hello hello everybody this is so exciting I cannot believe we are here the moment has come day two of web growth Summit I am so happy that you are here and I cannot wait to bring on the most amazing guests I’ve ever met tell you what you guys I am best friends with these new people that I just met I love them and you’re going to love them too want to shout out from yesterday we had a fantastic day for day one of web growth Summit it was really great we were talking a lot about how to get traffic right so how to get the people that you want to your site to your store to whatever it is you’re selling right whatever you’re offering hi hey Anna and then we are going today we’re going to talk about how do you convert them right so you bring them to your front door how do you get them through the front door so that’s what we’re talking about we’re talking about website reliability we’re talking about uiux driven conversions we are doing the great stuff yes we have some comments in the post in the chat here KRON we had a great day yesterday it was a great day yesterday if you all missed those videos those recordings just go watch them right now especially that last one was just lifechanging so we’re here to provide amazingness for you today too thank goodness um we’ve got an amazing giveaway later on in the day we’ve got a gift card for y’all so the person who is is chatting the most right the person most the most outgoing maybe not but go ahead and like be very active because we do have a prize at the end of the day it’s a cloudways gift card 150 bucks hey that’s pretty great so do participate today we’re going to have lots of polls and surveys and questions um and we’re very very excited about this first up well let me just tell you before we go first up and let me let me scare everybody behind the back screen before we go you guys today we have three amazing sessions right we’re gonna have a panel and then we’re going to have an like an audit right which is really really excited live everybody here some some people submitted stuff and we’re going to look at their websites and we’re going to do this full amazing audit and then we’re going to go into another expert panel so this is just too thrilling and I’m going to introduce our first panel if you’re ready are you ready let’s see it in the chat I’m looking I’m looking are you ready oh yeah okay some people oh we already have a fight for I gift card I love it you guys this is serious business here we are here to honestly big picture we’re changing the world y’all I don’t I don’t know why you’re here what you’re doing what you’re thinking um cloudways you gurus we are here to change the world I’m super glad you’re here let’s introduce this panel we’ve got amazing guests for you yes there they are I’m so excited first of all vlat you’ll never meet somebody who’s more hilarious right so we’re gonna bring vlat up on the stage vlat is super super phenomenal um head of implementation there he is look at him he’s so wonderful I’m at omyt he’s GNA bring us some Brilliance I’m so excited you’re here we’ll do a little more intro in a minute we’ve got Nick in the house right Nick super excited you are here too senior director of engineering a digital ocean there we go there we go love the energy glad you are here thank you thank you we also have Mike coming on strong here um Mike is the founder of reaction digital and the president of Red Deer chamber so glad you’re here this is exciting and last but definitely not least last but not least we’ve got Weston coming in coming in he’s the founder of local and Co this panel today yay there he is excellent this panel today is about to wow you um and thrill you we’ve got a lot of excellent questions here we are talking about being traffic ready so if you all remember or if you weren’t here yesterday all I going just tell you we talked a lot about getting traffic to your site now we’re talking about what happens when they get there what if crazy things happen right so being traffic ready enhancing website scalability and reliability yall know that pain when your side is De down knock on wood I don’t even want to mention it so we’re not going to go there let’s go into some questions as we go into these fabulous questions I’m going to ask each of you and Mike we’re getting a lot of feedback from your mic just to let you know it might be a mic thing let’s do it we’re gonna ask some questions here um first one is um guys as we’re looking at websites and we’re looking at like our livelihood you all know we were joking earlier you guys we were joking earlier about like what if our power goes on that’s not a joke right so this idea of the fact that look at the serious nods yes that is not a joke um this this having this reliability is so important and we’ve heard all these um crazy stories about we’ve heard them and experienced them about websites crashing during big events right this dreaded like you’re sleeping n you go I just hope this this doesn’t happen right um and what are some of the usual culprits Behind These crashes and how can we Dodge the bullet ask you guys hop on in want to hear these thoughts and opinions oh boy do I have a story for you oh boy I mean it was back in the day for sure you know a lot of years ago and I was actually running a Blog with a couple of friends and we were doing affiliate marketing right so basically our money came from other people buying and we were preparing for Christmas because around that time a lots of people make gifts by gifts and we were making recommendations on our Tech blog and guess what happened we poured money into ads and we tried to enter our site and it wasn’t working and the usual C cpet in most of the situation is the database it it crashed basically couldn’t handle the load couldn’t handle the traffic so yay poured money in got nothing out of it well not nothing we still got something out of it but lesson learned yeah lesson learned and uh that’s that’s it’s always a a Bittersweet prize is the lesson learned yes um it is how about the rest of you what do you guys what do we do to prevent this yeah I think um vaty came with a good point there I mean we’ve seen so many situations where you know marketing efforts and affiliate marketing and everything we did especially all the talks on day one of how to drive the traffic a lot of focus gets put on there and just inadequate testing and resources are applied to how you going to scale when you actually get that traffic and what you going to do about that um I would say probably in my experience 80% of the time is is the resources so database being one of them but anything from CPU Ram um just anything on your hosting structure that has not been prepared um depending if you’re you know cloudway customer or digital ocean and you’re running WordPress High chance it’s also a codebase issue there you know from a blow to theme plugins and off the shelf items um again a lot of this stuff can be avoided through your your testing and your lad testing beforehand to identify any of those bottlenecks um but also preparing for that that Surge beforeand and that will you know just help get those conversions that you spent a lot of money trying to get but I think on both sides for for clients especially you know they look at um the marketing side that’s just one aspect of driving that traffic through but I say it’s quite similar to a physical retail store you know you can’t get a very small front faing store you know with a real small doorway and expect to get massive traffic in no matter how good your marketing is they can’t fit um and you should see your technical back end and your hosting scalability in the same way you know you need a bigger store so people can actually be able to walk in and you have enough shop assistant there to help them out and talk to them just apply that on the technical side I love that yeah I’ll build on what Wesson was saying there so I come from the agency World working with clients so I’ve experienced this many times over the past 16 or so years we’ve been doing this work and and yeah it’s always going to be a or generally always a resource issue is why you’re going to have some downtime when you’re getting hited hit with that flood of traffic I always sort of put this type of scenario or this type of situation into two different buckets so you have the unexpected flood of traffic so this is where you get mentioned on a blog or some sort of social post goes viral that maybe wasn’t even shared by you and you get this unexpected flood of traffic and then the second bucket is where you know this is coming so we’ve had clients that have been on Shark Tank or um they they know that there’s some big Media or event uh happening that they’re going to get a bunch of exposure at so when you have the opportunity to be proactive about this um I think you know it was already said but making sure your CMS and your plugins are up Tod dat uh ahead of time doing some load testing U making sure that you have a backup server or application ready to go that your caching is enabled and then you can actually pay for load testing services that will flood your website with um you know thousands of concurrent visitors so that you can see how it’s going to handle uh under those kinds of conditions and so if you have the opportunity to be proactive because you know you’re going to get that flood of traffic I think this scenario is a little bit easier to deal with but it’s really the unexpected flood of traffic that I think is the most stressful because you didn’t have the opportunity to be prepared and now you’re dealing with a a fire that you weren’t prepared for and a couple of the things that I like to um have in my toolbox when this happens so number one is is having good active uptime monitoring so there’s lots of services that you can do this from cloudways will send you notifications there’s thirdparty Services you can use we’ve got this piped right into our company slack so that we’ve got so that if any website experiences downtime the whole team’s going to see that right away so that’s probably the first step is just knowing about it and then right away you want to check your log files in and see why did go down what resource did we exhaust and is that something that we can just change as a setting on the server uh because if it’s just say like your amount of memory going to PHP you could be adjusting that but if you’re actually maxing out your CPU now you need to move to to a different type of server and then this is where having even though you weren’t prepared for that traffic having a bit of a of a checklist that you go down of what do we do when this happens so do you have an sop or process in place for moving to another server if you have to move to another server and there’s different IP addresses is there now going to be a propagation issue so we can probably start talking about how to address all these things individually but I think it’s it’s being proactive when you know the traffic is coming but then being proactive with some good mitigation plans and processes if it happens unexpectedly so I I guess what I’m saying is you always have the opportunity to be prepared for this and you know this is like you know I do I live in Southern California we have floods and we have fires actual and the prep is really important and that’s why everybody is actually here today watching and being a part of this panel and we do have a poll running right now on has your website ever crashed due to traffic so I just published that poll there would love for all the participants to fill that out um but this is it you know Mike everybody we are here to help that prep Nick any last thoughts on this I think everyone nailed it I mean like load testing is pretty big right like 10 20 years ago like everyone just ran like J meter like that’s all there was right but there’s a pretty good sophisticated set of tools out there that make it easy for folks to do exactly what Mike Wesson and vlah ran through right it’s about being proactive and being able to go will I be successful when I have I don’t know a thousand customers a minute or whatever your whatever your projected Target is of folks kind of coming through and converting and that stuff’s come a long way in the last decade or or so so fantastic so for these like small and medium businesses what are the must haves around like website scalability right what should we be looking for and hosting an infrastructure setup well I think the to go back on mic is obviously be prepared um and step one there is make sure you have backups um so on your hos inside backups and staging is going to get you a long way um because during your testing you’re going to need to try something different um obviously a staging site will help you a lot that you do your low testing on a staging rather than your your client’s live sit and know have a risk of messing anything up there um but also you will look for I mean the first step will do any sort of vertical scaling that is easy to upscale your server or your resources vertically obviously there’s way more complex ones which I think we can talk about a little bit later um but for me those are the sort of musty you know vertical scaling backups and staging without those I don’t think you can do anything that mic recommended um or you know you’re going to get yourself into some headaches working on a live sites um doing any of those methods of load testing and preparation the the other thing I’d mentioned Jen would be um um you know SMB right like it’s it’s putting food on table right like it’s not a hobbyist right and so I’d be looking at what concepts or capabilities are available to your platform when it comes to managed hosting right because you know it’s it’s an smb’s got a sizable amount of investment and probably some Revenue involved here where peace of mind and the ability to utilize experts in order to help you be successful um that’s pretty important so like when you first start out as first start out as a Founder you know you do it yourself right right but then once you start being successful you really need to kind of look and go what can I what can I exchange MoneyWise with my provider to have them provide me some sort of bestto breed capability for what it means to manage my hosting for me yeah yeah makes and to make it easy for you know I mean what Weston said about vertical scaling if it’s simple as making a selection and clicking a button that’s wonderful that that’s what I would be looking for you know hosting setup not having to talk with two different experts is finding them making sure that they are in sync and somehow tenders later oh now we’re better no not that yeah and this goes straight into this idea of like we’re talking about some costs now right and um you know what are some smart ways to scale your website without overspending right so we talked a little bit Nick about like what where you know it’s appropriate at this stage founder stage to do it all yourself d d d and so how do we do this without overspending um and how do we balance performance and budget throughout our growth right because you don’t want to overspend at the beginning when you have no you can’t put the cart before the horse like I’m saying this all day long to my clients like you go and you put the cart before the they they don’t push horses pull carts so we got we got to be smart about this so what have you guys learned around this idea of not overspending and and that balance yeah I think it goes a little bit to preparation but also to go back to what Nick said it is you know the bread and butter of a lot of these businesses so there has to be some investment there you again if we were talking about anything with a physical presence a real business you know that people can walk into you wouldn’t really cheap out too much on that so there has to be some sort of investment but when you come in like become a little bit smart with your budget is ensuring what you put on there is optimized from the get-go you know so that as your preparation you know don’t upload a 10 megabyte JPEG file as one of your main images so optimize images beforehand making sure your code base is optimized you um your your caching and test that before because a lot of the your payments will go into using that excessive resources as much of them can be static um and that’s Serve by CDN or from Cache will reduce that stress on the server and that will then reduce you know the amount of resources you actually need to run your website e-commerce store or you know application that you’re running yeah my goto my go-to tool is also caching most of the times and caching is at different various levels actually so there is not one type of caching but there’s a catch you there are there might be you might be going into some troubles I’m not going to go into technical part but it’s not uh necessarily A a Wonder tool you know I just activated it and poof my problem is gone forever and no you need to be to apply it carefully so maybe you know advise contact contact somebody to to to to give you some some good piece of advice and start implementing it good the right way one other thing to think about Jen would be um one of the things we talked about with one of the previous questions was around your ability to like resize right we talked about like the magic button or the easy button and so when you’re looking for a platform understanding how um how much you can kind of either scale up or scale down right if you think of how like hosting used to work a long time ago it was like very very bespoke right it was like and so there there’s a dynamic here with cloud and so when you’re looking at your platform um you know do how easy is it for you to be able to go my gosh I’m being wildly successful um I need to scale up does your platform provide the ability for you to do that in a in a reasonable kind of native way which could include you scaling down too as well right if you’ve got some big event you might want to spin up spend a little bit of extra money for your big event and then let’s go ahead and spin it down and right size our costs you know and sorry to interrupt I want to add there are two types of growth there’s the unexpected or yeah sudden Spike that now we have 100 visitors and in the next minute we have 10,000 but there’s also the linear growth where the website or whatever you have keeps getting a bit slower each day by day so these two problems have different solutions but they both come back to how easy it is for me to go into my infrastructure account and make some changes I love it and vad you were talking a little bit about caching and these are as popular you know solution um how how do they boost scalability and performance especially during like traffic spikes right and what are some best practices for implementing this well coming back to my Horror Story with the affiliate marketing and our database crashing was that each time we had one visitor each time we had multiple reading from the database right with caching we don’t have that multiple reading for each and every user we could have 100 users and only one process reading ST stuff that so basically let’s say essentially that’s something that caching can help with and you would have you still have the same server the same size which can hold much more traffic than before activating caching and CDN also is a an option which helps because the CDN distributes your content geographically so being closer to your visitors with your content means that they will um experi they would have a a better experience they will download the content faster and also it’s not a single point of failure they’re distributed so in case something is gone wrong they can uh automatically be directed to the one that’s working and on that we did just publish another poll thank you all for filling out the poll really appreciate that but we’re talking about these cdns and whatnot what else do you guys have to say about caching cdns yeah I’ll just add add to that I think you know you have to do a real quick audit of your project application or SL website how many static resources can you get away with you know yes there’s a lot of dyn dynamic elements to you know any flow if we use e-commerce store you know price in stock but there’s a lot of things that can be static as many of those those can be cash and those can be served from the CDN um product images you know those don’t change too often so you need to just try to limit the amount of dynamic resources you really need to be querying your database and all of that can then be stored on your Edge cach in your CDN or this the C from the server and basically for for Layman for everyone else all that does is you know it’s been processed on the first visit that’s ready to go at the edge of the server there’s no more quering that needs to be happening again and that will help you have that cost- effective way unfortunately if you are going into a lot more Dynamic resources used you know like a learning management system course where you know a high traffic and high Revenue e-commerce store there is obviously transactions going through payment gateways you know that stuff obviously can never be cashed you don’t want to be cashing someone’s payment information or a API call but then you will look at the features that we look in and saying you know can I vertically scale this in a cost effective Manner and I know that a lot of my resources all my images my library that is static that’s cached and I’m will focusing on scaling my Dynamic resources and the server to be able to push that out yeah other thoughts y’ yeah I think one thing a lot of business owners need to consider we brought the question up about the cost and investment in all of these things and well definitely when you’re in the startup phase you as a Founder are going to try to do as much of this as possible and I know we’re all sitting here on a a cloudways webinar so we’re all probably fans of the platform and and I think it’s uh it’s fair to say that cloudways is a really good platform for those who don’t have a ton of technical experience because the vertical scaling is essentially one or two clicks um the support um is I think really great and if they’ve got a good team there helping um diagnose problems or things when they come up uh the caching uh plugin through Breeze and the integration with WordPress and the cloud Floor Enterprise uh setup and integration it’s all very simple and straightforward and I think it does provide a new business or a Founder L company to be able to start to enable some of these more technical features in a pretty userfriendly way and that’s going to get you pretty far in terms of that uh at least the first few phases of your growth but like any anything um once you get into a little bit more complicated problem you do need to have an expert behind you whether that’s a company on retainer or at least someone that you can reach out to that you can trust and if your business relies on Revenue coming through your website I mean a lot of companies don’t think twice about hiring a bookkeeper an accountant or a lawyer to do some contracts or things for them and I don’t think your website should be put into some second or third tier uh asset class for your company when in reality um it’s probably generating a could be a double digit portion of your Revenue um and I’m sure as Vlad was going to get into is there’s lots of challenges with to it can cause create unintended consequences or things that you didn’t expect to happen so it isn’t a silver bullet to scaling problems and having when you get into those technical weeds supports going to be there to help you but you might need to have an expert on your side too that’s that’s naviga this for you um so I’m uh speaking from the agency perspective but I think having an agency or freelancer or a technical person on standby is really important when you’re getting into the uh that at least that third or that fourth wave of growth in your business you know I just want to comment on that really quickly because um in my world I’m working with digital agencies every day and I’m mentoring them on growth and one of the things that I find y’all is that with digital agencies we’re newer right this this whole internet thing it’s newer we’re not lawyers or priests right like we’ve not been around for thousands and thousands of years so we really are pioneering this and so it is it’s interesting what you said Mike about this idea that you know we we of course we’re GNA go to accountant of course we’re gonna go to a medical doctor and now this like of course we’re going to get help with these extremely important issues that provide our business success right so I love that I love that thank you for for for talking about that I think it’s really important to normalize um not doing it all yourself once you get past you know very beginning founding stage I love that um yeah go ahead well I was just G to add I think that we’ve also seen especially in the last four or five years this explosion of the freelance Marketplace and and work from home and remote workers I mean it’s always been around but it’s really exploded in the last four or five years and I think when you’re a business that relies on your website or your online presence for a portion or significant portion of your Revenue that is not the time to go to Fiverr or upwork and find a random freelancer to start working on your website and and I think there are really great talented people on those platforms but you need to find them before you have a problem and just like a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant you want someone who knows your business and knows where your Revenue comes from and what’s important and what isn’t important so that they can provide the right advice and guidance along the way so whether you’re hiring an agency you’re just looking for an individual freelancer it’s you need to find them when you don’t need them so that they’re there when you do and they’re already on boarded to not just your website from a technical perspective but they actually understand how your business works and that’s when you’re going to get the best results from that person I love that so I I I agree with Mike 90% of what he just said there’s a a bit that I am a bit in a disagreement and I want to to say it out because I think it’s important um you mentioned Mike at theit sort of the beginning that it’s if you’re a non-technical founder or something you should go and use these type managed Services well I would actually suggest that even if you are Technical and if you are in the early stages you would still need to go to these managed Services because it removes a lot of headaches and you can focus on real issues and more important for your company at that point in time you know and later on yes later on in in future stages then you can and you need to go more in depth you could go on other routes maybe th this kind of like bleeds us into this idea of you know I’d love to discuss the cloudways autonomous like and how is this helping with this scalability I mean we’re talking a lot about reliability scalability Vlad you were talking about this like we start here and now we’re scaling up and we need to adjust um how how does cloudways and autonomous really address the like pricing concerns and availability and what not I’ll kick start a little bit um just adding to what vat’s started there as like agencies or Founders and you know businesses looking towards managed Solutions I think we found ourselves in that boat um you know I have experience of managing my own servers um and you know coming across many um High traff High Revenue sites even using the the current cloudways flexible you know for being introduced to to cloudways autonomous on my side just made that whole experience a lot a lot easier you know from not being having to constantly monitor New Relic and the performance of a website and how many hits and what the error ratees of everything coming through and woring about like again a lot of the scaling issues we spoke about but that was vertical um you know with something like any autis implementation um it’s a little bit of elastic so it kind of pull the other way um and that is something that autonomous allows you to do so you don’t just have to worry about you know the resources um fing in on on one front um it will scale vertically and the other way so it’s a little big elastic that pulls out um and from a technical point of view even if you are well technical V you don’t have to worry about too much you know you just basically what I do is I look at the log and see how many pods are firing up um andly that everything’s running running normally so autonomous has this place for they both technical um and and the end user for the client you know I I wouldn’t recommend people to try to explore that themselves and trying to make an autoscale infrastructure or explore many other avenues again it is easy to to get on to you need a little bit of expert understanding there’s always place for agency and obviously that’s where we earn up and butter I’m sure Mike Mike agrees with me on that you know um experts are always there to to have the help in hand for the client in terms of what solution they need are they fine with being on un flexible when do they need to take that step to go to something like autonomous and again migrate them through that process but yeah it’s just been a an easy integration of everything we spoke about the vertical scaling happening you know as and when the traffic is coming in um cost-wise you’re only paying when that that traffic comes through and it’s scaling back down I think traditional methods you always go in you scale up in the preparation Mike spoke about before you know a Black Friday or expected traffic Spike but if it’s unexpected you you’ve got a bit of a problem if no one’s on standby to quickly you know address those issues and scale your resources Qui that’s where autoscale s autonomous comes into place it says cool spiking traffic there low balances are in place everything’s fine how it worked with a 100 users it’s going to work just fine with 100,000 concurrent users um obviously you still need to do the base testing you your cash in and everything else we spoke about at the start but once you got that that need to manually intervene is is sorted I love it other thoughts yeah yeah I agree with them and I don’t want to sound like a dinosaur but back in the day people used cards and punched cards to do some programming right and we’ve come we’ve come a long way we have kubernetes and we have a ton of tech but it’s still difficult it’s still complex so a man solution is an abstrac on top of this which are other abstrac but that’s another point and it makes it much more easier for you to focus on what’s important handle the traffic convert your traffic win get some money that’s love it that’s a huge call out VL like because like what what is your core competency like what is your differentiator with whatever you are right you’re probably not a kubernetes administrator right or an autoscale Guru right you’re you’re here to make business with make money with your website as an SMB and so when I think about something like autonomous it’s really about taking a pattern of how to utilize Cloud technology to meet a business need and packaging it together in a way that meets customer needs like that’s really what that’s really what this is and and it and it does things like this do a really great job of going if you would like to unlock this pattern that works well for scaling websites you can can you can buy it here right and especially when you couple it with things like manage support and all like that’s perfect for an SMB right like because that’s what they want they want to be able to um be able to S deal with all these other uh challenges and failure modes and surges and spikes and going viral everything we talked about before you kind of you kind of get something like that by going with a solution like autonomous I love it I love it and honest like you know this idea that your your image as a business um you know I love weson you’re talking about the the analogy of an actual physical store like that’s very helpful to like imagine like you have thousand people show up but you have little door and they can’t get through um when it comes to website reliability and impact on user trust and overall business performance what do you guys have to say about this like you know when we’re thinking of a website going down or the door doesn’t even exist today right um how what’s this look like website reliability impacting user experience trust whatnot it’s huge right I mean I think it’s demo should be proven in a couple different ways right one whatever the data is that says like hey if the page doesn’t load in I don’t know one and a half seconds like people bounce or something right so it’s slow you’re going to lose people right and I would definitely close the tab right if the if it’s sitting there wheeling and then the other thing to keep in mind as well um your search engine optimization is is is impacted by how fast you load right if your set if your site is slow um these crawlers and these indexers like Google and stuff take they they they they observe that and it impacts your your your organic search results where you land in uh People’s Organic search results yeah yeah for me it’s one for me it’s one word and that word is choices users now have a ton of choices if you’re not in good shape I won’t wait I won’t stay you’re not the only one who could offer me that service or that product I’ll just quickly instantly go in another place and uh my money would go there so that’s that’s the main issue with websites really and especially when you think about mobile mobile is so pervasive with web presence the the phone is an absolute distraction machine it’s full of apps and notifications and so it’s just like what bot said it’s begging to take your attention away so if something is slow on mobile you’re going to lose those you’re going to lose those customers those visitors are going to walk and go do something else yeah I think to add to that it’s it’s your Brand’s credibility that’s at risk um you know you’re having a customer come through a campaign that you’ve been running on socials or advertising or traditional marketing methods and you expect them to put their credit card details and you know get spend a couple of hundred dollars but the whole experience is very slow that breaks that trust you know again going flatty the choices they have many other options that they can go for but your brand credibility and that trust that the C customer needs to build you know to become a lifelong customer recurring customer or recommend recommend your brand across the others that can be totally ruined by the bad reliability and really bad performance on your site yeah and truth is we do judge a book by its cover especially when it comes to businesses and I think there’s a easy case to be made if you’re selling product or directly generating Revenue through the website to invest in this presence but I think we’re at a point now in 2024 where most customers will even judge a physical businesses presence based on their online presence and I think this can apply maybe you’re looking for like a massage therapist or a chiropractor or someone to do some work on your car you might not be doing that transaction online but if you visit their website and it seems slow or kind of broken or it’s not working the way you would expect you do start to project that onto the business itself and that might not be right but it makes me think about a story from a long time ago where there was a contractor uh that was um gonna quote and do some business for a friend of mine and there was a big like glaring typo on their business card and that you know it’s just a typo on the business card not a big deal uh but that my friend ended up telling me that that contractor was terrible and had low attention to detail and like that’s an example where you have to as a business take pride in anything that customers touch and I think that’s very easy to do when you have a physical presence you want to have a welcoming showroom offer a coffee at your auto repair shop or have a nice couch for people to sit on while they waiting but we need to start thinking of that pride in our online presence as well because that actually will translate to more customers that trust and respect and want to do business with you and and I think it’s even gone to a new level y’all where we don’t even necessarily consciously know why we don’t trust somebody or what’s going on and you’re just like well you know you’re not thinking the site was okay but not great but not horrible you know and it’s just like no no I don’t have a really good feeling I’m moving on so this absolutely Mike I love it yeah your your example is very sub subliminal I have I remember something sorry W I’ll give you the in just a moment so I was visiting a website and it was working but it had some errors in it right and I saw the error messages they weren’t hidden in a console or something and my my next thought was I can’t enter my credit card details on your website I can’t make the purchase I’m sorry bye so this is another example yeah I mean I was just going to add to that I mean just to that example we we onboarded a client about two months ago and went through this entire process we all talking about now getting them scal scaling ready and you know they were on you know shared hosting before which is obviously not ideal um so we went through the entire process you know went through a little bit of a rebuil and not not too hectic on that side um but no marketing efforts um traffic was exactly the same and within a month they four times the revenue so it just shows that the customers were there they just weren’t converting because of the subconscious reasons that trust The credibility and know this that that feeling you you’ll get and again the reliability you know if it doesn’t work once you got the other choices you’re g go away you be frustrated um but what very interesting for us to see this the actual impact it has where you know take the marketing side out of it you know youve got x amount of users per month you know traditionally over the last year they’ve been making x amount of Revenue and all of a sudden just to have this change increased about four times um I think you know people should definitely take a deeper look into it you know how can you implement that in your business are you looking at your reliability of your site is is your conversion rate optimization really there you know are we thinking from a marketing standpoint but I actually that experience when someone’s on the site yes there’s a ux part to it but again are you breaking that trust barrier in through the technology that you’re using so you know we’re talking about uh these like sudden spikes and there’s some we know are coming right so black Friday right we’re all we’re all super oriented to Black Friday um and it can really be make or break right there you know especially if your s’s down right so how can people prep like how do you prep your website for an event such as Black Friday right what metrics should uh should people be watching you want go first um well again I think we we spoke about a little bit at the start your testing your preparation ex exactly like m M spoke about and having those operations in place there is always a chance something can go wrong so your standard operating procedures around around that need to be put in place but your load testing can be done before fire per stage in sight test everything make sure that your hosted infrastructure is up to scratch you know if you are expecting it put the vertical scaling a little bit higher before before that point can look at historical data you know your Google analytics data from from previous um you can run your pingdom test you can use new can see you know with 100 users how many resources you with a thousand how many you’re using so you can kind of predict but there’s always that unexpected you don’t know how well your campaigns are going to work um and that’s the point of something like autonomous that you don’t have to worry too much still do your testing beforehand make sure everything’s running you know be sure you’re autonomous or you up you up your vertical scaling um for that period based on your historical load um and and for us you know then it’s monit during that time you know looking into success looking for error rates looking for how many time your your missed um you can quickly start to identify errors in that sense and if you are e-commerce you’re looking for that transaction drop off or even know people dropping off on their payment Pages um those are quite your your R alert and you know there’s so many monitoring tools out there that you can use to monitor I mean Clarity has been an amazing free one that you can um know hit map your site and also you know have the live recordings to really see what’s going on um um but then also reduce the Lo your load on the processing side before that you know if there’s no need for these certain features to be live for Black Friday it’s going to be focused