How to Build a Fast, Secure, and SEO Optimized Website feat. Stephanie Hudson

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge. And today, this is I’m looking out for you all today. Okay. I try to do my best to give the best guidance when it comes to marketing and technology. And usually, that will actually always, that’s always it takes place online and you need a nice, secure home. Okay, you need a place that you can be very comfortable and confident can handle your business and your marketing without worrying that places your website. So I have been looking high and low, far and wide to find a valuable, valuable, highly individual with high acumen to teach us about the three S’s and potentially four S’s of your website for entrepreneurs. Let me say this, I am a self taught web developer. There’s all kinds of bad habits I’ve picked up, and all kinds of things I just don’t know. And it wasn’t until I talked to today’s guests where it highlighted not just how foolish I am sometimes on the on the internet on website building. But also a nice reminder that there’s always someone smarter than you that specializes in the exact thing you may know a little bit about. And the best thing is they she also has a means for you to take advantage of such acumen and resources for a very, very competitive investment. We’ll say so, today’s episode, everybody, please welcome Stephanie Hudson, and she is a geek, entrepreneur, inventor and notebook hoarder. Now this is important anybody who’s a notebook hoarder, we know has some kind of strong affinity towards writing, like they did back in the day pen and paper. So this is Stephanie. She started building websites way back in the days of dial up internet, and chunky motors, leveraging nearly three decades of experience she’s able to share the tactics and confidence digital agencies need in order to scale and thrive through coaching, mentorship, and her white label company which we will talk about later. Focus WP Stephanie, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? What

Stephanie Hudson 3:06
is up Chris? It’s so good to be here. I’m really excited and I That’s the worst part about being on an interview or anything is having the bio read I know you did a good job. Oh, it’s so awkward.

Chris Davis 3:22
It’s a thing and and I want to listen I want to dive in and give some behind the curtains. Stephanie and I met through a mutual friend actually everybody knows because she’s been on the podcast a couple of times KPC so she continues to be my AC BFF as well as it’s expanding to just like all things Internet software and recommendation so just a huge resource. And K is awesome. She She absolutely is and how we got connected we spent an entire Saturday we did not know each other by the way me and you know, okay, you and I because Stephanie I went through her company to get my my website tuned up. And she reached out her personally reached out to make sure everything was okay. And offered to jump on a call. So I’m a little hesitant because it’s the weekend everybody’s like a Saturday I’m a family person. Should I really take time away from my family and you know, jump on this call. But I did it and oh my goodness. She we, I think between everything that you shared and just sharing our stories and resources and everything. It was like hey, look, even if you didn’t want to be my friend. You can’t you can’t not be my reluctant

Stephanie Hudson 4:36
you guys it was supposed to it was like I think we scheduled a 20 minute chat. Yeah, and I believe we were on the call for two and a half hours.

Chris Davis 4:46
Easily. Easily everybody I was so big.

Stephanie Hudson 4:49
We would like talk anything one of us would say the other one be like oh my gosh, I’m also I have something about that. You know? Yes, it was super fun.

Chris Davis 4:57
Absolutely. And what what made me They, you’ve got to come on the podcast everybody is if if you’re an avid podcast listener, you know that I have an episode called the marketing layer. And it’s the teaching that you should have your landing pages separate from your website so that if your website goes down, your marketing stays up. And I was so refreshed, and we’ll talk about it to hear that Stephanie uses a similar approach to like your domain and hosting. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, like you, you are the me and websites, like, I should share for all expertise to you and your company. Just like I would expect somebody to do that for me and marketing and technology. So let’s start from the from the top here. You came up with this? I didn’t I just introduced it. Stephanie. There are three S’s to having an effective website presents for entrepreneurs online today. What are those Ss?

Stephanie Hudson 6:02
There’s Okay, so there’s a lot of factors. There’s more letters than just three S’s. But, and also, by the way, if you’re always watching and not listening, I have an absolutely insane three month old kitten who loves to attack me while I’m on podcast, which is super embarrassing. Yeah, I hate it anyway. So websites, they have a lot of different things that you need. But when you are setting up websites for your clients, when you’re doing getting these things prepared for other people in particular, also for yourself, too, though, there’s the three S’s that I think would be really useful for everyone to really focus in on with the new site, or even the landing pages and things like that. You want to look at your speed, your security and your SEO. Those are my three S’s for today.

Chris Davis 6:50
Speed, everybody security and SEO. And I know it’s there’s some listeners, this is what they did. Stephanie, they heard that and they’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got that. I got that. Yeah, always. You gotta be fast. It’s got to be secure. And yeah, you need SEO. All right, next episode. Pause, everyone pause, because I want to put myself on display here. I’ve had troubles with website speed, not my automation bridge website, per se, that one’s been pretty good. But depending on your back end technology, and I’m not talking about like the amount of plugins I’m moreso talking about the type of plugins and different website builds require different resources. So so in this, let’s start with the first S. Where do people miss the mark when they’re trying to achieve the fastest website speed? And what do they really need to be mindful two

Stephanie Hudson 7:46
words. Two words are the actual problem. Tons of the time. cheap hosting. Sorry, I hate to say it, shared hosting, if you really want speed you, you need to have some resources devoted. And it just makes sense that you’re not going to get the top of the line, if you’re going for the 299 a month hosting plans, there are different types of setups, there are different types of servers, there are all kinds of different things that are going on under the hood that need optimization, to run properly, and to be able to deliver a fast site. The second most common issue on top and by the way, just because it’s not cheap, doesn’t mean it has to be super expensive either. There are some very reasonable options, you’re not looking at hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month for hosting, you can easily get superfast hosting for less than 50 bucks a month. So if you could spend $30 A month would that be worth it, to have a fast website, you know, something like that would be really doable. Okay, so then the next most important thing with speed is images that will always be the next culprit, people uploading images that are too big. Either they are too big in their dimensions, like they’re too wide and too tall for the space they’re in. So they’re only going to ever show this big, but you’re loading a file that’s that big. The other thing is even if they’re the right dimensions, they could be too big of a file size or too heavy of a file. So the one of the best ways is to have your files optimized ahead of time. But if you don’t, if you’re not a Photoshop user or whatever, there are some online tools that you can use. But one of the other things that I try to always have on a site is an image optimization plugin. There’s a ton of them out there. They almost all have a free level. shortpixel is the one that we’ve been using for a while but there’s a bunch and you put that on your site and you set the maximums that you want to file to be and then it will automatically upload it and I even use that in conjunction with Photoshop because it still is always able to, to squeeze it down just a little little bit smaller in size without degrading the quality of it. So those are the two top tips for speeding up your website.

Chris Davis 10:07
I’ve got to jump in here this is listen. So what I’m gonna say is Stephanie put the gun on the table and water gun everybody. Okay, water gun, something light, but I’m going to be the one firing shots. Okay, I usually reserve this for my premium podcast, but I’m going to say this because it has been a lifetime of terrible service and experience with everybody on their platform. I’m going to say Stephanie, listen, everybody, I’m on my own island. Stephanie. We did

Stephanie Hudson 10:38
not know what you’re gonna say. Yes, no

Chris Davis 10:40
kidding. I’m about to say you’re for it. Stay away from GoDaddy. Everybody listened to me

Stephanie Hudson 10:46
I was I was like, Please

Chris Davis 10:49
run the other I cannot stand their hosting their pricing their server. Everything about GoDaddy just I’ve never had a good experience. Never had a good experience. Thankfully, I’ve never signed up with them. I know a lot of people will buy their domain from them. Okay, go go for it. But

Stephanie Hudson 11:09
they are domains from is the least is the least bad thing. Yep. So don’t freak out if you have domains that you own through them. But yeah, and then if you go all the way to the other end of their managed services and all that they have some good stuff there. But your basic run of the mill I mean, I don’t do that is what most people do their basic run of the mill that remember Danica Patrick, she’s I think it’s her fault when the gutter all this. It’s her fault. I say that all the time too. I blame Danica Patrick yes state of affairs on the internet and all these websites is

Chris Davis 11:41
like you know, Hooters meets a race car driver. Oh, Go Daddy a sexy look at if you want to be here

Stephanie Hudson 11:49
tried to make the hosting sexy.

