It’s easy for people to say you can boost performance with better hosting, or using a caching program — and sure, that’s true to some extent. But according to Patrick Garman, these changes won’t make the biggest impact…and he should know. He’s in the business of building and optimizing online stores. Instead, you should focus on simplicity
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Hello, welcome to next level ops, a podcast that explores tools, tips, and techniques for hosting and managing websites presented by Plesk. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And today our guest is Patrick. And we're talking all about best practices to speed up your e-commerce site. I'm really excited to get into that, but before we do a quick reminder, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, to get the latest episodes as they come out.
[00:00:31] You can do that over@plus.com. All right. So let's get on with the show and bring in our guest. Patrick, how are you today? I am great. Is a favorite topic. Always want to talk about it, how store owners and site developers can make their WooCommerce sites better easily. There's people think I have a secret sauce for it, but I'm going to give you all the secret tray here.
[00:00:59] That is fantastic. That's what I'm looking forward to. We've known each other for a few years. I'm excited to, I was when Plesk, uh, when we decided to make season two focus on e-commerce. Uh, name immediately came to mind. So, uh, let's get right into it. You are the CEO of mind size, which is an, an e-commerce agency, right?
[00:01:22] An agency that specializes in e-commerce or digital agency we're known for e-commerce built kind of off the back of the brand. I had built before mindset has existed. Basically we can build any e-commerce site. You want scale it, however you want. Our experience is in selling hundreds of millions of dollars and doing it efficiently, scalable performance and all the buzz words.
[00:01:49] Yeah. And, and you've worked on some huge sites. Right. Are you allowed to like mention any of those clients here on the podcast? I can't name names, but. You've heard of them. Uh, most people have and Dell we've people come to me and say, Patrick, I'm working on my WooCommerce site. We're stealing. We're a growing business.
[00:02:11] We're at a point where we think we're not sure if we'll commerce can handle it. We're doing like a million dollars a year. And I sit there and think back to the WooCommerce sets I've worked on where we've done like $5 million weekend with an average order of 30 bucks. Wow. So they do in a year, we've done in a single day and it's definitely not the platform.
[00:02:31] That's the fault. Yeah. And I mean, and you, you straight up mentioned woo commerce here, right? This is a show that mostly focuses on WordPress, WooCommerce and WordPress related tools. Uh, so I'm really excited to get into that. And, and you are, um, just to set the stage a little bit here you are the CEO, but you're also, uh, an active developer in your company, right?
[00:02:54] Yes. Yeah. I'm actively involved with commerce community and the projects we do. The difference between us and other agencies generally is the architecture. So when I go into a project, I act as kind of the lead architect of what that project is. I define how we do it and then developers actually do the work.
[00:03:16] Nice. That's yeah, that's fantastic. Right? Because that is getting all of that stuff squared away early on is important. And maybe before we get into the base, Um, you, you mentioned that the platform isn't necessarily the thing, that's not performance, right. And you and I have seen this over and over again.
[00:03:38] Uh, people are saying WordPress WordPress is slow because it's WordPress WooCommerce. It's slow because it's WooCommerce. Uh, but that's not really the case. How, how. Is the architecture when it comes to a performance e-commerce site? Well, everything I do in speaking of his clients, I had to speak in analogies a lot because he can take a really complex information to make it easy to understand by any car you want.
[00:04:04] And then don't take care of it for 10 years. That's same as your website. If you don't take care of it, you don't properly maintain it. That's step one, at least taking care of it, maintaining it. If you're not doing that, your car is going to fail, your website's also going to fail. So it's all dependent on how you build it, how you buy it, how you run it.
[00:04:26] And if you do those things poorly, you're probably gonna run into issues. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, uh, that's a really great point. And so, um, One of the reasons that we're focusing on, uh, e-commerce here in season two of next level ops is because of the global pandemic. Um, a lot of people, uh, have realized that they need to get online, that they need to, uh, better.
[00:04:52] Um, they need to have a better digital presence. Uh, as, as we've been calling it throughout the season, um, in your own client work, have you seen. Uh, an influx of, of new clients who are like, we don't have a website and we need one, or we don't have a shopping cart and we need one, or has it been more current clients who are like, Hey, the pandemic has shown us that our website and our experience, our digital presence is not good.
