning that he is out of the office in a couple of weeks then swaps the message to his true out of office while he’s away.

Me, I’m writing a blog post and I’ve personally emailed the people who have projects with me plus doing everything.

Let Your Team Know

If you have a team then let them know and expect them to pick up the slack.  Have an expectation that you will not be contacted by your team, why else would you have a team if you are still micro managing their every move while on vacation.

Defend Your Boundaries

One last thing defend the boundaries you have set when you are on vacation and don’t reply to message that look like this.

I know you are on vacation but can you [insert client request]

You need rest and cannot hustle 24/7 so switch off and enjoy your time away.

Wrap Up – Prepare Your Website For Your Vacation

I’m on holiday next week, back in the office on the 2nd August as you can probably guess.

If you are a maintenance client I’ve got you covered send a message to [email protected] and my VA will look after you.

I’m looking forward to putting out the fires in my inbox when I get home 🙂

Photo by The Travel Nook on Unsplash

I’m having a staycation in the Lake district in the UK it wont look like that photo that’s for sure.

I’ve been thinking what is the best way to start a conversation with potential new clients that I’ve never worked with in the past, I’ve been thinking what is the best lead magnet for service businesses for cold traffic.

What Is A Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an offer you give away for free to people visiting your site in exchange for their email address.

The lead magnet is meant to prove your expertise or value to someone you have not worked with (or sold to) in the past, so they can start down the process of know like and trust.

Know like and trust is a principal where you get to know a business, decide if you like the way they work and if they can be trusted.

You’ve probably all signed up for a PDF download, that’s a lead magnet, or signed up for a free video course or attended a webinar, all examples of lead magnets.

You get the freebie then there is usually a follow up email sequence to improve the know like and trust process.

Do Service Businesses Need Different Lead Magnets?

I’m selling a service, so I’ve been pondering if I need a different type of lead magnet than say someone selling products (information or physical).

To get people to work with me, I need to prove I’ve got the expertise and that I’m a good person to work with.

I’m not sure PDFs of videos are the best way to do this.

Things I’ve Tried

I’ve tried a lot of things over the years here’s what I’ve found

• pdfs – I’ve written eBooks about WordPress and used them as a downloadable offer, they are good but don’t show what it’s like to work with me.
• courses – I’ve created screen cast courses to teach people about how to do something in WordPress, the trouble with this is a person wanting to learn how to do thing X in WP doesn’t want to hire someone to do X so I’m attracting the wrong people
• videos – I’ve created specific videos with a squeeze page to collect an email before the video can be viewed, same thing as the course
• nothing – My quote is the lead magnet, this works but only for people who know me, have been referred to me or my website has done a good job a KLT.
• blog updates – is that really valuable anymore?  Get an email address in exchange for regular updates form my blog.  This highlights my writing but not what my working procedures are like.

Other Type Of Lead Magnet

There are other lead magnets out there, that I’ve not tried but are worth a mention:

• webinars – get people on a webinar and explain what working with you is like
• trip wires – sell something at a low cost and upsell them to a more expensive item, for example sell a cheap productised service then offer a complex service.
• free services – let people work with you for free to let them experience your service and gain KLT then upsell future services, the problem with this is it attracts low quality clients wanting free services and high levels of support for that freebie

What I’m Trialling Now

I’m trialling a new lead magnet and I would like to know what you think.

I’m building up a series of free audits where I’ll check your site over for problems and tell you how they can be fixed.

If I do a good job hopefully I can sell the services to fix the issues noted.

The benefits of this are that the audit has a predefine scope, it does not take too long to create an audit, it is very specific to that person’s WordPress sites.  It proves my expertise and understanding of the problems specific to their site.  I’ll include a narrative on how I will fix their site in the audit.

I’ve got two audits planned, a security audit and a performance audit.

With these audits I can the questions is your site secure or is your site fast enough.

I’m going to start with performance because all I need to do a speed audit is the URL, the barrier to entry is less, I don’t need a login to check performance.  The performance audit is lower on the KLT ladder.

