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Al Carmona

How to measure website performance

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Video Transcript:

Hey, this is Al from Useractiv, and today I want to talk about website performance. First of all, why website performance is important, what you can do to check your website performance and how to see what the issues are coming up on the performance reports and how to start fixing them. So why is website performance in porn… First of all, it goes back to usability, your users, the people that visit your website, they don’t really… And I don’t think… Anybody has the patience to wait 30 seconds for a website to load. It’s not 1995 anymore, everybody’s got high-speed internet, so they’re expecting the page to load quickly, so performance is an issue because if somebody is waiting for a long time, they’re going to lose patience and they’re going to hit the back button or they’re going to go somewhere else. So it turns out that people usually on average, are willing to wait up to eight seconds, I’d say it’s probably a lot less than that, somewhere between three to four seconds, if you don’t see something happening on the web page and a fair amount of information coming up, then you probably think it’s broken and you hit the back button and you go somewhere else.

As far as why it’s important to have a fast loading website, also because of SEO and for Google search engine optimization purposes, because Google’s actual customers, besides being the people that they sell ads to, are the people that use their search engine, and they don’t want to have a bad user experience for the people that use their search engine. So imagine you’re searching for a particular phrase and you see this search engine results page, and you click on a link, but that page doesn’t perform well.

Google checks all the pages that they link out to and if they are performing well and if they don’t load it quickly, then they get dropped as far as the ranking, so you want to make sure if you want to keep those rankings for your website and those keyword rankings that your page is performing well.

Let’s get into how to go ahead and check what your website performance is, there are several tools and the three most common that are Google PageSpeed Insights, HubSpot Website Grader, and GTMetrix, as far as being able to test how fast your page loads…

So let’s start off with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. So I’m going to use my website, useractiv.com to see how that comes up as far as a performance report, so I’m going to go ahead and analyze that and… While that’s going, because it takes a little bit of time. I’m going to get HubSpot going as well, and I’ll get GTMetrix going as well. That’s somewhere between 30 seconds to a minute for this scan to run and for you to get your performance report. So let’s give it a little bit of time.

So as you could see here in Google’s PageSpeed insights, this is on the mobile tab. Well, it’s important that you check for mobile and for desktop. So I’m going to do for desktop just today, and it’s giving me an idea as far as performance on a desktop, so everything looks good, everything is green and looks like the page is coming up quickly, and it’s given me some suggestions or opportunities, and it’s telling me to properly optimize images.

This is probably one of the best things that you could do to improve your page speed performance. A lot of the times when you get images from your designer or your designer creates images for your website, they don’t take into account how big the image files are. Everything that’s on a web page has to be pulled in from different files on the website and that all has to be loaded and downloaded, and if you have these oversized images as far as files, it’s going to blost your website and it’s going to make it bigger than it has to be, so that’s one of the quickest fixes, is to go ahead and optimize your images, make them as small as possible, but still high quality.

You have to gauge it and see if it’s worth doing because right now it’s telling me to .72 seconds. I don’t think that there’s much I can do there. I can maybe trim a quarter of a second at most, or maybe some file size, but that’s one of the decisions that you have to make, is it worth doing and what’s going to create the most amount or rewards? So let’s take a look at HubSpot. HubSpot is giving me in 83, which is okay. And some of the issues that I’m seeing here are performance and security, so if I go into the performance section, a tone, there’s room for improvement as far as page requests, and it’s telling me the more HTTP request your website makes, the slower it becomes.

Try to reduce the number of files your site loads, and by files, they mean JavaScript files, CSS files, image files. Your browser has to call all these for your page to render correctly, JavaScript for functionality or interactivity, CSS for the way your page looks or style. The best way to do this is to go ahead and combine some of those into one file if you have many files and also to minimize of these files and by minimizing, they mean…

When you have a website or you have code for a website like CSS, there are a bunch of spaces, and all this does by minimizing is it compresses it, so there are no spaces and you save some amount of space as far as file size, but not a whole ton, unless you have a lot of different files that you’re loading in.