[00:05:23] It's been a mix. And it's kind of been even for us, at least. So our existing clients, it was great because from an architecture point of view, we already architected our work. To succeed. They saw their sales, essentially double and triple overnight. And as I just worked, we didn't have to do work. We then focused on how to better serve their customers.
[00:05:45] But then we had other clients who COVID hit, they had to shut down their stores limit capacity, and that encouraged their sales. So how do we build a experience online that matches what we do in our stores. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. And that, and again, that's, um, kind of hearkening back to early on in this season.
[00:06:04] Uh, we talked about exactly that, right. Um, taking a real life experience and turning it into a digital experience as best that we can. Right. It's not just about being able to order bagels. I think we said in an early episode, it's. Um, ordering the big goal that you want and being able to pick it up when you want and not having to like, interact with the person.
[00:06:29] Um, yeah, hopefully at that same time, not have the brick and mortar people and the digital people fighting for sales because then both lose. If they collaboratively work together, then they will both succeed and they can bounce off each other. Digital we'll bring people in and then people in the brick and mortar store can help upsell or better serve their customers too.
[00:06:51] Yeah. That's, that's really fantastic actually, you know, it's interesting. Cause I just recently had an experience with one of these, uh, gig economy, uh, delivery services. I won't name names. Um, yeah, so you know who I'm talking about, but I placed an order. Uh, they gave me an estimated time. And then about 40 minutes later, the order was canceled because the store was closed.
[00:07:17] And I'm like, if you knew the estimated time, why would you even let me place the order in the first place? Right? Cause now it's like, whatever, eight 30 at night, 45 minutes of other places have closed. I was expecting dinner and now I don't have it. Um, which is like maybe a first world problem, but it's also a huge hole.
[00:07:38] In the digital experience, right. If I were to walk into a store, the owner would either say we're closing or we're closing, but I can make you a sandwich real quick. Uh, but on this website, on this app, it was all right. Yeah. We're going to make your sandwich and then 45 minutes later. Nevermind. Yeah.
[00:07:57] That's uh, unfortunately a lot of those gaps were found when COVID really blew up. Yeah. The grocery space and all these other stores, they were struggling to get online and they found ways to get online quick but quick. Isn't always good. Right? Sure. We could. But is the sales week out worth the issues we caused while sewing, because some of those customers may never come back.
[00:08:26] You're probably not going to go back to where you bought that sandwich from. Yeah, I'm definitely not going to go back to the app. Like I full on uninstalled, it canceled my premium pass and everything. Um, I mean, not just from that experience, but this is not the joke complaints about gig economy, app power.
[00:08:46] Um, but I think it's important to set the stage, right, because we're going to be talking about the performance of a website, uh, but it is important. And I would encourage listeners to go back and listen to early episodes about crafting the digital experience because performance is part of it. But understanding how your customers interact with your work.
[00:09:08] Is also part of it. So once, once you understand the process and you start implementing it, um, you do want a performance website. So, uh, Patrick let's really get into the, uh, the meat and potatoes of this episode. And let's start with the store owner, right? So we'll break this episode, the rest of this episode, down into the story.
[00:09:28] And the developer, what are some things the store owner can do, uh, to, uh, speed up their e-commerce website? What are some things that they should be thinking about? So simplicity is name of the game. If you build an application, any application e-commerce or otherwise, and you think from the beginning, all the features you want, I'm going to cram all these things in all these different bells and whistles.
[00:09:57] You probably only need a third of them, of what it takes to actually do what you're trying to do. If you're trying to sell online, you need a product, an add to cart button, a cart, and checkout don't even really need the, my account page, but to real nice to have you don't need complex faceting and search to launch.
[00:10:17] You don't need a facet with 50 options. Customers are never going to use those. Start simple for one. And that's going to do two things. One, your customers are not going to get confused by the number of options and bells and whistles and flashing lights and everything going off in front of them. And two, it's going to be cheaper to build and faster.
[00:10:41] So your customers have a streamlined experience. Streamlined is slick. It's painless. That's going to increase conversions simplicity then also is going to make your build cheaper and the website will have less bloat it'll run faster. So from that, so you've got the simple site. Now, the next thing you're probably going to lead into asking me what the next one is.