Chris Davis 11:51
He tried to make those things.

Stephanie Hudson 11:54
It’s just not be sexy.

Chris Davis 11:57
It really shouldn’t. So stay away from cheap hosting. Like Stephanie said, I believe the best expectation for a website. And let me say this everyone, this is your home online. Compare what what you’re about to pay for a website annually to any building rent you will pay anywhere else. And it’s always the least expensive and highest value back. But anywhere between $10 and $50 a month. You can really get some good service everyone. So it if you’re pinching pennies on the hosting, don’t do it. The second thing I’ll say is we love Canva. Everyone, but Canva is a culprit. Canvas a culprit when Stephanie mentioned your file size. And then I’m glad you said it’s definitely because it it went I had to go back to a time where I was looking at my website. I’m like, Man, why is it low? So slow? I’m the type of person that are going to Best Buy. And like on the computers. They’re low, my website. Just see. Yeah, that’s good. That’s right, on a new computer that’s not cached. I don’t have any. It’s never been there. Right. So it showed me that some images, which is low, slow on my mobile device, I use other people’s phone low my website, everything else. And that’s when I realized that the default font of a Canva export is usually like 5x the size that you actually need. So everybody makes sure you’re checking the size of that template that you use in Canva. Because the size is so easy. You’re like, Oh yeah, you took them now, thumbnail, but when you look at it, it’s like 900 by 1200. And you just have a little bitty bio picture. So what I’ve learned to do is I make sure that I’ve got an SOP with my team that we go in, click that button that says compress. And then I changed the dimensions down you can scale it down. And then that gets me below usually around 100 kilobytes. And then I’ll go and upload it to like tiny ping or something like that and get it you can

Stephanie Hudson 14:03
get it under under 100. Yeah, under 100k is good, you should never I mean for most websites, you’re not really going to need anything wider than 10 ad. If and I’m not talking about a background image, it’s like full screen full with whatever but for the most part, any websites any images that aren’t shown up full full with full screen anywhere 10 ad is probably a safe number and it’s easy to remember because you think of 10 ADP so if you think of that number as you’re shrinking it down most of the time you need smaller than that even but that’s just a little rule of thumb if you’re not a if you’re not an image person Hey Chris Do you know how to tell if your site is fast or not other than going to BestBuy?

Chris Davis 14:46
No, I’m sure there’s way that’s like my main go to borrow somebody’s that

Stephanie Hudson 14:53
was a good one was a good one. Yeah. There’s a website called G T metrics me TR exe, it’s free. You can, they have paid accounts. But as I use a ton of things on there, I have a free account with them, you don’t even have to create an account. It’s just like they’re just saints of the internet, you can go on there and run a speed test. And it will give you a color coded grade, it’ll show you a bunch of gobbledygook about what’s going on under the hood. That’s the reason if it’s slow or not. But I’m using those results in combination with how it feels on the front end of your site. So Chris, when you and I were working on speeding up your site, for example, I was like, well, we’re only increasing it like we weren’t getting the results. I was hoping in the numbers as much like I wanted to get it a little bit higher, and you were like, it feels like lightning. And so it’s like, Okay, well then let’s not break, you know, like, let’s go with that. Right. So those numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s mostly to be used for figuring out what, like where the issues lie, but, but it can be a really, really useful tool for seeing what’s going on in your site. And just to get an idea of how fast it is loading.

Chris Davis 16:02
Yeah, and I want to kind of park here and speak for a minute because that’s probably one of the most important for a marketer, but I think holistically everybody needs their sight to low fast. I had a I had a situation where I came and we were really trying to get the most most of the juice out of the fruit and just squeezing really hard. And I have been struggling with this everyone for a long time. So I’ve run my courses and learning platform, my whole entire Academy is WordPress based. And I use LearnDash. It’s a learning management system and LMS plugin for WordPress. And I have just never been able I’ve tried different themes, I’ve tried to minimize my plugins, whatever the case is, it just wouldn’t, it couldn’t achieve the speed that I desire for people logging in and XYZ heavy resource, lots of calls to the database, all of that. And when you told me cheap hosting, you didn’t necessarily say cheap hosting, you didn’t say that. But you’re saying it’s it this problem may be your hosting, like we’re doing all we can, you may have to look at another hosting. Just talk people through something like LearnDash, for instance, may just require a specific type or a different type of hosting because of how it handles things. Are there anything in that vein that you want to talk about are any other plugins or instances you’ve seen that could mandate that?

Stephanie Hudson 17:35
Sure, there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood. And what let me sort of pause one second to explain another thing first, if you’ve you guys are familiar with caching, you know, like, cache me outside. Remember that check. I love that. Not that kind though, it caching is where the browser’s and it happens on multiple levels. But either your hosting company or the browsers will download files that are associated with your website. And they’ll sort of hang on to them, so that if somebody goes to it, it can serve them up really fast. So caching helps to speed up your site. That’s another thing that can be turned on in a few different places. However, when you have a site that is dynamic, like a learning management system, some e commerce things, stuff like that, you know, if you go and check, you’ve been on a site where you check a box or click something and the whole page reloads? Well, that’s different. When you’re on an LMS, you’re interacting, you’re ticking boxes and things are changing dynamically. Or if you’re looking at a shopping cart, and you tick a box to add something or remove something or increase the quantity or whatever. Those can’t be cached. Because they have to be changing dynamically, they you can’t be looking at the same thing that somebody else looked at in another session. So because of that, you lose the you lose that little advantage of being able to cache things, which makes the hosting even more important, regardless of the other stuff that’s going on under the hood. That being said, there’s still a lot more calls going back and forth to the database, and all kinds of geeky things that happen behind the scenes that that do require certain configuration from a hosting company.

Chris Davis 19:22
Yeah, I’m glad you said that. Because as marketers, everyone we’re looking at making pages dynamic and personalizing them. You want to be sure that if you are running a caching plugin or some kind of caching environment, and you want that page to be able to be served up to that user, depending on what they’re doing, maybe the source they came to from your website. If they’re logged in, they do a thing since they click this button, you want it to display differently. That was my case. I mean, I had a very personalized experience. Once you log in you complete a course something unlocks if you do something else We’re here displaying text. So I could not use caching or else, of course, it’d be outdated and would throw off the customer journey. So that’s what I’m saying I had a very special outside need. So yes, you want to not go with cheap hosting, but you also need professionals, like Stephanie and her company that can guide you through because I can’t tell you how many times I changed hosting, thinking like, Oh, it’ll be better over here. And it wasn’t in all of the hosting I tried was not terrible. It just wasn’t optimized for that particular use case and outcome.

Stephanie Hudson 20:41
Yeah. And if you if you guys want, I will, we’ve got a link to share at the end of the show. And I’ll put up a few recommendations for some of the hosting companies that we trust and use ourselves. We don’t offer hosting personally, at Focus WP, but we have we know enough about it to know which ones we trust and don’t trust. So yeah,

Chris Davis 21:01
yeah. And speaking of trust, I think that’s a great segue to go into Security. The second S which you mentioned, verse was speed. Next is security. I say this reservedly. Because, again, self taught web developer, I probably have had my back end out, you know, the hospitals. You think you’re all good, because the front is covered? You say, what’s that breeze back there? I’m bracing myself for what you’re going to say. But how do we approach security? What does that look like for just the average WordPress builder, a website builder that wants a website, their logo on it to look good, and people go to pages and fill out forms and provide information and hopefully, like, give money at some point.