I’m going to run cold paid traffic to my audits.  As usual I’ll report back if things work or not.

What I’m Offering

My free performance audit will be to show you how fast or slow your WordPress site is loading, I’ll run your site through a performance tool and discuss why it is slow, I’ll record a screencast video of me doing that audit and how your site speed can be improved.

You’ll get an experience where you get to see my expertise, get to know me (you’ll see this pretty face talking you through an audit) and a very tailored experience of your own site.

It’s small in scope (about 5 minutes per audit) it’s valuable to that person, they will see where their issues are, it’s very specific to that person, I’m showing issue on their live site not a video on how to find their issues.

Wrap Up – What Is The Best Lead Magnet For Service Businesses?

Answers in the comments, what do you think is the best lead magnet for freelance service businesses, what do you think of audits?

If you want a speed audit click through to my audit page and complete the form, I’ll review your site and create a video audit of why your site is running so slowly and what can be done to speed things up.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

In this video I want to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about sales funnels but were afraid to ask.

Well, not everything but “an overview of sales funnels” doesn’t sound as good does it.

In this video I’ll explain why websites have a problem and how sales funnels overcome the paradox of choice.

Video

The funnels Featured In this video are linked below.

Kajabi Funnel – https://www.grahamcochrane.com/workshop

Click Funnels – https://www.legitmarketingacademy.com/get-clients-webclass

My White Label Funnel – https://dev.neilmatthews.com/white-label-care-plan

Random Facebook ad – https://start.getswiftresults.com/swift-sales-system

Wrap Up – Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sales Funnels But Were Afraid To Ask

Hopefully you have a better understanding of what a sales funnel is.

If you want to build a sales funnel and need some help, get a quote from me today.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

I’ve spent countless hours building passive income streams, spoiler alert, it’s anything but passive. Let’s start saying leveraged not passive.

I was listening to a the Modern Wisdom podcast the other day and the guest on a particular episode was talking about passive versus leveraged income and I could not agree with him more.  So much so that I’m penning a blog post to make you think about leverage not passivity.

Tim “fecking” Ferris put this idea of the four hour work weeks and passive income into our heads, we can setup a passive income stream and sit on the beach while the money rolls in.

If you look at what Tim built in his book, it was a supplement product business.  He setup outsourced call centres, had customer support to deal with customer returns and queries.

He setup a distribution service to send out his products for fulfilment and a group of affiliates to sell the products, along with paid advertising to bring in new customers.

That sounds like a hella lot of work to me, that is years of streamlining and systemising.

His final outcome is a business that leverages other peoples time, systems and automation.  It took a lot of Tim’s time to get to that point.  That was active not passive.

Personal experience has told me, promises of passive income are snake oil, but leverages income on the other hand is something you can definitely achieve.

What Is Non-Leveraged Time

Non-leveraged or active income streams are where you need to provide your labour and time to get a payment, think going to a job, being a freelancer or managing people as an agency / business owner.

You only make money by giving up your time and effort.

How To Gain Leverage

You can gain leverage by using other peoples labour by hiring people or outsourcing to another firm.  The effort is still there just not your effort and the other persons labour needs to be managed.

You can claw back time with processes that make what you do more efficient and your effort take less.

By transforming your labour into a product that can be sold many times is another route to leverage, but you need to make that product in the first place

By using automation with software you can gain leverage, for example rather than sending an email which requires your time setup an email automation.

You can use capital for leverage if you have it.  Put your money into stocks which return a dividend, it’s leverage but you need to put in effort to earn the capital in the first place, if it’s gifted or inherited that person who came before you sure as hell put in the hard work.

Let’s Talk About The Holy Grail Of Passive Income Streams

The holy grail of he passive income junky is the information product.

Wrap up your expertise as a course, eBook or membership site and you have won the war (or so the courses for $1997 tell us) of passive income.

The outcome definitely is a passive-ish income steam but the massive effort required to make that product is totally ignored.