[00:11:06] I'll just dive right into it. Install, query, monitor. This is also going to bridge into the development. But query monitor sounds complex. Sounds like something a developer would install, even if you don't know what a query is or a monitor is install, query, monitor. It's a free plugin. It's on wordpress.org and just look for colors.
[00:11:30] It's gonna, when you're logged in as an admin, it's going to be at the admin bar top center of your page. If, when you load your homepage, it's orange or red or anything other than the color of your admin bar, something's wrong. Find a developer. Gotcha. I love, I love that. And, um, so, uh, let me just ask here, right?
[00:11:50] It's okay to have query monitor on a production site. There's definitely a debate there. And if you want to follow. Strict security and performance and all these other guidelines that exist. Maybe remove it, turn it off when you're not using it. There's all these other things you can do. I've got production sites that have, and I've got production sites that don't, it's kind of a choose your own adventure there.
[00:12:19] Um, I have never had a problem with it in production, but on the critical production sites, I do, you know, Caution myself, keep it on our staging sites. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, um, it, you could probably use it as like a fact finding mission, right? Like if, if, uh, I know I've used it on my own sites, for some reason it was taking one of my websites, like 10 seconds to load.
[00:12:45] Um, and I installed query monitor, and I found that, uh, one of the plugins actually like, uh, an actual good plugin. So I don't know what happened. Uh, that I updated was causing some, some crazy thing to hang. And so I disabled it until I got it all squared away, but query monitor helped me figure that out.
[00:13:03] And then now I kind of have it disabled until I think I need to use it again. Yeah. It's a handy tool to have in your back pocket. That's usable for store owners. It's usable for developers. I use it almost every day. On most sites I work on it's highly valuable.
[00:13:25] Great. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I'm, I'm a big fan of it too. It's very informative. And, uh, uh, like I said, it helped me find the issue. I was that I was struggling with very quickly. Um, now simplicity, I love that you said that, right? Cause it's, it's kind of the difference between, um, like going into a store with like neatly.
[00:13:45] Organized aisles and going into a store that's like just has like stuff everywhere. Like an antique shop comes to mind, I guess, where it's just like, yeah, rummage and you walk into that antique shop and they hand you a map. And that map lists every single shelf location and then say, good luck. That's what your site could turn into.
[00:14:07] And maybe if they organize their shells and maybe if that map only. The sections instead of every single shelf and location, that's the difference we're talking about. Your customer can now find what they want to go to. Now, maybe you're super into cast iron and you go to every single antique shop and you look for the cast iron and the map says here's where my cast iron is instead of this one specific model from this one specific manufacturers on this one specific shelf.
[00:14:34] And then you walk to the shelf after spending 15 minutes, you finally get there. Great. Thanks for all this direction. You don't even have it in stock. Yeah, absolutely. That's you know, it's funny that reminds me of, um, I love fountain pens and, uh, fountain pen websites have varying degrees of, of good user experience, but there's one in particular that I shop at a lot that if you search for a brand.
[00:15:05] It doesn't take you to like a product listing for the brand. It takes you to like reviews of products of that brand, which is extremely confusing because it's like, it'll list the same pen, like four times in a row. And I'm like, I don't know what I'm looking at. Um, so now I know, and sometimes it's a problem in WordPress too.
[00:15:25] Um, you just described that. I literally think back to the problem. We have one of our clients right now. In WordPress, you have search and then you have product search. And depending on which search form you use, you're either searching your site or you're searching your products. And if you search your site and you get end up with, why am I looking at blog posts about pens instead of products that are pen?
[00:15:48] Yeah. Um, so is, uh, so. Uh, we won't, I really want to ask you, I'll ask you later maybe, um, like if there's a good solution for that, if there's like a plug in that you'd recommend, but, um, when we're talking simplicity here, right? We want to, you said you don't need complex, fascinating or search and fascinating for those who don't know.
[00:16:08] That's like, if you search on Amazon, that's a classic one. It has different categories. And then you can like narrow down the products based on those things, right? Like price and color or brand or whatever. Yeah, fountain pens, you can search by pens and then you have fountain ballpoint and all these other kinds, and then you have the color of ink and then you have the thickness of the pan I'm sure.
[00:16:33] And the links of the pen eyes, all that fun stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Um, great. So, so we've got two things here for the, uh, For the basics, right? Simplicity is the name of the game install, query monitor. I do need to ask, right? This is, uh, this is a plus podcast here. Plus has tools that could be installed on any server.