Stephanie Hudson 21:47
There’s a lot there’s, there’s a lot you could do here too. But I can give sort of some basics of some good things. One that is almost a non issue anymore, is you want to have an SSL certificate, which comes through the hosting company, it’s usually sort of a no brainer, there was a time period a few years back where this was a huge deal, and everybody had to have this added. But now you’ll have the little green lock, and you will get big red scary warnings from the browser, if you don’t have it. So that’s a good thing to have your that that just keeps your communication from the server and back, sort of encrypted, it keeps it secure. So that’s one thing. Another thing that is one of the easiest things to do, is to limit the access that the users on your website have. So if you log into your website account, how many admin level users are there, your website is only ever as secure as the weakest admin password is a little thing I like to say. So if you’ve got multiple people that have admin access to your site, do they really need it. Sometimes even if we build a site for a client, the client doesn’t even need it. They can have editor access or lower levels, there are various levels that are built into WordPress. And then when you add things like LearnDash, or other systems in it adds other user levels as well. And so you just want to make sure that you give them as much access as they need, but not more than that. The second thing is, of course, to make sure that people are using secure passwords, you can set in WordPress to force that. And you can turn on two factor authentication, which is a little bit the bane of our modern existence, I get it, it’s super annoying that everywhere you log in, somebody’s going to email you or text you a code, you gotta go get and then put that thing and it’s like passwords weren’t bad enough. Now we have to do two things. But but it is unbelievably good for securing your website. So just just the just the user element alone, limiting the access and having it be really secure passwords. That goes a long way to locking down a website. That’s, that’s number one. Do you have me to go into more? Well,

Chris Davis 24:00
let me let me just see if I can say this. You’re only as secure as the lowest users password strength,

Stephanie Hudson 24:10
the weakest admin password.

Chris Davis 24:13
Okay, you’re only as secure as the weakest admin password. I have a to do to check all my admins and make sure their password is nice in very well. What is it? Very difficult to guess. I can see that. I’ve listened Stephanie I’ve been on the receiving end of somebody giving me access to their website. And the password literally is 1234. And I cringe because no password should be that but now when you put it in the context of website security. Oh geez. Even more scary. Okay, go on.

Stephanie Hudson 24:47
Yeah, no, it’s it’s easy to do. And we all have a million passwords and nobody wants to deal with it. But you know, get a password keeper, use LastPass or one password or one Those, they all have skill, there’s all there’s people that are scared of all of them. But listen, if you’re writing stuff down on a sticky note, or using an insecure password, that’s worse, trust me, like, just do it just get something where you can keep those things secure. And, and then you don’t have to stress out about having a 20 or 30 character password, just click a button, and it puts it right in. Yeah, so. So the users are one, you want to make sure again, that your host is using proper security protocols and things that’s a little bit more tricky to understand. That’s why if you go with one of these more reputable hosts that we trust, that’s, that’s a good thing. And then also, you can add a plugin. So both wordfence and I themes have a free and a premium level, both of their free levels are great. And they will do you a world of good. We, we use the premium I theme security plugin, which adds a bunch of more security features on there. But that in and of itself is, is a really solid choice, either one of the free plugins, you just install those, you can even just run basically the default settings, they both have little onboarding thing. And that will get you a big chunk of the way toward locking things down a bit as well.

Chris Davis 26:15
Yeah. And listeners, I hope you’re seeing the value here. Because though, we may have came out of the gate telling you, hey, you need to pay more for that hosting, listen to all of these resources that Stephanie has mentioned, that are at no cost, but high quality. Okay, so I always like to grow into necessity, where you’re at is probably fine for the free version of a lot of these tools. And by the time you need something more, your business has proven that it needs more. So I don’t, you can’t just go out there and start installing free plugins, everyone, you’ve got to have the right guidance to do so. And speaking of free, I don’t know where this lands, but you gave me a free tool that just really made stuff so much easier. It was really the counterpart to the marketing layer on websites. And it was a company called Cloudflare. And you gave you said, Chris, you heard what I was doing, how I was handling things, you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna give this to you. It’s free. It’s got a bunch of

Stephanie Hudson 27:21
trying to take it to the next level Now out of these folks, but it helped. We’re already laying some tech stuff on them, you’re gonna blow their minds. It was

Chris Davis 27:29
so great. Listen to everybody. Stephanie was so passionate about it. She had me sign up while we this is the same call on Saturday. And I did I signed on I did. I’m all the way in Cloudflare. Now. So I just wanted to mention that in let you explain what is Cloudflare? And why should they be thinking about it in the manner in which you presented it to me,

Stephanie Hudson 27:55
okay, so this goes, I’m gonna try and make this as simple as I can. And don’t for those of you out there who are marketers, and not web developers, I’ve actually been on a mission lately to educate more web developers about this, because this is something that is crucial to how websites work and function. But it’s technical. And so a lot of people shy away from it and don’t fully understand it and feel intimidated by it. It is not something that you need to feel intimidated about how which is sorry, I’m not even saying what it is your DNS, you don’t need to be intimidated by it. But you need to respect it. And understand the basics, at least with the basics, you can you’re perfectly capable of doing what you need to do for your website. The DNS is what routes, everything from your website. So you own your domain name. That’s a registrar, you have someone hold this one over here, that’s your registrar, you have your website hosting, you understand that that’s where all of your files live and your database lives and everything. And then there’s something else that is called your name server. And that’s where your DNS is managed. And a lot of people just lump that in with either where they buy their domain or where they host their website. And like we talked about the beginning, I don’t advise that I think it’s better to keep all of that separate, because it’s just too many. It’s like it’s too much riding on any one point of failure. So if you manage that separately, you can run your DNS through a company called Cloudflare. And you can do this for free as well. And it’s scary because you have to point your name servers to CloudFlare, which seems like you’re moving your hosting and all this other stuff and you’re not, but you have to use caution when you do this, follow some tutorials online or maybe by that hopefully by the time this is live, I’ll have my little tutorial out for it because this isn’t what I want to do. But, but basically, if you use CloudFlare, then that becomes this sort of navigational hub. So if somebody typed Send just your domain, it’ll say, oh, that goes to the hosting, boom, it’ll point them over there. If somebody sends you an email, it’s like, oh, that gets routed through Google workspace boom, sends you an email, if it if it’s somebody’s trying to FTP it, whatever any of the things are, if somebody wants to go to a subdomain, where does that point, you know, any of the things that are happening on your site, it runs through Cloudflare. And it’s this little like, it’s like the old lady with the little button, little cords at the telephone company, right? She’s like, you know, answering the phones and sending you to where you need to be, I’m going to plug in right here, right there. That’s what Cloudflare is doing. There’s a little old lady behind the scenes, I think, doing all that every time somebody goes to your website. And it’s, the other thing about that is, it adds a layer of security to your site. It helps to prevent a ton of bad things from happening. So when we install a security plugin, or an admin user, you know, we audit our end users and all of that they’ve already gotten to your website. So they’ve already gotten past that routing bit and gotten to the website, and then we’re trying to defend it. Well, Cloudflare does is it doesn’t even let it get it blocks them a step earlier. So you could see that that’s a big advantage. And some still get through, of course, but you know, that’s just another layer of protection. Plus, it’s just, it’s just so much better to have it through there. It’s such a great service. Yeah,

Chris Davis 31:23
I’m gonna give you all a couple use cases. One is, I was moving hosting. And because I had all of my name, and

Stephanie Hudson 31:37
I tell you, what, can I predict what it is? Yes. Okay, you moved hosting, and you moved your name servers? Because you were moving just this piece here, right? Like you weren’t changing your domain. You weren’t changing your email, you weren’t changing that stuff. You moved your hosting. But when they changed the name servers to point to it, it broke, everything else

Chris Davis 31:57
broke everything else. And I had to tie you

Stephanie Hudson 32:00
down. Yes, your everything. Yeah.

Chris Davis 32:04
And speaking of email, I’m using I was using Google domains, which got purchased by I think, Squarespace now or whatnot, wherever they got purchased by makes me feel yucky about. And I had all of my Google workspace email stuff configured in Google domains. So when it came time to change my hosting and point elsewhere, I had to go to Google and try to like, reconfigure that. And I think that was the thing that you’re like, you know, you should put that in Cloudflare. Because if I had it in CloudFlare, I’m just literally going in updating what’s called an A record every one that’s still the little thing that the lady who routes,

Stephanie Hudson 32:49
one of those little things in the in the punch, but what is that thing called? There’s a word for that? workboard? I don’t know. wires, right? Yeah,

Chris Davis 32:58
John Wick, they still had that in John Wick. So maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s

Stephanie Hudson 33:03
somebody there is great. He’s really fast.

Chris Davis 33:07
She’s amazing. One day, we’ll meet her. And then I just had to update the a record, which she took it from here and plugged it in here and then went to my new host doesn’t

Stephanie Hudson 33:16
even that doesn’t even touch your email. It doesn’t in any way it doesn’t your email doesn’t even know what happened. It’s like completely over here on doing its own thing. I’ll tell you something else for you. Marketing automation, folks. You know, speaking of your emails, you do those little law, SPF records, and your demark and your DKM. You guys know all those acronyms.

Chris Davis 33:40
We gotta get savage back on here and break those down here doing those?

Stephanie Hudson 33:44
Yes, where those things all live Cloudflare. So, again, they’re all in one place. So that if one of these properties or elements or something, if you want to change your email, or if you want to change your switch, not that you would ever switch from Active Campaign, you know, but if you wanted to change to it, maybe from something else, or whatever, right, like you, any of these changes you want to make it can all be done in that one place without affecting the other bits and pieces that are connected. Yeah,

Chris Davis 34:12
it’s really secure everyone and we’re at a deep level of technical here. I should have put a warning on the beginning.

Stephanie Hudson 34:20
That’s what you said. You want to start down Cloudflare I’m like really? Right. Okay.

Chris Davis 34:24
So I can they can listen, it’s up to my neck right now. Everyone does shredding just a little higher than most. And I’ll say this, don’t go at it alone. I had to get my new hosting provider to do it for me, which I met through Stephanie. He logged in and configured all the Cloudflare stuff. And I’ll say this everyone, the first pass that he did it, my website was faster already, just by letting Cloudflare handle the routing. So uh, Again, there’s, you know, Stephanie, I went to the, the focus WP website to do website maintenance, and I got in there and truth be told foolishly enough, I thought it was like a button that you’re gonna do, you’re gonna go into my website, click a button, do some things. But as you educated me on all of the things that we’re talking about on this podcast, which, by the way, is why I invited her, I’m like, nobody’s ever told me this, I never knew it. I, when you go and hire a web developer, most people are hiring, you know, the ones who can do it for the cheapest or the fastest. And this is just a wealth of information that you need to know about, if you’re going to keep your website up and running, which means your business would stay up and running. So let’s go to the last s because I can I can, we’ll go on forever. Seo, what what do we need to know about SEO and have have covered?

Stephanie Hudson 35:54
So we’re talking about the basic levels of all of these things, right? SEO is its own whole entire ocean of information, and techniques and tactics and all of these things. But if you’re going to have a website that is set up for success, you you need to have what I call, I like to say I make my websites SEO ready. And what I mean by that that’s not so if I launch a new website, and they’re not hiring me for SEO or anything like that, or if I’m auditing a website, and they’re not hiring me for ongoing SEO, I will still check all of these things to make sure that this website is ready for an SEO endeavor. And there are a few things that Google looks for in, in the technical side of things, right, you want to have the meta tags that that’s like a, it sounds like the early 2000s kind of slang, like the meta tags, people would put words in there. But what the meta tags are on your site there, it’s the title of your page. It’s the description of your page, it’s things like that, you want to make sure that all of that stuff is if there’s an excerpt or not, you want to make sure that all of that is there. And it is clear that those are the things that will, by the way, in 90% of the time anyway, show up on a Google search. So those things are very important for click throughs and stuff like that. You want to also make sure that you have like a featured image things, you know, have you ever seen somebody share, like a personal site of theirs, and it’s like the middle of a big wide image that got cropped, or it’s something completely unrelated to what they’re sharing or whatever, and it throws you off and it doesn’t feel legit. The other thing about oh, what was there was one other thing I was just gonna say about this, and I forgot, oh, I remember the H tags on your website. Here is this is going to be it’s not hard. But this is important. You guys, the H tags are not for styling, your website. We sometimes were like, Oh, this is a big, I want this to look big. I’m gonna make it an h1. Yeah. Okay. The reason that that’s defaults to a big size is because that’s supposed to be the most important thing on your page. So if you ever remember like back in, in school, when you would make like an outline with Roman numerals, right, like Roman numeral one, and then it would have like, underneath that, it would be like a, b, c, and under those would be like the little eye, two eyes, three eyes, right. So think of those as your H tags, they are making up the outline of your page. The H one is the title of the outline. So there’s only one of those, and then you go down, you have h2, and then you can break down under there. And you can have some H threes under there. Maybe even H fours it goes all the way to six. But I don’t know very many people who go that deep to build up a pretty long, detailed article. And then you can have another h2. And you can have some more H threes and fours under their little, it’s the little points within there. And that is one of the things that Google scans. And that gives them an idea of what that page is about. So that they know whether or not that’s going to serve the person who is searching for information. So if that’s clear, and you are the one that’s going to answer their questions, then Google will serve your site up for them to click on. So that’s a little thing. And if you it doesn’t matter what those look like on the front end. So sometimes what I will do is if I want the if like the page title, if it needs to have keywords in it and things like that, I will make a big fancy word that’s like, check this awesome thing out. And then underneath it, it will be the keyword rich, which is smaller. So it’s two, don’t get caught up in how the H text looks on your site. Make sure that you’re structuring it the other way the styles can be done, like the styles can be changed. But you want to make sure that Google because Google’s not looking at it visually. It’s reading the code. So you want to make sure that Google and Bing and everybody else can read those that outline of the page. Yeah, that’s

Chris Davis 40:02
really good. Those Those H tags everyone there, they’re there for instructing Google to find you quicker not just for design where I know that’s where I initially found is like, Oh, this is how you make a blog stand out bigger text, small and text, big, bold, black, Indian, this is off gray. And so yes, you can make it look good later. But use those H tags effectively. And here’s one thing that I stumbled upon. And when you mentioned, featured images, this is extremely important, everybody. Now I use an SEO plugin that allows me to do all of this stuff without one I don’t, I really don’t know how you would do it. But it’s a little, it’s a, it’s not a hack. This is just functionality that you need to understand how it works. When you share your your your page on social media, it’s going to pull your featured image. And it’s going to pull from two places, you can do it at the page or article level, or you can do it at the website level, you can do like a fallback image at the website level so that if you never upload a featured image I forget to in displays. Here’s what I will say to you, that featured image is so important, because sometimes you can use it like an ad. So that if someone else that is unknown to you comes across your article was like, hey, check out this cool article, all they’re doing is copying and pasting is sharing that article. But now in Apple messages, I know in Google messages, it does the same thing. It pulls that image. So you’ve got real real estate to make something compelling, you could add text to that image, but I don’t I no longer look at it as a featured image, just like the ad, the organic add to this page or post is how I design you know, for those for that that particular

Stephanie Hudson 41:52
and I’ll throw a couple more tips on top of that if you’d like you don’t actually have to have an SEO plugin to do a featured image. The SEO plugins are a great idea. We use all in one. No, we use SEO press Pro. All In One SEO is another good one. Yoast is another good one that they have, you know, there’s just different ones that different people prefer they all basically are good. So when you even without an SEO plugin, if you look at a page or a post, in that right hand column that’s got like the Update button in the upper right and all that and there’s all that stuff down below. If you get all the way to the bottom, it will say Featured Image. And you can add an image right there from your media library or upload a new one. So you can do that on each and every page. The SEO plugins offer the fallback, which is really useful in case you forget or if it doesn’t have something special. There’s also a setting in some themes. Excuse me, I think it’s in the themes that that will let you use the first image in that poster page as the featured image, which is also useful, especially if you’re doing a blog post. And you’re gonna put the big fancy like cover image on the top, and then it just will automatically grab that and use it as your featured image. However, you want to make sure to again, that it shares well, because sometimes it looks junky, here’s another little tip, excuse me, sorry, I keep choking. The if you go and I can never remember the URL, I always just Google it myself. Go Google Facebook, debug, and it will pull up a link. And this is another free tool. Man, I’m giving all the freebies away today, because it’s another I’m giving away all my secrets, that stuff for free. It’s a tool where you can put in the page has to be public. And you put in the link to your new post or page. What if you’ve just put a new blog post up, let’s say you put that link in and click the button to crawl. I can’t remember what the button says. But you click that button and it will show you what that page will look like if you share it. Or if it comes up in search results. If you don’t like how it looks, go change it. But remember to come back and re scan it. Because if you don’t, it’s like Facebook at least has now saved in cash that previous way. So go back and redo it again until it looks right. And then you’ll be so then you have competency you know how to do it and you don’t have to go like I pretty much all of us have done at one time or another right? You go and share it on social media and then delete it really quick once you see what it looks like.

Chris Davis 44:31
Yep, yep, yep. And some people do it. And they’re like, how do I change this? Why does it keep doing that? That’s why folks that is why so oh my goodness, such such goodness. And again, it it’s worth repeating. Listen, I’ve been using the internet in websites on it and building for over a decade and I’m just now finding the stuff out and that’s what technology does definitely it low As the barrier of entry to absolute zero, and anybody can get in and start doing this stuff in, there’s no body mandating or no quality control to say, hey, wait a minute, you’re using those H tags wrong. So until you get it right, your website won’t work. No, this is the Wild Wild West, people can just put any and everything out there. So I don’t want you all to be lost. And I can feel it. Stephanie, I can feel it. We’re about 40 minutes in ish. And somebody’s eyes glazed over. They’re like, Man, I really liked this podcast because it teaches me so much marketing stuff. This isn’t that this one may have short circuiting their breach, they’re just like, Okay, you actually lost me at DNS. I just tapped out. Yeah, I

Stephanie Hudson 45:43
went for the record. That was Chris’s idea. I knew that was pretty much I knew that was

Chris Davis 45:49
they needed it. Listen, go back and rewind. They were on the elliptical, and they just couldn’t do it. I just like, I just gotta keep listening to it. Or they were jogging, driving something. But since you made it in the shower,

Stephanie Hudson 46:00
I’m a big shower podcast listener, right, you can hit some buttons, then

Chris Davis 46:05
it hit it, just had to listen to it. So those of you that have endorsed now, on the flip side, there’s people that are just like, give me more where who is Stephanie? Let me find out more. Right. So I got a mixed bag. But for both, there is an extra s that as Stephanie was talking, I was like, Hey, wait a minute, there’s one more. And that’s service. All right. You should not be doing this alone. Stephanie and I were Facebook chatting. And she asked me she said, Who’s Who’s maintaining your website. And I was like hesitantly the second she asked, she wasn’t judging me, she was just trying to get a gauge. I instantly felt small. And it was like, I couldn’t tell her the truth. And I said me, and she just responded with one of those astonished emojis. And the reason being is because I am now a firm believer after working with a company, you should not be doing much of anything on your website, if you don’t have to, I really, really recommend that you let

Stephanie Hudson 47:09
you know, I don’t know much of you shouldn’t do much of anything. But the things that are the crucial Hi

Chris Davis 47:16
know, the crucial, so it’s all those who endured this podcast know some of the crucial

Stephanie Hudson 47:24
guys handle the content and the automations, leave the rest of us.

Chris Davis 47:29
It’s just like, if you if you’re gonna get a home built, don’t ask your cousin, your brother, your neighbor, just just go to the reputable company, you don’t have to worry about the floor falling in and the house collapsing. I’ve seen too many websites go wrong, I really have. And you have a means now, there is a service available to you, where they will maintain your website and be your eyes and ears when you don’t know what to look for what to listen for. So Stephanie, give the listeners a little bit of insight of what the service is, how they can get started with it and where they should go.

Stephanie Hudson 48:10
We do we offer care plans, it is a white label service that we do that means you can use it for yourself or you can use it for your customers or your clients websites. And they won’t even know that we’re there. We will we we update everything. Every week, all the plugins themes, anything that needs updated, we clear out all of the junk messages in the back end that are trying to sell you something. We optimize things clear out the database, we do all the things that are like, you don’t even want to know about it, right? It’s just boring technical stuff, we also we run backups every single day of your site. So just in case something, you know tragic were to happen or something breaks, we can roll it back. And we send you a report at the end of the month that you will have your logo on it. So if you want to just forward it to your clients if you do that. And by the way, did I mentioned Chris that it is stupid cheap? It is $34 a month, it’s $34 a month. And if you want to resell this, you can charge easily $99 a month for what we offer some charge even, you know 50% or 100% More than that. And then if you have three customers with us, then we’ll maintain your site for free. So

Chris Davis 49:27
there you have it. Yes. So where where do they go? Stephanie? Where? Wherever?

Stephanie Hudson 49:31
You mean? You mean I need a call to action? You marketers? Yeah, gotta get the market. My website is focused wp.co And if you guys go to focus wp.co/all systems go. You will hear you’ll get to see some more info about all of this. And you might even get a fun little discount code just for being friends with Chris L Davis. Like I am Yeah, and, and also, I didn’t really talk about this, but we also offer development services and other agency services as well. We’re basically a full white label provider. So we do these care plans. And that’s like a small little thing. It’s just the thing we do. It’s just our bread and butter, we just crushed it out. But we also have six different agency teams that you can use as if they’re your own team. Like, we’ll just be your team. And we have developers, designers, copywriters, video editors, anybody, SEO experts, and we also have some vas, if you need just a little bit of admin help. So any of those teams, you can just come and buy some hours submit a ticket, it’s all just hourly, at a what I like to refer to as a markup double rate. Depends how many hours you buy at a time. And that’s it. I don’t know, I’m,

Chris Davis 50:55
no, that’s a little

Stephanie Hudson 50:56
lonely up here, Chris. I don’t know what, oh, good, you’re back.

Chris Davis 51:02
I’ll say this help has arrived, everyone. I am saying it, I am not trying to push products, I have nothing against pushing products, by the way, especially when you stand by him. But I just want to say I’ve dealt with this pain for so long. And I simply didn’t know where help could come from. So I just want to help you all. Just imagine with me, as we close everyone a day and age where you’re not logging into the back end of your website ever seeing all those red,

Stephanie Hudson 51:34
red circles? Oh,

Chris Davis 51:37
I’ve logged into websites where it’s like 50 updates available, and you just don’t want to touch anything at that point.

Stephanie Hudson 51:43
Do you know why it’s important to run those updates?

