What is a performance website?

Phil: Steve, the topic today is ‘what is a performance website?’ and I know it's not just one thing, is it? It's a number of things, so I guess, do we start with the tech?

Steve: Yeah, I guess so. Well actually ‘performance website’ is a phrase of ours actually, isn't it? And actually, maybe like broadly, what do we mean when we say performance website? Well, we've got clients on our books, you know, establish businesses, multi-million pound companies, who've got websites built in a certain way, in a way that performs that's a long lifespan they're really happy with them. They're as flexible as they want them to be, they deliver results they want them to deliver and we regard that as performance sites. And we get enquiries from people that haven't got that type of website. They've got something that's built without some of these considerations. So what's this formula of the established businesses that actually the websites are really key, you know, it does a job for them. It's actually working for them and yeah, tech is a key thing. Well, you'll know we sometimes look at search results, we might get an enquiry, quite a couple of enquiries every week, don't we? One of the things we do is look at the search results and maybe there's enquiries from somebody in the top five and if we look at search results, we use the ‘built with’ plugin to see what tech’s being used. The top results, at a certain level, established businesses, are not, you know, template driven sites.

Phil: If we use those tools, it will almost always throw up that it isn't a template-based site. It will generally be a framework-built product, you know, so a high performance product built on a framework. I'd even go as far as to say, you know, we can mention the ‘W word’ WordPress, we just wouldn't be in the same category as a WordPress type product, would we?

Steve: No, it would be a website built using tech that's intended for an enterprise-level system or, you know, a lightweight fast scalable system. A sort of hypersecure system and this is what, you know, established businesses generally have so we're in the territory of, I mean, some people might choose Umbraco, some might choose a framework driven system like Asymphony, or Laravel or something like that. There's a number of choices but the point is, it's an enterprise grade content management system, not something that was built for primarily home use or blogging or that sort of thing.

Phil: Yeah and I guess one of the benefits of choosing that route is that we're not saddled with plugins that need updating, you know, which can be a disadvantage and also risk to security as well.

Steve: Yeah the big one, non-negotiable for clients of a certain size.

Phil: But the other factor with that is the hosting as well, isn't it?

Steve: We actually know there was something earlier this year where there was a leak of the Google algorithm, and we found out for definite, for the first time, that sites that are hosted on premium enterprise grade hosting, and using enterprise grade systems are scored higher than sites on cheaper hosting, you know and common systems like WordPress and so on as well, so it's no longer speculation. We've always wondered why do our sites seem to perform better than some of these template sites? But there it was in the leak, you know, it's proven.

Phil: So there's an algorithmic advantage to not being on a templated product?

Steve: Yeah and that's why there’s the enterprise grade or Bespoke built sites generally are in the top five results and the others are generally lower. There are exceptions of course, but yeah, as a general rule that's one characteristic of a performance website.

Phil: And I guess then moving on from the tech then, obviously the site has to be, you know, keywords is a big consideration. It has to be built around all the right high intent keywords.

Steve: Yes so, well search isn't as important, organic search isn't as important as it once was because obviously the real estate of a search results page is much more paid results now, and yet it's still so overlooked. We inherit websites which are, you know, good in many ways, but just the structure isn't planned around the really high intent or high volume keywords. And we switched the site around this year and tripled its traffic and tripled its leads just by changing the structure, you know, building the structure around high intent keywords and just that one change to actually go and look at ‘well where's all the, you know, really really quality leads here?’ ‘Well, they're in these searches’, ‘well, let's just structure the site around it.’ And as soon as we do that, you know, there's a change in performance, so performance website would always be structured around high intent keywords.

Phil: That's right and you know, those high intent keywords, the positioning of them isn't as important, but it still is important. But that can also benefit the cost of your campaigns, so it's still centrally important to building a high performance website.

Steve: Yeah and it's not so difficult, so why wouldn't you do it?

Phil: Yeah, you're going to build that in from the start anyway aren’t you? Okay so we've got the tech, we've got the right keywords in place, I suppose next we should look at research? You know because doing the homework, doing the groundwork and doing all the thorough research is critical for, you know, for that performance product.

Steve: Yeah, so I mean, one of our key thing for all our projects, is you start with a workshop. And I think that moves everybody from thinking about what internally does the company want in its website to what actually does the customer wants in its website. So every exercise in our workshop is about looking at things from the customers' point of view. We just flip that lens around and look at it that way and from that, you end up with a way better planned user interface and a way better plan structure as well, so it's got to be customer-led led not led by the business and what the business wants in its website.

Phil: Yeah and obviously if you take that time out and you draw out everything that you've just mentioned, it doesn't just draw out all the necessary information for a successful project, but it gets everybody invested, including the team here as well, gets everybody pulling the same way.