So sets giving me the suggestion for minimizing because I’m not using it, sometimes it’s good to use it on… As I said, how many files are you using? And then let’s go into the security, and the biggest issue here is going to be HTTPS, and I could tell you that probably the biggest issue there is going to be that maybe I’m not linking to some of these images using HTTPS because when you call them… You call the image URL and then you want to have HTTPS for all your calls, so in every file that it’s calling in image files, a JavaScript file, that data is being encrypted as it’s being called and delivered to your browser and your computer because that’s what you really want to keep safe. Okay, so the next one that we want to go into is GTMetrix.

It’s kind of giving me an error here, let’s try it again, and see if this works. And you could see that the test server location is in Vancouver, Florida…

I’m sorry, Vancouver, Canada. So that’s not so close to where I’m at in Florida, so the closer this testing server is to where you actually are, where your ISP internet service provider is, the faster you’re going to be able to check that, so that doesn’t appear to be working on my site for the moment… So I’m going to check out another website to see how that does, so you could take a look at the kind of metrics that they come up with on their report.

So again, it’s testing from a server location from Vancouver, Canada, that’s bringing up the page image and generating a report, and it’s giving this web page a 99% performance. So the summary is giving some suggestions here where you might be able to save say 150K and let’s look at performance. First content full paint, 262 milliseconds being indexed in 681 milliseconds. And if you hover over some of these question marks, it’ll give you more of an explanation as to what this means and what a good benchmark is, so you hear it saying that .9 seconds or less. We’re way below that. We’re a .26 speed index. We’re looking good.

The largest content paint, that’s the biggest part of the content and how long that takes to load, it takes less than a second, as long as you get the big things out of the way quickly, everything else should load up pretty fast. Let’s compare that to page speed insights, it’s telling me my first content paint is .07. The largest content paint is one second. So let’s compare that.

There’s a difference here. So why am I highlighting the difference between the two and is that it’s not an exact science, it’s more or less an estimation because again, you’re using different servers, this is using Vancouver. Google might be using other servers in California or somewhere closer, if you’re testing and this is the same thing when you’re visiting a website, because that website might be visited, might be hosted on a server somewhere in Denver, and there are different web hosts all over the place.

So you’re trying to access computers and are all over the world, and your load time is going to be different depending on what type of information you’re loading, how much and where that information is stored on the web server somewhere, so that’s why it’s important to use these three different services, so that you could get a good gauge and kind of average things out, and what I suggest is to look at whatever is a red flag that they show, and as long as all three of them show good performance numbers, depending on the location of the servers, then you should be good.

So I hope that helped. I hope that you’re able to now go out there and optimize your website or take a look at some of the metrics using some of these websites, I’ll put the links to those inside of the description. And if you like this video, please hit the Like button and subscribe for more videos that can help you improve your website so you could gender more, generate more leads and more sales for your business. If you need help with optimizing your website and proving your metrics, or revamping your website with better copy, better graphics or a complete website refresh, please reach out to us at Useractiv, that’s what we do all the time, we’re a website design and development company and an optimization company, we’re all about making great websites that serve your customers and help your business grow. Thanks!

4 Tips: How to choose a web design agency

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Hey, this is Al Carmona with Useractiv. And in today’s video, I want to talk about how to choose the right web designer for your business.

Check out their portfolio

So the first thing that people look at when they’re looking around for web designer is they’re probably looking at portfolios. They’re looking at the designs that people have done, whether it’s the mockup or whether it’s a live site, and seeing what kind of work an agency has done and the quality of their work.

Once they kind of see the quality of the work of several agencies, then it’s good to go ahead and drill down a little bit further.

These are more of the things that you should be looking for when choosing the right web designer for your business beyond the portfolio…

Do they ask the right questions?

When you have that first meeting with your prospective web design company, you want to listen and see if they’re asking the right questions, the right questions about your business, about your customers, about the way you work, about your goals, about what it is that you want to accomplish with your website, and what’s wrong with your website. Now, what can you do to fix it? What are your key performance indicators that you’d like to increase or better?