Chris Davis 51:45
I don’t, I think I do. But I’ll let you you say it,

Stephanie Hudson 51:49
there’s usually only two reasons. It’s either a feature or effects. So if, if it’s new, if it’s you know, if you’re running your LearnDash thing, and somebody’s they’re like adding on new modules or new whatever, that will be an update, if you are running LearnDash. And it’s a security patch. That’s because something is vulnerable in there. And the way to tell there’s also major and minor. And this is a little trick, if you guys aren’t super geeky, like me, it will be like maybe you’ll be on version 10 point 2.13 Or something like that, right. So the farther down to the right the numbers are, the less significant it is. The first number is a mate. If that first number is changing, that’s a major update. And you want to use extreme caution, make sure you have a backup and everything. The second number is kind of big. If it’s the third number, it’s probably something minor, like a little tweak or minor change to it, that probably won’t break anything. But you still want to use caution. And you don’t ever want to run updates without having a backup that you know how to restore. It doesn’t matter if you just have them, you got to know how to restore them. But But anyway, those are those are some tips. And one other thing. Like, Chris is sending me out on my website. And that’s great. I’m happy to have you. But I will almost always teach you how to do stuff and even tell you these all these free tools and things. Because I figure like, I didn’t make any of this up. I just figured out how to do it. And if you want to do it yourself, go for it. But if you get in there and you’re like this is awful. I want you to do it for me. Then we’re

Chris Davis 53:24
here. They’re here. Listen, people you see Stephanie has a wealth of knowledge. There’s just little bitty things that you didn’t know you didn’t know that will improve your life drastically. Thank you so much, Stephanie for coming on to the podcast. This has been everything I hoped for. And more

Stephanie Hudson 53:45
prayers I will speak out with you any day of the week my friend

Chris Davis 53:48
Yes, this is probably one of our shortest meetings everyone by the way. One of our

Stephanie Hudson 53:54
right Wait, Chris was on my podcasts already.

Chris Davis 53:57
I was yes, yes. Yes, the Divi chat was on there. If you’re in my community you have the link and I also emailed so find that blew everybody’s mind there. Yes. So So now you’ve returned a favor and blew everyone’s mind on mine. Thank you again Stephanie. Greatly appreciated. listeners. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Even if you have a headache right now. You’re welcome for that headache because you’re going to be better because of it. I promise you you will. I hope you got the value from it. I want to say thank you for taking the time out to listen whether you’re on the elliptical or in the shower, jogging, or next to your spouse or your best friend just listening to good old Chris and his next guest listen, I appreciate driving trucks. I met I met folks that drive trucks for a living and listen so thank you all for your listenership. I greatly appreciate it. Everyone. As always,

Stephanie Hudson 54:54
I would like to make an apology if you are before you finish your tag. Yes. If you’d like to listen at one point get to five speed like me. I’m sorry, because I talk way faster than Chris. So this is gonna be like a torture episode you either gotta listen to me super fast speed or Chris really slow.

Chris Davis 55:13
I take my time. I hope I hope one, I’m usually a 1.5 1.75 type of guys, sometimes I can get up to two. So no harm, no foul here, but again, everyone’s Stephanie’s wealth of knowledge. And we have the same middle initial. So anyways, thank you all. Thank you all for listening, as the shirt says, Everybody continue, can

Stephanie Hudson 55:37
I do it? Can I do art going? Automate responsibly,

Chris Davis 55:41
my friends. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge. And today, this is I’m looking out for you all today. Okay. I try to do my best to give the best guidance when it comes to marketing and technology. And usually, that will actually always, that’s always it takes place online and you need a nice, secure home. Okay, you need a place that you can be very comfortable and confident can handle your business and your marketing without worrying that places your website. So I have been looking high and low, far and wide to find a valuable, valuable, highly individual with high acumen to teach us about the three S’s and potentially four S’s of your website for entrepreneurs. Let me say this, I am a self taught web developer. There’s all kinds of bad habits I’ve picked up, and all kinds of things I just don’t know. And it wasn’t until I talked to today’s guests where it highlighted not just how foolish I am sometimes on the on the internet on website building. But also a nice reminder that there’s always someone smarter than you that specializes in the exact thing you may know a little bit about. And the best thing is they she also has a means for you to take advantage of such acumen and resources for a very, very competitive investment. We’ll say so, today’s episode, everybody, please welcome Stephanie Hudson, and she is a geek, entrepreneur, inventor and notebook hoarder. Now this is important anybody who’s a notebook hoarder, we know has some kind of strong affinity towards writing, like they did back in the day pen and paper. So this is Stephanie. She started building websites way back in the days of dial up internet, and chunky motors, leveraging nearly three decades of experience she’s able to share the tactics and confidence digital agencies need in order to scale and thrive through coaching, mentorship, and her white label company which we will talk about later. Focus WP Stephanie, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? What

Stephanie Hudson 3:06
is up Chris? It’s so good to be here. I’m really excited and I That’s the worst part about being on an interview or anything is having the bio read I know you did a good job. Oh, it’s so awkward.

Chris Davis 3:22
It’s a thing and and I want to listen I want to dive in and give some behind the curtains. Stephanie and I met through a mutual friend actually everybody knows because she’s been on the podcast a couple of times KPC so she continues to be my AC BFF as well as it’s expanding to just like all things Internet software and recommendation so just a huge resource. And K is awesome. She She absolutely is and how we got connected we spent an entire Saturday we did not know each other by the way me and you know, okay, you and I because Stephanie I went through her company to get my my website tuned up. And she reached out her personally reached out to make sure everything was okay. And offered to jump on a call. So I’m a little hesitant because it’s the weekend everybody’s like a Saturday I’m a family person. Should I really take time away from my family and you know, jump on this call. But I did it and oh my goodness. She we, I think between everything that you shared and just sharing our stories and resources and everything. It was like hey, look, even if you didn’t want to be my friend. You can’t you can’t not be my reluctant

Stephanie Hudson 4:36
you guys it was supposed to it was like I think we scheduled a 20 minute chat. Yeah, and I believe we were on the call for two and a half hours.

Chris Davis 4:46
Easily. Easily everybody I was so big.

Stephanie Hudson 4:49
We would like talk anything one of us would say the other one be like oh my gosh, I’m also I have something about that. You know? Yes, it was super fun.

Chris Davis 4:57
Absolutely. And what what made me They, you’ve got to come on the podcast everybody is if if you’re an avid podcast listener, you know that I have an episode called the marketing layer. And it’s the teaching that you should have your landing pages separate from your website so that if your website goes down, your marketing stays up. And I was so refreshed, and we’ll talk about it to hear that Stephanie uses a similar approach to like your domain and hosting. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, like you, you are the me and websites, like, I should share for all expertise to you and your company. Just like I would expect somebody to do that for me and marketing and technology. So let’s start from the from the top here. You came up with this? I didn’t I just introduced it. Stephanie. There are three S’s to having an effective website presents for entrepreneurs online today. What are those Ss?

Stephanie Hudson 6:02
There’s Okay, so there’s a lot of factors. There’s more letters than just three S’s. But, and also, by the way, if you’re always watching and not listening, I have an absolutely insane three month old kitten who loves to attack me while I’m on podcast, which is super embarrassing. Yeah, I hate it anyway. So websites, they have a lot of different things that you need. But when you are setting up websites for your clients, when you’re doing getting these things prepared for other people in particular, also for yourself, too, though, there’s the three S’s that I think would be really useful for everyone to really focus in on with the new site, or even the landing pages and things like that. You want to look at your speed, your security and your SEO. Those are my three S’s for today.

