Website CRO Best Practices: Tips for Quality Assurance and Diagnosing Issues

[00:00:11] John: So some zero best practices. Somebody asked earlier about a theme. Shopify actually has a theme called the Light Theme. So don't confuse my note here with saying choose that theme specifically. Make sure you choose a theme that's lightweight, and you can tell that often A, there's a billion in one forms of people talking about what the best theme is and why.

[00:00:27] John: And B, when you're looking at the demo for the theme, you can usually tell how quickly the demo loads, and that can be of solid indication of how well that theme's gonna load. If you've got a good developer, a really good developer can make phenomenal inroads from a speed perspective. But I wouldn't rely too heavily on that.

[00:00:42] John: Not least of which, because even if they improve your site speed, and this has happened to us quite a few times, the minute there's a major update, like if Shopify changes their code base, a lot of what that developer customized goes away. So you wanna make sure that your website can be fast. As it stands without too much heavy customization, because if you rely on heavy customization, there's no telling.

[00:01:01] John: When that customization is forced into obsolescence, and now you're back to being reliant upon the foundational utilities. We wanna make sure that you're scaling your images properly. I see this a lot. I've made this mistake a lot where you've got, a 2000 pixel image in a spot that will only take a 500 pixel image.

[00:01:16] John: there's really easy tools that you can use online to make sure you're resizing images correctly. But this is a, real quick and easy win for page speed. And to be honest with you, some cases for mobile loading, because oftentimes what you notice on a mobile device is the device loads the site in its entirety first and then scales it down.

[00:01:31] John: And so this can kind of improve engagement too. John, did I see you? Gearing up to pipe up? No. I was gonna say uh, the theme updates from a customization theme. We've run into this issue a few times and that's kind of why we're speaking about it. But heavy, custom themes, which is where they kind of ignores the framework that is Shopify or a theme that is standard to like Woo commerce or big commerce or a theme that's kind of standard in the industry.

[00:01:51] John: When you have themes that possibly can have a forced update, we see this a lot with WordPress. WordPress has, they kind of force you to update their themes or like, or the website just doesn't work anymore. So when you look at heavy customizable themes, you can still use them. But one thing to be considerate of is updates to those themes, sometimes wipe custom code.

[00:02:08] John: And the custom code could be your Google tag manager, your analytics and your conversion tracking during marketing tags. those type of non-standard implementations can be wiped where you might update the P H P version of your WordPress site and there's a small update that happens on the backend and it kills possibly a plugin or that page no longer loads quickly.

[00:02:24] John: And all of a sudden conversion tracking just goes away and you're not exactly sure why. those are important to know that anytime that there's a website update, I can't tell you how many times. So it is probably been over a hundred times where all of a sudden conversion tracking just stopped because of a website update.

[00:02:37] John: So that's gonna be something that's gonna be very important, especially in Google Ads because Google has a two day role. After two days of non-activity, Google stops learning. if you're losing conversion tracking for 4, 5, 6 days and then you restart, it's not like it's gonna be restarting from scratch, but you know that that restart after five or six days of inactivity, you're gonna have a little bit of a, a relearning period for possibly a week or two before you find a level of normalcy.

[00:02:58] John: And that's sometimes a little bit painful, especially if you're in higher spends or you've been finally scaling up to a specific degree. So we usually recommend having a developer, not like not that you have to pay, you know, $500 a month or just to kind of hang out, but someone that you trust and that you know, can work quickly.

[00:03:12] John: That if you see, or if they know that a website update is coming, you can retest your conversions. Make sure that your conversions are still working properly and the code's still at least found on the page. Because that is something that we've had starts and stops and sputters for a long time, and it just becomes a nightmare to try to scale Google at least get some level of normalcy and consistency.

[00:03:31] John: So just be weary about any sort of updates that come to the site. you'll see in our checklist, we do a weekly that we check conversion tracking for all of our clients. That's a part of our S O P that every single week we check conversion track. Even if it's been two years, we still check it. So that's just something that that'd be mindful of.

[00:03:45] John: Cool. Decrease the weight of images which is, you know, kind of a cool little pro tip from a bond. Do it. Thank you. Limit the amount of plugins and apps. This is, it's such a noted point of hypocrisy from us because on one hand you get on calls with us and we're talking like Scott and going back and forth on, oh, and you can do order bumps and here's what Zipify does.