[00:16:54] They also offer, uh, some amount of hosting through some of their offerings does, and we don't have to name names obviously, but does hosting matter, right? Like is, do I, can I get by on the $2, uh, a month shared hosting? Oh, should I go for something a little better? It's a yes and no answer. Um, hosting 90% of time.
[00:17:20] Yes, it does. Those things matter in my e-commerce site, I'm going to assume you have reasonable hosting and say probably not. If you have hosting that is sized for what you're trying to do, as long as the server is not there. You know, your friend's uncle's cousin who has a server in his closet, and he built your site for 50 bucks and hosted on his server in his closet office DSLs connection.
[00:17:50] That is not good. Um, 15 year old me feels called out right now. I am calling out all the 15 year old Joe's out there right now. Um, but if you have decent hosting, The it's usually a matter of I'm on host X and I'm going to move to host. Why? Because they're going to speed my site up twice as much. If you're seeing significant increases in speed between hosts, then it's just a flavor of the hosts that may or may not be impacted more by the pitfalls of your own site and your sites, the problem, not the host.
[00:18:26] Gotcha. So if you have good hosting, And your problems are disappearing because you switched to a different hosting. Then you should really look at your site because there are definitely problems with it. But if you have good hosts, good server, you're going to be good. That's really interesting. It's almost like a yeah.
[00:18:44] Of two V4 and this is, I'm not good at cars, but you used the car analogy before, right? So it's almost like you have like two very similar sedans and one, you change the oil on regularly. And so it runs better than the other. Let it turn into that sludge. And so you have engine problems, right? It's almost, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:19:02] So something like a hosting control panel say, plus can help you maintain those server. Awesome. Awesome. Uh, great. So there are a few tips there for all store owners. Now, a lot of developers do listen to this show, uh, and of course we should, um, in our remaining time we should dig into a little bit about what they can do, right?
[00:19:22] Because as a developer, I know I've been bitten by like some real time site stuff. Well, I've used varnish cache, but like I cashed the law, the first logged in user to hit the site. And so now everybody was logged in as JNS or whatever. Um, so what can, uh, you're laughing? Cause you've seen that problem before probably, uh, but, uh,
[00:19:45] um, a mutual friend, Brian Richards, who was on a previous episode of this. Uh, always says cash ruins everything around me, and that often resonates with me. Um, but I'm getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. What can developers do to help improve the performance of their clients? So I'm going to give two parts of my answer.
[00:20:09] Like I did last time. Then the first part I'll go into the second part, but the very first step is stop using cash to speed up your ribs. Nice cashing. Isn't going to make your site actually faster. It's going to look faster. Um, if you test the site with caching and that's how you know your site's running fast, because I enabled cask and look how fast the pages are.
[00:20:35] It loads fast when it's cash, but then anytime you do anything dynamic or login or add to cart, you check out, then it starts failing. So. Test without caching, make the site itself fast and then add caching on top to actually handle the traffic loop. Step two. Now that you've stopped testing with caching install, query, monitor that's for the developers to, um, once you have query monitor is sure the store owners can look for pretty colors and see something drawing as a developer.
[00:21:07] You can look and see, okay, I'm on my homepage. Why did it take 450 queries to generate the page instead of the, less than 80 that I wanted to be, uh, look for numbers and make the numbers lower. You don't always have to understand what the numbers mean. Just look for numbers and make them lower. I love that.
[00:21:26] Uh, because you're right, right. If we're dealing with a mostly static website, right. Um, a blog like cash is great for that, right. You're probably not updating every blog post every minute of every day. Um, But with, with membership sites or shopping carts, where people are hitting dynamic websites and you don't want a shopping cart cashed in the way that we're talking about it, because everybody's going to have the same shopping cart or whatever.
[00:21:53] Um, it's, it's not that helpful, right? Uh, there are certain experiences on your website that can't be cashed, uh, or at least can't be cashed in the channel. If you start thinking down that path of, you know, what can I cash? What can I make faster? You start getting into the scary area of people doing it wrong.
[00:22:13] Uh, there was a site we worked on a couple of years ago, so cash is great, right? The object cash on WordPress. I want to put everything in that. So why not build a custom cart and then store that in the object cash except. What they did was they took every single customer's cart and stored it in one single cash entry as one big array.
[00:22:39] So if you can imagine what happens now, I get too many people on my site. I all started clicking at the card. At one time, the service starts getting all these requests at one time. Now, whose card is going to win the race to taking that array, modifying it, shoving it back in the cash. That's when you start thinking.
[00:22:59] Slow down. Don't shove everything in cash cash. Isn't going to solve it. Or as Fran Richard says, it's going to ruin everything around you. Yeah. That led to an actual debate between us and the stores developer of no, it's not the problem. It is not a race condition. And then no matter how much proof we showed.
[00:23:18] Yeah. Wow. That's wild. Uh, this one was the exact thing I was about to say. So I'm glad you said it. Um, so that's, that's so interesting and it's, it's a little bit weird to me that, um, I mean, I guess you get attached to the things you create, but if, if I feel like you're doing your client a little bit of disservice, if you're like this thing, this thing I thought of is definitely not the problem.
[00:23:45] Yeah. Something, we run into a fair bit. We very heavily lean into the we're trying to serve our customers. Customers needs. We, because we're largely e-commerce, we're trying to make the customer's experience better. Not for the client's benefit of just making more sales, but we actually legitimately want to make the customer's experience better because.
[00:24:14] We want that for ourselves, right? Yeah, absolutely. Um, so, so I love that, uh, stop using cash to speed up your website. Um, you should test without cash and like you said, kind of put cash on top of it, where it makes sense. Um, and then you install, monitor, look, look for numbers to make that and make them lower.
[00:24:35] Right. Is database hits. Is that the number one thing that kind of decreases performance on a, on an economy?
[00:24:47] Yes. Most of the work we do is enhancing the way we're working with the database. So we're going to keep on this car analogy now, or too deep into this to get out of it. We're going to now talk about bridges and cars. Your database and website are this bridge and the cars going across to our database queries.
[00:25:08] You know, some of them are real tiny. Prius's. Some of them are very large semi tractor trailer trucks, don't across it. You know, one maybe weighs a couple thousand pounds. Another has 80,000 pounds of cargo and its trailer. That semi is going to have a bigger impact on that bridge than a little tiny Prius.
[00:25:29] So it's not just have less queries and it's also have better queries. Things like post Metta can be really detrimental to a site if you don't know what you're doing with it. So you think I want a filter on my shop page and I want to be able to say, bring me all products back there between 20 and $40.
[00:25:55] Let's say that's a reasonable price for a pen that Joe wants to buy. Um, he puts that in. What's actually going to happen now is we're going to clear the database for Postmate of values of 20 to 40 problem with postman of values is it's generally not index data. It's not an efficient query. And now that one single search and filter that you're trying to get everyone to use because you put it at the very top of your sidebar is actually crashing your way.
[00:26:22] So you have two options there, one, you just remove the filter or two, you find a service like last search or Algolia that can then make that query faster by not hitting SQL. Yeah. So, so that's, I want to maybe just very lightly dig into the technical things that are happening, right. Because I'm what in grad school, like my favorite thing to do is like design databases.
[00:26:45] Like, it was just a weird nerdy thing, uh, in an already nerdy. Um, but like when you're searching for Postmates, if you just do that, right, you're basically querying every record in the, uh, is it the post options table, the post a table. And let's just start making up some data too. It's kind of a little bit close to actual WordPress site.
[00:27:10] You have posts and it will commerce site that's every order coupon, product variable, product variation within a variable. Everything is a post. Now, every order has between 50 and 150 and meadow on it, depending on the site, every product has call it between 30 and 75 Meadows on it. So now think about that extrapolation of data.
[00:27:36] I have a hundred thousand products. I have a million orders, a million times, 150 Postmates for orders. And then 50 times a hundred thousand posts. Now you have many hundreds of thousands or millions of postmasters, you run that any efficient price query. And it is going to go through every single post Metta and look for the ones that match your price.
[00:28:00] Right. Right. And then it was very slow. Yes. And then it needs to grab the post information. Right. So if there's a post medic table, The ID, right? Uh, yeah. And then grabbed the posts. Right. Um, so in a, in a situation like that, you know, I know that there are, again, I don't want to dig too technically into this, but you can kind of create these, um, I don't want to say cashed, but it's like these cash, like table queries, right?
[00:28:31] Like these fake tables that you kind of set up that aren't really tables, but they are, I usually use the name of helper tables, helper tables. Okay, cool. So like you create. These helper tables that combine the right information and allow you to write these more efficient queries, right? Yeah. A really good example of this actually is in WooCommerce.
[00:28:50] If you look at the data architecture in order as attached to a customer based on Postmates. So when you as a customer go to a WooCommerce sites, my orders screen. It is going to query for all posts that have a Postmate, a customer user equals your user ID, which is that same, any fish price query just for customer users.
[00:29:10] What we did, or what I did actually before mine says, was a company. As I wrote a quick little plugin that every time an order was touched, it would update a single table. That table had three columns. It was just a order ID, user ID, user email. So every time you touch. Right to that quick little info to the order or that helper table, it would only update it when there was natural update.
[00:29:35] Now, when you build that query, we also tied into the, uh, there's a whole bunch of filters and how you query posts. If you dive real deep into the WordPress core code. And we added when you're querying posts for a customer orders, add this table in with. And it would limit it only to records that had that customer's orders in it.
[00:29:59] You would still have this super inefficient query, but it would restrict the post IDs of the post medic table down to the posts that were actually relevant to the user, which made the query faster. That plugin took half a day to write wow. And lived in production on that same exact site that had $5 million in a weekend.
[00:30:18] Wow. And took our orders. From where we would literally turn it off during a flash sale. Because once we hit, it was like 15,000 users on the site, 15,000 users. We knew they were hitting the, my account page at a high enough rate that it would hurt our database. So we'd turn the page off. We no longer turn that page off anymore.
[00:30:40] Wow. I actually, when we turn it on, I was monitoring new Relic and I was looking for a slow traces on that page to see what was happening. I had a slow trace shop and it was like, this can't be right. There's no way someone took 14 seconds to load our, my account page. And I dove into it. And I realized, we found a bug forgot to add pagination.
[00:31:02] This customer was a reseller who had 278 orders and it took 14 seconds to load 278 orders on their page, uh, by getting all the order information and right. Every single item of every order. We fixed that we never saw another slow trace again from my account page. Wow. That's incredible. And, uh, that's great.
[00:31:22] I'm really glad we got to dive into that. Uh, I hope that the listeners, um, uh, got God's stuff out of that, cause I, I just think it's so interesting, but I think if we, if we kind of look at the main takeaways, we're coming up on time here and I do want to ask you about kind of many pitfalls. Um, if you're a store, whether you're a store owner or a developer query monitor is a thing that can help you.
[00:31:46] Right. If you're a store owner, yes. Look for colors. Um, because that's going to be, I assume red is bad. Um, that's going to be an indication of a, I don't, I can't, I shouldn't say I assume because I know, um, that's going to be an indication that something, there is a problem on the page that your view. Um, as a developer, you can dig deeper into that query monitor data.
[00:32:10] Look at the numbers. If you, if you see 400 database queries or whatever, and, um, figure out how to make those numbers lower. Uh, I think the query monitor is, sounds like an invaluable tool for every soar. Yeah. It doesn't matter your level of experience. He could know barely how to use a computer, but you know how to log into your e-commerce site and browse around.
[00:32:32] If you can install a plugin, you can use. If you're a developer, the more, you know, the more valuable it gets because it's not just, okay, now it's pretty colors and red. Yeah. Reyers. So it's bad. Uh, bright orange is HTTP calls the think and the yellow is slow queries and it gets real deep into all the colors.
[00:32:53] Um, but then as a developer, you can actually click on it and see what was slow, what broke. And then if you're more advanced developer, you can actually dive in to the actual call stack of all these errors and see the exact function file and line of code that's broken. And then go dive into that. Yeah, that's, that's fantastic.
[00:33:14] And so, as, as we wrap up here, um, are there any gotchas and maybe we, uh, any gotchas or any pitfalls, um, and maybe we could do like a couple for store owners and a couple for developers. Scott just still, and I've been preaching this for years now is people building complex sites that don't need it. So if you're installing too many features on your site, the simplest way to see whether you've fallen into this hole is take a list of your plugins and just go one by one.
[00:33:52] How does this plugin make it? How does no, this custom buy one, get one feature. Make me money are customers actually even using it? Do they even have it enabled? We had a client site last week. We literally just turned off a dozen plug-ins three quarters of them weren't even used. Wow. We doubled their page load time by turning off a bunch of stuff that didn't matter.
[00:34:18] Wow. That's and, and this is an important distinction, right? Because usually people will say like, oh, there's never be like 40 plugins on the site. It's not the number of plugins. It's the number of features that you are not using. That's bogging down your website. Yeah. It's a very. Uh, that's a deep hole to go down and it's not the number of plugins.
[00:34:41] It's not even so much how many are not being used. It's the quality of them. And that's kind of the second pitfall, just installing everything you see, right. If you install a plugin or you see a plugin, you're like, sure, I want that feature on my side. I'm going to ignore everything else. Patrick and Joe said about how I shouldn't install every feature on my site.
[00:35:03] I'm going to install it. You're either going to slow down your site by having it and it not working and maybe it'll work or maybe it'll become popular, but it will have been the wrong plugin to use. And now you have not just, okay. I got find a new plugin. You have to migrate from one plugin to another.
[00:35:20] Yeah. And now you just took what could be a $2,000 test to build a feature to a $15,000 tasks, because now you have the migration to deal with and that's generally more of a pain than actually building a feature. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so maybe that's another, another pitfall, right. Is, uh, don't just, don't just find whatever plugin, um, speak to whatever experts you trust.
[00:35:43] Whether that is, you know, some, I know, plus Caz, developer, advocates and customer advocates, or somebody, uh, like, like Patrick, whom you can hire, who knows what they're doing, um, and, and ask them, right. And if there's a plugin that they trust, um, then, then maybe go with it. And, and if it's just something you randomly found from doing a search.
[00:36:08] I'll tell you I've been doing this for like 17 years. And I, I got bit the other day by a plugin that seemed really simple and I just bought it and I tried it out and it didn't work. And I asked for a refund they're they're not giving me a refund. Cause they think I'm lying about their plugin networking.
[00:36:26] Uh, And so, you know, lesson, lesson learned, I knew I quickly, I did it on the staging site first. I didn't put it on my, yeah. Find someone to help you review the plugin. It could be someone you hire could be someone at a local WordPress meetup. Well, during COVID, there's less in-person meetups. There's a lot of virtual meetups, which actually increases the audiences number of people.
[00:36:54] Yep. Um, I've seen people even internationally hopping between meetups and just hanging out at different ones to meet new people and see what people are doing. Go into WooCommerce, slack, uh, tons of people in there and myself included, actively contribute and share information and answer questions. At least as much as we're able to keep in mind, we're all there for free.
[00:37:15] So. You get the occasional, I'm going to blast my question in 10 channels and deem a bunch of people who seem active and the dozen or so of us that are pretty active. We're onto you. We talk, right? Um, yeah. Well, this is, uh, well, so I did ask you for store owners and developers. Did you have any more pitfalls you wanted to mention before?
[00:37:39] I think that's the main ones. Cool. And coming back to, or going back to the very first thing I said, like, that's the secret sauce? Yeah. Keep it simple and lower your numbers. That's the most simplistic way to put it, but this doesn't. Someone who's been doing this as long as I have to be able to do that.
[00:37:58] If you see a hundred queries, try and get it lower, even if you think that number is okay, where it is, try and get it lower. Yeah. Yup, absolutely. Uh, and I mean, it just from like a customer choice standpoint, too, right? The simpler, the simpler your site is the less cognitive load you have on your customer.
[00:38:16] The fewer choices someone has, the more likely they are. To make a choice. So, um, yeah. And that's getting into the psychology of conversion and all that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Um, awesome. Well, Patrick, this has been great. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you? Uh, they can find me@pmgarminontwitterandatmyownwebsitepmgarment.me.
[00:38:40] I probably should post a blog post more than once every. One to three years, um, and also find mine size at mine, size my own Twitter and find size.com. Awesome. I will link that those and everything we talked about in the show notes, you can find them over@plesk.com. If you liked this episode, please consider subscribing giving us a rating review on apple podcast.
[00:39:10] Thanks. Uh, so Patrick, thanks so much for your time. I really. Thank you for having me here. Our pleasure. And, uh, thanks so much to you. The listener for listening to next level ops until next time. Remember to take it to the next level.