Chris Davis 6:50
Speed, everybody security and SEO. And I know it’s there’s some listeners, this is what they did. Stephanie, they heard that and they’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got that. I got that. Yeah, always. You gotta be fast. It’s got to be secure. And yeah, you need SEO. All right, next episode. Pause, everyone pause, because I want to put myself on display here. I’ve had troubles with website speed, not my automation bridge website, per se, that one’s been pretty good. But depending on your back end technology, and I’m not talking about like the amount of plugins I’m moreso talking about the type of plugins and different website builds require different resources. So so in this, let’s start with the first S. Where do people miss the mark when they’re trying to achieve the fastest website speed? And what do they really need to be mindful two

Stephanie Hudson 7:46
words. Two words are the actual problem. Tons of the time. cheap hosting. Sorry, I hate to say it, shared hosting, if you really want speed you, you need to have some resources devoted. And it just makes sense that you’re not going to get the top of the line, if you’re going for the 299 a month hosting plans, there are different types of setups, there are different types of servers, there are all kinds of different things that are going on under the hood that need optimization, to run properly, and to be able to deliver a fast site. The second most common issue on top and by the way, just because it’s not cheap, doesn’t mean it has to be super expensive either. There are some very reasonable options, you’re not looking at hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month for hosting, you can easily get superfast hosting for less than 50 bucks a month. So if you could spend $30 A month would that be worth it, to have a fast website, you know, something like that would be really doable. Okay, so then the next most important thing with speed is images that will always be the next culprit, people uploading images that are too big. Either they are too big in their dimensions, like they’re too wide and too tall for the space they’re in. So they’re only going to ever show this big, but you’re loading a file that’s that big. The other thing is even if they’re the right dimensions, they could be too big of a file size or too heavy of a file. So the one of the best ways is to have your files optimized ahead of time. But if you don’t, if you’re not a Photoshop user or whatever, there are some online tools that you can use. But one of the other things that I try to always have on a site is an image optimization plugin. There’s a ton of them out there. They almost all have a free level. shortpixel is the one that we’ve been using for a while but there’s a bunch and you put that on your site and you set the maximums that you want to file to be and then it will automatically upload it and I even use that in conjunction with Photoshop because it still is always able to, to squeeze it down just a little little bit smaller in size without degrading the quality of it. So those are the two top tips for speeding up your website.

Chris Davis 10:07
I’ve got to jump in here this is listen. So what I’m gonna say is Stephanie put the gun on the table and water gun everybody. Okay, water gun, something light, but I’m going to be the one firing shots. Okay, I usually reserve this for my premium podcast, but I’m going to say this because it has been a lifetime of terrible service and experience with everybody on their platform. I’m going to say Stephanie, listen, everybody, I’m on my own island. Stephanie. We did

Stephanie Hudson 10:38
not know what you’re gonna say. Yes, no

Chris Davis 10:40
kidding. I’m about to say you’re for it. Stay away from GoDaddy. Everybody listened to me

Stephanie Hudson 10:46
I was I was like, Please

Chris Davis 10:49
run the other I cannot stand their hosting their pricing their server. Everything about GoDaddy just I’ve never had a good experience. Never had a good experience. Thankfully, I’ve never signed up with them. I know a lot of people will buy their domain from them. Okay, go go for it. But

Stephanie Hudson 11:09
they are domains from is the least is the least bad thing. Yep. So don’t freak out if you have domains that you own through them. But yeah, and then if you go all the way to the other end of their managed services and all that they have some good stuff there. But your basic run of the mill I mean, I don’t do that is what most people do their basic run of the mill that remember Danica Patrick, she’s I think it’s her fault when the gutter all this. It’s her fault. I say that all the time too. I blame Danica Patrick yes state of affairs on the internet and all these websites is

Chris Davis 11:41
like you know, Hooters meets a race car driver. Oh, Go Daddy a sexy look at if you want to be here

Stephanie Hudson 11:49
tried to make the hosting sexy.

Chris Davis 11:51
He tried to make those things.

Stephanie Hudson 11:54
It’s just not be sexy.

Chris Davis 11:57
It really shouldn’t. So stay away from cheap hosting. Like Stephanie said, I believe the best expectation for a website. And let me say this everyone, this is your home online. Compare what what you’re about to pay for a website annually to any building rent you will pay anywhere else. And it’s always the least expensive and highest value back. But anywhere between $10 and $50 a month. You can really get some good service everyone. So it if you’re pinching pennies on the hosting, don’t do it. The second thing I’ll say is we love Canva. Everyone, but Canva is a culprit. Canvas a culprit when Stephanie mentioned your file size. And then I’m glad you said it’s definitely because it it went I had to go back to a time where I was looking at my website. I’m like, Man, why is it low? So slow? I’m the type of person that are going to Best Buy. And like on the computers. They’re low, my website. Just see. Yeah, that’s good. That’s right, on a new computer that’s not cached. I don’t have any. It’s never been there. Right. So it showed me that some images, which is low, slow on my mobile device, I use other people’s phone low my website, everything else. And that’s when I realized that the default font of a Canva export is usually like 5x the size that you actually need. So everybody makes sure you’re checking the size of that template that you use in Canva. Because the size is so easy. You’re like, Oh yeah, you took them now, thumbnail, but when you look at it, it’s like 900 by 1200. And you just have a little bitty bio picture. So what I’ve learned to do is I make sure that I’ve got an SOP with my team that we go in, click that button that says compress. And then I changed the dimensions down you can scale it down. And then that gets me below usually around 100 kilobytes. And then I’ll go and upload it to like tiny ping or something like that and get it you can

Stephanie Hudson 14:03
get it under under 100. Yeah, under 100k is good, you should never I mean for most websites, you’re not really going to need anything wider than 10 ad. If and I’m not talking about a background image, it’s like full screen full with whatever but for the most part, any websites any images that aren’t shown up full full with full screen anywhere 10 ad is probably a safe number and it’s easy to remember because you think of 10 ADP so if you think of that number as you’re shrinking it down most of the time you need smaller than that even but that’s just a little rule of thumb if you’re not a if you’re not an image person Hey Chris Do you know how to tell if your site is fast or not other than going to BestBuy?

Chris Davis 14:46
No, I’m sure there’s way that’s like my main go to borrow somebody’s that

Stephanie Hudson 14:53
was a good one was a good one. Yeah. There’s a website called G T metrics me TR exe, it’s free. You can, they have paid accounts. But as I use a ton of things on there, I have a free account with them, you don’t even have to create an account. It’s just like they’re just saints of the internet, you can go on there and run a speed test. And it will give you a color coded grade, it’ll show you a bunch of gobbledygook about what’s going on under the hood. That’s the reason if it’s slow or not. But I’m using those results in combination with how it feels on the front end of your site. So Chris, when you and I were working on speeding up your site, for example, I was like, well, we’re only increasing it like we weren’t getting the results. I was hoping in the numbers as much like I wanted to get it a little bit higher, and you were like, it feels like lightning. And so it’s like, Okay, well then let’s not break, you know, like, let’s go with that. Right. So those numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s mostly to be used for figuring out what, like where the issues lie, but, but it can be a really, really useful tool for seeing what’s going on in your site. And just to get an idea of how fast it is loading.

Chris Davis 16:02
Yeah, and I want to kind of park here and speak for a minute because that’s probably one of the most important for a marketer, but I think holistically everybody needs their sight to low fast. I had a I had a situation where I came and we were really trying to get the most most of the juice out of the fruit and just squeezing really hard. And I have been struggling with this everyone for a long time. So I’ve run my courses and learning platform, my whole entire Academy is WordPress based. And I use LearnDash. It’s a learning management system and LMS plugin for WordPress. And I have just never been able I’ve tried different themes, I’ve tried to minimize my plugins, whatever the case is, it just wouldn’t, it couldn’t achieve the speed that I desire for people logging in and XYZ heavy resource, lots of calls to the database, all of that. And when you told me cheap hosting, you didn’t necessarily say cheap hosting, you didn’t say that. But you’re saying it’s it this problem may be your hosting, like we’re doing all we can, you may have to look at another hosting. Just talk people through something like LearnDash, for instance, may just require a specific type or a different type of hosting because of how it handles things. Are there anything in that vein that you want to talk about are any other plugins or instances you’ve seen that could mandate that?