And the types of questions that they ask are going to be very indicative of the type of company they are and what their approach is leading on to that aspect of a web company asking the right questions.

Are they focused on your users’ experience?

And the next question that they should be asking or that you should be asking of them is… what about the users? What about your users, your customers, because in reality, your website design company, or your website design agency’s customer is not you, it’s your customers. They’re trying to appeal to them. They’re trying to have a better user face interface for your customers, so they could find what they’re looking for. And they’re able to accomplish tasks, be it, find out more information, schedule a consultation, or making a purchase easier.

So a web design company that thinks about the user first that asks questions about your user and what your user can do, or how they can benefit from your website and how that I, that can be improved by some of the things that you’re going to be going ahead and working on when you’re redesigning the website.

What’s their process?

The next thing that you probably want to ask or that you want to inquire about of your new web design company is what their process is. How do they manage the web design process and how do they communicate every step of that process, make sure that they’re very clear in their process.

How long it takes to research, how long it takes to do this design, what the back and forth is on the revisions of the design and the wireframing and the architecture of the website. Communication is going to be very important. And you’re going to need that in order to get all the right information that you’re going to go ahead and put on the website.

Recap

To recap, those are some of the most important things to consider:

Check out their portfolio

When you’re interviewing the companies, make sure that they’re asking the right questions and listening to your goals.

That their user-centric

Make sure they’re focused on the user experience, your user, and your customer.

Their process

How long do things take, what are the phases of web design and how do they communicate along the way?

Making sure that everybody’s on board, that they’re on the same page, and that you’re moving towards that end goal of launching that new website. That new and improved website that’s going to make your business a whole lot better, and that’s going to be better for your customers.

So I hope that helps please subscribe to more tips on how to improve your website, better your website marketing, generate more, leads, more traffic, and get more sales. Thanks.

What’s the difference between web design and web development?

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Video Transcript:

Hey, it’s Al from Useractiv. And today I kind of want to go over the differences between web design and web development. So in a nutshell, web design is more or less the graphics that are designed usually by somebody who is a specialist in creating mockups and designs. But not necessarily somebody who is a coder and then web development is when you actually do the coding of the website. So just to give you an example, and I’m going to break the web design part of it up into two different types of sections, because probably the best process of creating a website involves, you know, the research phase the wireframing phase, the web design phase, and the web development phase.

So we’ll probably get into the research phase and maybe the coding aspect in other videos. But I wanted to give you an overview of what the design and web development, what are the main differences between the two. So after you’re done with the research phase where you’ve looked into what your target market is who your users are, what they’re looking for, how that relates to your product, and so forth you start to create something called a wireframe, and a wireframe is when you start to get elements that you want to have on the webpage, and you start to lay them out in a very simple way, using boxes and text.

So as you can see on this page by the way, this is Figma, which is what I use for pretty much all my wireframing and my web design mockups. So, it’s a great program. I recommend it highly. I think everybody should use it. It’s free to use you know, there are different tiers for Figma, but it allows you to quickly create these wireframes. So as you can see, this is very simple. This is just to illustrate to a client and to work out between the client and yourself on my end, at least, as a web developer, what goes where, so here, we’re looking at a blog wireframe. So the client requested, you know, the redesign of the blog and they had some ideas. So rather than designing everything and then saying, okay, I wanna move this here and move this. There you start off with a wire frame. So as you can see, you got the logo here, you’ve got some links, you’ve got a call to action at the top. And this is the hero section with you know, the headline, a static image here. And since this is the home of the blog, it’s going to have a listing of a bunch of different blogs based on a category. So here, you’ve got a dropdown for categories you could search, and then you start to see all the blog posts here, or at least snippets of them with, you know, a featured image and category title excerpt, and then call to action to read more. And this goes on and on. They could go ahead and load more. And then the simple footer is here. So this is kind of what we ended up with with the blog homepage. We moved a few things around, and this is where we ended up. So as you can see, this is much easier to grab and move around. Then if we were to fully skinned this lets you get an idea of the space and the content and how that gets laid out on the page. And it makes it much easier. Once you have this part of the design process approved to go in and design this fully into a mock-up.