Bringing in new customers to your courses is not passive, that requires work building a sales funnel and brining new people into that  funnel via content or paid advertising, all of which required work.

Customer management is always ignored by he passive income gurus, refunds, answering customer emails all takes time, it’s not make a sale and count the cash.

Yes I agree once the work is done the outcome is highly leverage but it is not passive.

My Own Leverages Income Streams

I have my WordPress consulting income stream stream, that’s not leveraged very well, it is me selling my time one on one.  The lead generation and client reach out is done via an automation in my email provider.  I have processes in place to ensure things work in the same way each time.  I’ve tried to automate where I can to leverage my time to give me as much billable time as possible,

I have my WordPress care plan, this is a leveraged income stream.   I have a VA that does most of the hands on work for that service, I have software tools to automate backups etc, I sell this in an automated fashion with an email automation after a project is complete from my WordPress consulting.  I need to manage this work, it’s not passive.

I have a diary mapping course, that took an awful long time to record and produce.  That sits on Udemy and I leverage their traffic and software service.  I am not active with this product so income is not great.  It is a true leveraged income stream, last month I made less then $20.

I’m Planning Leverage Income Not Active Income

It’s my plan with every new income steam I think about that it needs to be leveraged, I’ve hit my celling on time I can sell as a consulting, all new income streams need to be one to many, info products or delivered by other peoples labour.

I have no thought in my mind that this will be passive but I will be leveraging systems, software and other people time to deliver these streams.

Wrap Up – Let’s Start Saying Leveraged Not Passive

Let’s pop the passive income bubble, nothing is 100% Passive it’s leveraged and your time in the income stream becomes less.

Photo by Tekton on Unsplash

doing the seo dance – Let’s Start Saying Leveraged Not Passive

This is not for everyone, but if you have a multi language site or are considering adding additional language to your site this is for you.

I’ve written a short eBook entitled “10 Things To Consider Before You Build your Multi Language Website”.

This eBook will show you some of the pitfalls you need to think about before adding multiple languages to your website.

You can download it by completing the form below.

Download Your Ebook

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Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

In this blog post I want to talk about a technique to speed up your site by lazy loading images and or videos.

What Is Lazy Loading

It’s a technique to speed up the loading of a web page by deferring images or videos that are displayed “below the fold”.  These images are not loaded as part of the initial page load and are only loaded as the site visitor begins to scroll down the page.

This makes the initial page smaller by not downloading the image and as a result makes the page load faster.

You might have noticed lazy loading on websites that show a blurred or low resolution version of images until you scroll over them and the full image is show.

What Is Below The Fold

That is the part of the web page that is offscreen when a page loads, here’s a zoomed out view of my blog page the line marks the “below the fold” part of my page.  I think the term comes from newspaper publishing where the less important stories are show below the fold of the newspaper.

 

 

How to Add Lazy Loading

WordPress added this feature for images after version 5.4 natively, but there are plugins which also extend this function

My preferred tool is WP Rocket, this also offers lazy loading for videos, it will load an image place holder for videos rather than downloading the video from YouTube for example, the video is rendered when the site visitor gets to the placeholder image.

There is a free version of their lazy loading so you don’t need to buy the full plugin:

LazyLoad Plugin – Lazy Load Images, Videos, and Iframes

There is not much to do other than load and activate the plugin to be honest so I’ll not dig to deeply into the actual implementation of the plugin.  Once activate attribute are added to your images.

How Lazy Loading Is Activated

Lazy loading is done at the browser layer and is an attribute on the IMG tag, <img loading=lazy>.

When the browser sees this attribute while loading the image the image is ignored and loaded when the site visitors scrolls over the image.

Wrap Up

So lazy loading is a way to speed up your web page load speed by deferring image or video loading.  I recommend you implement this as part of your optimization toolkit.

Is your website loading slowly?  Get in touch I’ve got a free speed audit where I’ll record a video to show you why your site is loading slowly.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash