Listen
How & Why to Speed Up Your Website
Look, site speed matters for SEO. A lot. It’s easy to ignore, but with the SEO arms race that’s happening, site speed is the next weapon to add to your arsenal. With everything else being equal, you can easily beat your competitors in search rankings if your page simply loads faster.
Today’s Listen is going to help get your site speed up to speed. You might need to ask a developer for help with some of these tips, but it’s worth it. We swear. Skip to 25:10 if you want to get straight to the actionable advice.
- Stop adding “stuff” to your web pages. The simpler the page, the quicker it will load. This is more noticeable on mobile than it is on desktop.
- Refactor your code. This is essentially getting rid of unnecessary code that isn’t even used on your pages.
- Use system fonts. Certain fonts can slow down page speed by a few milliseconds, but system fonts won’t cause a slowdown.
- Optimize and compress your images. This is the easiest change that will make a big difference.
- Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to find out how fast or slow your website is and make the changes they suggest.
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Read
Marketers: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Marketers and consumers are in radically new times thanks to the shift from text to video and audio, messaging apps, advancements in AI, augmented reality, and voice recognition. As consumer behavior evolves, marketing channels shift endlessly, resulting in an ever-growing competition obsession for attention.
Kipp Bodnar, Hubspot’s CMO, is here to give it to us straight. He argues that it’s not so much the world around us that is changing, but that marketers themselves keep messing everything up. (We phrased it a little nicer than Kipp.)
Enter what Kipp refers to as “Scorched Earth Marketing”. We’ve all seen it happen — a new channel or market strategy opens up and marketers ravenously flock to it, obsessing over the best hacks instead of the best message, turning the channel into a “rabid gaming of the system.” We start to solve our own goals, instead of our customers’, forgetting why they were drawn to the channel in the first place.
Kipp delivers some hard-hitting truths in today’s Read like:
- How we’re messing up content and what went wrong
- How we risk messing up messaging (say that 5 times fast)
- The plague of the infographic
- The democratization of video production
- How we risk messing up video, too
- How we can save ourselves from ourselves
Watch
The Worst Ads of 2017 (So Far)
We usually serve you up the “Best of” lists when it comes to advertisements, but the bottom of the barrel is just as inspiring and amusing, if not moreso. The write-up for this post from Digiday is as entertaining as the ad spots are cringe-worthy. Bonus points to the author for not including that one Pepsi ad with whatsherface — that woulda been too easy.
Check out these eight, gloriously bad ads and relish in the fact that (hopefully) your work is a lot better.