Steve: That's right, it has that little that bonus, doesn't it? That everyone's on board for the project.

Phil: We've done all the groundwork, we've drawn out all the right elements in a workshop environment for a successful project. I guess then we move on to overlaying that with campaigns or lead magnets?

Steve: Yeah, so we can think the website's going to be a certain level and designed in a certain way, but it's not going to perform on its own. So every website that we've got which we regard as a performance website, it's really firing out the results the client wants, whether that's visibility or leads. It has lead magnets within it, so that will be sort of, it will be things that we've added that are looking for signals of interest from people. So that might be that there is a white paper for download, for example, or it might be that there's a tool that you can use on the site to do a calculation, or there's a scorecard and you can go and do a little test, a self assessment that sort of thing. But all these things that are asking you ‘if you're visiting our website and you're not ready to enquire yet but you're interested, how can you just leave a soft signal just to let us know and then we can follow up with you?’ So we usually fine when we do that, you get a certain number of enquiries, but you get lots and lots of these soft signals and in year two, three, four and five, they move around to become enquiries because we warm them up over time with the campaigns that run around the website as well.

Phil: Yeah that's right, because you can't just build a brilliant product, brilliant website and expect people to immediately engage and immediately transact or be prepared to give their details away, you know, and those signals of interest that we nurture over time are critical, aren't they?

Steve: Yeah exactly.

Phil: So no matter how much expertise we've got, with all the right tech in place, all the right groundwork, you know, it can always be improved upon, can't it? So I suppose if we're going to count these down, the fifth of those five elements that's critical would be thorough testing.

Steve: Yeah, so quality assurance. So, for example, the team, you know that works in the room behind us, the quality checks being done routinely on the sites that are live, 1 hour response support desk so there's never any issue that lingers, you know, the sites that run at their optimum basically. And there's one thing that we can do with that, which I mean here it's a blanket activity we do on everything, but anyone could do this on their site, and it's just that there are quality checks that you can do to measure if the site's at its you know full potential in certain ways. So one of those is Google's Core Web Vitals, and you can go online and do a scan of your site, and it will give you a score and things that you can fix to speed up the site, improve the performance of the site. So we have a benchmark and we make sure every site runs above a certain level, but everyone should do that, you should fix the issues that core web; it's Google telling you ‘improve this’, so why wouldn't you do it? Same with Google Search Console, that will also highlight errors, you know, 404s and 500 errors, and redirect errors, and canonical errors, and so on, but again, why wouldn't you just fix those? Google's telling you ‘we think this is wrong’, so you've got those tools from Google which are just saying, you know, ‘sort your site out’ - well do it, it's easy, that's the the low hanging fruit. And then there's some third-party systems so you can run a scan of your site as well and for example, we use one which is Ahrefs, there are alternatives, but we keep every site at a 99% or above quality score on there. So there's just three different tools there which are all keeping a site at it's top hygiene and health and that's another thing that makes a performance site so these five things together add up to you know a profile of a performance site versus a sort of standard site which doesn't perform quite as well.

Phil: I suppose if you're using all those tools to keep all the. Let's call it health and hygiene, and the performance levels optimised over time. I suppose the other thing you could do as well is look at how users are behaving as well with some perhaps some technology like Hotjar?

Steve: So video recording, everybody that passes through, yes so I mean again, when we put a site live we watch the first hundred visits on video cause we video the screen recording and for our retainer clients we're recording everything as well. But you do see trends in there, just you know, things that you're expecting people to do with the design, places you're expecting to go, and actions you expect them to take, and they don't. But if you know that in video, you know, you only have to watch 50 videos and you get a sense of ‘I can tell how they're feeling about this site’, and that's when we can start optimising and getting it really firing.

Phil: You can observe those behaviors and avoid people going down unnecessary dead ends, and you can get everybody navigating away through that journey as efficiently as possible. I suppose with, I mean there's five general key areas there, but is there a takeaway from those, an overall takeaway from those five key points?

Steve: Maybe one thing we would probably say in our team is, so what have we got there? We've got the tech has to be rightm we want to build around high intent keywords, we want to build around customer research, we want lead magnets and campaigns in there, we want to be doing these quality checks as well. I think the thing we know having done, what is it, 250 projects? It's all five of those have got to be in place, you know, four of those being in place doesn't equal a high performance site, you know, if you've got one of those pillars missing, then the whole performance is compromised. It's 20% off the performance if we've not built around search and so on. So it's the thoroughness of every box is checked and we've got a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 score on all those points.

Phil: Yeah, cause we often talk about them as individually, don't we? But you're saying that all five of them need to be optimised, need to be firing, otherwise
we're not going to get the performance required?

Steve: Exactly yeah.