And now if I move over here, you could see that this is the wireframe for the single page or a single post. As you could see here, we have a featured image. So obviously if somebody clicks on here, they go to this template here for the featured post or for an individual post, you could see a featured image, the title, the author, the text, and how this will be laid out. So this was also approved. So it, the wireframe just makes it easier for you to go ahead and start creating a design. It lets the client know that you want to position things in a certain place. All the content that they want to have is going to be in there and it’s going to be easily accessible for users that go onto the website. So once you have that, you kind of move on to the design part of it. So just to separate it out to give you an idea, this is what a full-fledged design look like, looks like. So this is for a homepage on a different site, and you could see all the graphics are already in here. All the text, everything has been kind of designed here.

And this is what we call a full mock-up of a webpage. And this is what the web is, and this is also in Figma. So this is what the webpage looks like live. Once this has been launched on the web. Now, if we take a look at the code for this if I right-click anywhere on here and have view source, you could do this for any webpage. If you go ahead and do that, it’ll show you the code. And this is really what the web development part is. The coding of the website is what goes, where you could see it’s got all this code is needed for the webpage to be able to be viewed this way for you to be able to scroll for there, to be interactivity for there to be links. This is what the web browsers view, what they see. They see this code and they translate this code into this, the markup or the full website page that all your users view. So again, I mean, I’ll get into how to create the code for this based on the design here. And this is what they call custom development, taking a graphic, and then turning it into code strictly from that graphic.

So I hope you enjoyed this video, please let me know if you have any questions and put those in the comments, please subscribe. And like this video, if you want me to continue to create quality content that helps you with your website design and marketing your website. Thanks.

HubSpot CMS Pricing

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As a Marketing Professional, one of your primary responsibilities is to ensure that your marketing budget is being used in the most efficient way possible. You need to find a balance between getting the most bang for your buck and ensuring that you have the tools and resources necessary to meet your company’s marketing goals.

When it comes to website development and content management, there are a lot of options on the market. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the major benefits of the Hubspot CMS Hub and pricing options.

Benefits: HubSpot CMS Hub is great if you’re using HubSpot CRM

CRM integration

HubSpot’s CMS Hub offers a number of benefits for businesses, including CRM integration and a user-friendly editor. The integration with HubSpot’s CRM allows businesses to keep track of their customer data in one centralized location, making it easier to manage and nurture leads.

User-friendly editor

The editor is designed to be simple and intuitive, which makes creating and managing content a breeze. It also features drag-and-drop functionality and live preview, so businesses can see how their content will look before it goes live. 

Plug-ins and extensions

In addition, the CMS offers a range of plugins and extensions that can further improve the experience. Overall, HubSpot’s CMS Hub is an excellent option for businesses looking for an easy way to manage their website content.

Hubspot offers three different pricing tiers for their CMS: starter, professional, and enterprise.

Starter
The starter package starts at $23 per month (billed annually) and gives you access to the basic features of the CMS.

Professional
The professional package starts at $360 per month (billed annually) and gives you access to all of the features of the CMS.

Enterprise
The enterprise package starts at $1200 per month (billed annually) and gives you access to all of the features of the CMS plus customizations and support from HubSpot’s team of experts.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Hubspot CMS Hub offers a lot of features for a very competitive price when compared to other popular options on the market. However, price should not be the only factor considered when choosing a website development platform. Be sure to also consider things like features, ease of use, customer support, etc. before making your final decision. Get more HubSpot CMS Hub pricing details.

How Content Marketing is Changing The Game

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The playing field for marketing is constantly changing. As new technologies and platforms arise, businesses have to scramble to keep up.