on your main call to action you can turn quite a few things off just for that period to reduce that excessive load you don’t need but again if you on something like autonomous less less of a worry love it did we nail that Nick did I see the big nailed it no notes fantastic fantastic any other thoughts on on what to watch what be I mean besides the obvious it depends I mean I I don’t I hate it I hate this word but I actually think that the key metrics to watch kind of depend on your current stage what and what you’re selling what you’re doing what your business is about I could say I could I could be looking at something like number of purchases made on the site in a certain period of time so knowing my averages knowing my maximum let’s say if I had I if I prepared myself so that I would kind of know that oh we are close to maximum we need to do something about that but again it could vary from from business to business quite a lot and to sort of offer an alternative to what Weston said about cutting some things off that are maybe not important for that time period which is an awesome idea I’m going I’m going to steal that Weston I’m sorry I I I did something a bit different so in preparation for Black Friday what we did was to make some very specific landing pages which were completely separate from the actual website on a completely different servers they were kind of they didn’t have a lot of a lot of things in common and we made them very static you know so everything load really really fast and the only thing that we loaded dynamically was the stock because it was important to actually show products that were still available to to be bought and that helped this separation helped a lot because that those static liting Pages can take a lot and the website was able to perform almost as normal as it could in those periods but actually that’s a really good point and idea oh yeah go ahead yeah uh I wanted to finish it’s it’s not easy to do so it’s not something that you can oh let’s do this and two hours later it’s it’s done you need prep you need somebody to do it so a managed Services is is a bit better isn’t it I love it I I really like that point and the idea I think is is actually a really key takeaway for this Black Friday conversation about putting landing pages off of your primary site so it can be on a subdomain it can be a uh on a different server then you can just cash the hell out of it because it’s not going to be uh Dynamic and then the product links go back to your your main catalog and I think this is a really good strategy for also making sure that the mission critical parts of your site don’t go down when you’re getting a flood of traffic from Facebook ads or something like that and I think that also goes back to the point about having somebody who can help provide that kind of advice and guidance because they actually know your business and they know how you’re going to Market your products and what your ads look like um there was you know a couple comments in chat about how good Freelancers can get on boarded to sites quite quickly and I do agree with that a good freelancer is going to be able to jump into a site and hopefully within an hour or two get a lay of the land but it takes longer to get on boarded to the business itself and understand how they market and how they sell and where their traffic swings come from and you can’t provide that kind of advice like hey you should move all your landing pages to a subdomain with a separate install of WordPress you can’t make that advice until you start to know the business a little bit better and that’s I think the difference between looking for someone in a reactive situation versus being proactive and and building that team behind your online business and your online presence I love it this has been so wonderful y’all we are going to be ending in just a second I just want to say um thank you for everybody out in the audience and and filling out the polls and asking great questions we didn’t get time for questions because this conversation was so good um thank you panel I really really appreciate that you are all here um I’m gonna we had a lot of gold dropped on us here and one of the main things was this idea of you you at home you in your offices you are the professionals you might not feel it yet but you are or you’re fully perfect get help get the expert help you need right so that you can focus on your area of expertise your gift yours whatever special thing you’re bringing to the world you focus on that and get professionals around you to help especially when it comes to your your livelihood right Nick you’re talking about this is this is not a joke business is not a joke we do do it because we love it but there we go we do it also because we need to do it because things we want in life like electricity right and health care right so you all thank you so very much for being here this has been absolutely wonderful I appreciate your time and your energy um you all are fantastic thank you for being here thank you all the audience for being here and participating love it we are going to end this session thank you you guys so very much um we’ve got a next session coming up which is a uh it is like an audit right it’s performance so we’ve had people um you all have put in your your sites to see like how are they actually performing so we’re going to go and we’re going to consult on that um with a specialist in just a few minutes so thank you all there is a survey overall because you know how this goes we’re always trying to get better right Nick right we are always growing we are always getting better that’s what we do as humans right it’s super fantastic so do help us with that survey um and we will see you all very shortly yay wonderful bye enjoy fantastic thanks this this was great thank you yeah wonderful thank you we should do this again let’s I would love to very cool