[00:04:02] John: And, and we just like, we're kids in candy scores when it comes to some of the things that are, that are possible. And then on the other end I'm like, well, don't use too many apps or plugins cuz it's gonna slow down your site. This is the balance of risks that you get to, you know, decide on your own. And it will never not be an issue.

[00:04:17] John: And it's just something to be cognizant of and play with. There's a lot of information out there as to what plugins tend to slow down sites, and so I would just recommend doing that research before going all in on something that might, not necessarily improve site speed. I've also noticed that this isn't something that, people pay a lot of attention to, which is shocking to me.

[00:04:32] John: Somebody mentioned, Carlos mentioned ClickFunnels earlier, like ClickFunnels Site Suite is so. Horrible, like so abysmal It's a landing page company and it just makes you wonder like, how on earth did you, Leadpages isn't any better. just because this is important and it's an axiom, don't expect the creators of these products to have figured this out for you, like you need to advocate on your own behalf.

[00:04:52] John: it's so important too that smart shopping campaigns usually hover around the 56 cents, cost per click. That's where usually smart shopping campaigns, if we took an aggregate total of all of our campaigns right now that we're running so let's just say about 50 cents. Your site speed being slow can bring that up to a dollar. that's where it's, super important to understand that. and when 50 cents up to a dollar, it's like, yeah, that, stinks. But if you think about it, you cut your traffic in half or you double your traffic.

[00:05:13] John: Double your cost. Yeah. Right. Google makes you pay to play when. You're not following by their best practice. It's like, okay, so your landing page score is low which drove down your quality score. Now your quality score is low. We're gonna give you a lower position for it. Yeah, we want the higher position.

[00:05:26] John: All right. W, your C P C and you can get there. So Google penalizes you with ad spend. and cost for click, essentially, if you have a slow website. again, we're kind of harping on this, but just don't overlook it cause Well, no, it's important to harp on. I mean, listen to what John just said, y'all, you can double the cost of your traffic.

[00:05:41] John: With this one problem, this one issue, this one error. So it's really important that we spend some time here because this is an important thing to improve upon. And Shopify, if I know not everybody's on Shopify, but if you're on a Shopify theme, Shopify has a directory of Shopify developers that you can draw upon.

[00:05:55] John: And it's cool cause you can see reviews and work that they've done, et cetera. So, It might be worth if you're on Shopify going and finding somebody who's Shopify specific. And I always ask to see, cause everybody says they can do it when they're trying to earn the gig. I ask to see, show me the fastest site that you've built.

[00:06:06] John: And then they show it. And I'm like, all right, now show me the second fastest site that you've built and I wanna see at least three successful implementations before I'm confident that you're really gonna be able to pull this off. And don't ask for three on the front end because they'll go find three, ask them one at a time.

[00:06:19] John: Cause you kinda like, Rope 'em into being a little bit more honest than they might have been otherwise, and run those websites through pay speed insights. Yeah, that's exactly right. Limit the amount of products that are displayed on certain pages. I actually like longform pages because it can improve your time on site.

[00:06:33] John: There's ways to do this though, to where you have a longform page that loads as the user tries to scroll instead of somebody landing right on and having to sit there while all a hundred thousand products load. One note, don't aim for a hundred out of a hundred, you're not gonna get it.

[00:06:45] John: I don't think I've ever seen an e-commerce site, especially on mobile. Has anybody had it? Anybody? Google can't. Google can't. Yeah, exactly right. Google can't get a hundred. We're not gonna get a hundred. I've seen it in the nineties. I'm thinking of the lighting company. Remember them? Mm-hmm. I've seen it in the nineties. I think if you were like in an 80 out of a hundred, that would be. They're in the nineties, but those are the type of companies that's like, we have 300 grand ad spend this month. What can you do? So, right. Just, you know. Yeah. I always say it's like that funny card, like the drag card that they're like doing a quarter mile in four seconds, like how to get down down to three.

[00:07:15] John: It's like we're gonna need like a million dollars. Yeah. So. Well, and that's a really good point too. Every point that you improve past a certain point that it's incremental returns for costs that are so substantial, it's probably not worth it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Cool.

[00:07:27] John: .