One of the latest changes in the marketing landscape is the rise of content marketing. Content marketing is a way of reaching out to customers through various forms of content, such as articles, blog posts, videos, and social media posts.

Unlike traditional advertising methods, content marketing focuses on providing valuable information to customers instead of simply trying to sell them something. As a result, customers are more likely to trust businesses that use content marketing and are more likely to buy from them.

Why Content Marketing is so Important?

As we all know, “content is king”. High-quality and compelling content can help you stand out from the rest and attract more customers. In today’s competitive market, it is more important than ever to create interesting and engaging content that can reach your target audience.

Here are some ways that content marketing is changing the game:

1. More Focus on Quality Over Quantity

In the past, businesses would focus on churning out as much content as possible in order to rank higher in search engines and get more traffic. However, things have changed now and businesses are starting to realize that quality is more important than quantity.

This is why we are seeing a shift towards producing fewer but more high-quality pieces of content. This not only helps to improve your ranking in search engines but also helps to build trust and credibility with your audience.

2. Greater Emphasis on Audience Engagement

Another way that content marketing is changing is the greater emphasis that is being placed on audience engagement. In the past, businesses would create content and then just hope that people would read it and be interested in it.

Nowadays, however, businesses are much more focused on creating content that will actually engage and interest their target audience. They are using various formats such as infographics, and video to make their content more engaging.

3. Increased Use of Data and Analytics

Another change that we are seeing in content marketing is the increased use of data and analytics. Businesses are using data to track various metrics, such as how many people are reading their articles, how long they are spending on each page, and what keywords they are using to find their content.

This information is then used to improve the quality of their content and make it more relevant to their target audience.

4. Greater Focus on Creating Evergreen Content

Finally, businesses are starting to realize the importance of creating evergreen content. This is content that will remain relevant and useful for a long time, regardless of when it was first published.

Creating evergreen content can help you to attract more traffic and leads over time, as people will continue to find and read your articles even months or years after you first published them.

As you can see, content marketing is definitely changing the game. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, then you need to make sure that you are producing high-quality, engaging, and evergreen content.

What are some of the best practices of content marketing?

There’s no one answer to this question since content marketing is always evolving and changing as new platforms and technologies emerge. Here are some best practices that have emerged in recent years:

1- Tell your story

One of the best ways to do that is by using storytelling. Storytelling is a great way to connect with your audience on an emotional level, and it can be used to relay your brand’s story, highlight your products or services, or even share customer stories.

2- Use visuals

Another important element of engaging content is visuals. Visuals are a great way to break up text-heavy content and capture attention. They can also help you deliver your message more efficiently.

3- Keep Your Content Relevant

Regularly update your content with new information, and test different formats and strategies to see what works best. It also means paying attention to the latest trends and changes in your industry, so you can be sure your content is addressing the most current issues and concerns. By staying on top of things, you’ll ensure that your content continues to be a valuable resource for your audience.

4- Promote Your Content

If you have great content, you need to promote it to get the most out of it. There are a number of ways to do this, and it varies depending on what type of content you have.

Here are a few tips for promoting your content:

Share it on social media. This is the obvious first step, and probably the most important. Make sure to post it on all of your social media channels, and use relevant hashtags to help it reach a wider audience.

Email it to your subscribers. If you have a mailing list, email your subscribers about your new content and encourage them to check it out.

Reach out to bloggers and other influencers. If you know any bloggers or other influencers who might be interested in your content, reach out to them and see if they want to write about it or share it with their followers.

5- Analyze and Measure Your Results

Content marketing is not a one-time effort. You need to constantly analyze and measure your results so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

6- Be Patient

Content marketing takes time to produce results. Don’t expect overnight success. Instead, focus on creating high-quality content that will slowly build your audience over time.

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers. It’s one of the most effective ways to market your business because it helps you build trust and credibility with your target audience.

In this article, we’ve shared some tips for creating successful content marketing campaigns that will help you achieve your business goals. What are you waiting for? Start creating more great content today!