Stephanie Hudson 17:35
Sure, there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood. And what let me sort of pause one second to explain another thing first, if you’ve you guys are familiar with caching, you know, like, cache me outside. Remember that check. I love that. Not that kind though, it caching is where the browser’s and it happens on multiple levels. But either your hosting company or the browsers will download files that are associated with your website. And they’ll sort of hang on to them, so that if somebody goes to it, it can serve them up really fast. So caching helps to speed up your site. That’s another thing that can be turned on in a few different places. However, when you have a site that is dynamic, like a learning management system, some e commerce things, stuff like that, you know, if you go and check, you’ve been on a site where you check a box or click something and the whole page reloads? Well, that’s different. When you’re on an LMS, you’re interacting, you’re ticking boxes and things are changing dynamically. Or if you’re looking at a shopping cart, and you tick a box to add something or remove something or increase the quantity or whatever. Those can’t be cached. Because they have to be changing dynamically, they you can’t be looking at the same thing that somebody else looked at in another session. So because of that, you lose the you lose that little advantage of being able to cache things, which makes the hosting even more important, regardless of the other stuff that’s going on under the hood. That being said, there’s still a lot more calls going back and forth to the database, and all kinds of geeky things that happen behind the scenes that that do require certain configuration from a hosting company.

Chris Davis 19:22
Yeah, I’m glad you said that. Because as marketers, everyone we’re looking at making pages dynamic and personalizing them. You want to be sure that if you are running a caching plugin or some kind of caching environment, and you want that page to be able to be served up to that user, depending on what they’re doing, maybe the source they came to from your website. If they’re logged in, they do a thing since they click this button, you want it to display differently. That was my case. I mean, I had a very personalized experience. Once you log in you complete a course something unlocks if you do something else We’re here displaying text. So I could not use caching or else, of course, it’d be outdated and would throw off the customer journey. So that’s what I’m saying I had a very special outside need. So yes, you want to not go with cheap hosting, but you also need professionals, like Stephanie and her company that can guide you through because I can’t tell you how many times I changed hosting, thinking like, Oh, it’ll be better over here. And it wasn’t in all of the hosting I tried was not terrible. It just wasn’t optimized for that particular use case and outcome.

Stephanie Hudson 20:41
Yeah. And if you if you guys want, I will, we’ve got a link to share at the end of the show. And I’ll put up a few recommendations for some of the hosting companies that we trust and use ourselves. We don’t offer hosting personally, at Focus WP, but we have we know enough about it to know which ones we trust and don’t trust. So yeah,

Chris Davis 21:01
yeah. And speaking of trust, I think that’s a great segue to go into Security. The second S which you mentioned, verse was speed. Next is security. I say this reservedly. Because, again, self taught web developer, I probably have had my back end out, you know, the hospitals. You think you’re all good, because the front is covered? You say, what’s that breeze back there? I’m bracing myself for what you’re going to say. But how do we approach security? What does that look like for just the average WordPress builder, a website builder that wants a website, their logo on it to look good, and people go to pages and fill out forms and provide information and hopefully, like, give money at some point.

Stephanie Hudson 21:47
There’s a lot there’s, there’s a lot you could do here too. But I can give sort of some basics of some good things. One that is almost a non issue anymore, is you want to have an SSL certificate, which comes through the hosting company, it’s usually sort of a no brainer, there was a time period a few years back where this was a huge deal, and everybody had to have this added. But now you’ll have the little green lock, and you will get big red scary warnings from the browser, if you don’t have it. So that’s a good thing to have your that that just keeps your communication from the server and back, sort of encrypted, it keeps it secure. So that’s one thing. Another thing that is one of the easiest things to do, is to limit the access that the users on your website have. So if you log into your website account, how many admin level users are there, your website is only ever as secure as the weakest admin password is a little thing I like to say. So if you’ve got multiple people that have admin access to your site, do they really need it. Sometimes even if we build a site for a client, the client doesn’t even need it. They can have editor access or lower levels, there are various levels that are built into WordPress. And then when you add things like LearnDash, or other systems in it adds other user levels as well. And so you just want to make sure that you give them as much access as they need, but not more than that. The second thing is, of course, to make sure that people are using secure passwords, you can set in WordPress to force that. And you can turn on two factor authentication, which is a little bit the bane of our modern existence, I get it, it’s super annoying that everywhere you log in, somebody’s going to email you or text you a code, you gotta go get and then put that thing and it’s like passwords weren’t bad enough. Now we have to do two things. But but it is unbelievably good for securing your website. So just just the just the user element alone, limiting the access and having it be really secure passwords. That goes a long way to locking down a website. That’s, that’s number one. Do you have me to go into more? Well,

Chris Davis 24:00
let me let me just see if I can say this. You’re only as secure as the lowest users password strength,

Stephanie Hudson 24:10
the weakest admin password.

Chris Davis 24:13
Okay, you’re only as secure as the weakest admin password. I have a to do to check all my admins and make sure their password is nice in very well. What is it? Very difficult to guess. I can see that. I’ve listened Stephanie I’ve been on the receiving end of somebody giving me access to their website. And the password literally is 1234. And I cringe because no password should be that but now when you put it in the context of website security. Oh geez. Even more scary. Okay, go on.

Stephanie Hudson 24:47
Yeah, no, it’s it’s easy to do. And we all have a million passwords and nobody wants to deal with it. But you know, get a password keeper, use LastPass or one password or one Those, they all have skill, there’s all there’s people that are scared of all of them. But listen, if you’re writing stuff down on a sticky note, or using an insecure password, that’s worse, trust me, like, just do it just get something where you can keep those things secure. And, and then you don’t have to stress out about having a 20 or 30 character password, just click a button, and it puts it right in. Yeah, so. So the users are one, you want to make sure again, that your host is using proper security protocols and things that’s a little bit more tricky to understand. That’s why if you go with one of these more reputable hosts that we trust, that’s, that’s a good thing. And then also, you can add a plugin. So both wordfence and I themes have a free and a premium level, both of their free levels are great. And they will do you a world of good. We, we use the premium I theme security plugin, which adds a bunch of more security features on there. But that in and of itself is, is a really solid choice, either one of the free plugins, you just install those, you can even just run basically the default settings, they both have little onboarding thing. And that will get you a big chunk of the way toward locking things down a bit as well.

Chris Davis 26:15
Yeah. And listeners, I hope you’re seeing the value here. Because though, we may have came out of the gate telling you, hey, you need to pay more for that hosting, listen to all of these resources that Stephanie has mentioned, that are at no cost, but high quality. Okay, so I always like to grow into necessity, where you’re at is probably fine for the free version of a lot of these tools. And by the time you need something more, your business has proven that it needs more. So I don’t, you can’t just go out there and start installing free plugins, everyone, you’ve got to have the right guidance to do so. And speaking of free, I don’t know where this lands, but you gave me a free tool that just really made stuff so much easier. It was really the counterpart to the marketing layer on websites. And it was a company called Cloudflare. And you gave you said, Chris, you heard what I was doing, how I was handling things, you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna give this to you. It’s free. It’s got a bunch of

Stephanie Hudson 27:21
trying to take it to the next level Now out of these folks, but it helped. We’re already laying some tech stuff on them, you’re gonna blow their minds. It was

Chris Davis 27:29
so great. Listen to everybody. Stephanie was so passionate about it. She had me sign up while we this is the same call on Saturday. And I did I signed on I did. I’m all the way in Cloudflare. Now. So I just wanted to mention that in let you explain what is Cloudflare? And why should they be thinking about it in the manner in which you presented it to me,

Stephanie Hudson 27:55
okay, so this goes, I’m gonna try and make this as simple as I can. And don’t for those of you out there who are marketers, and not web developers, I’ve actually been on a mission lately to educate more web developers about this, because this is something that is crucial to how websites work and function. But it’s technical. And so a lot of people shy away from it and don’t fully understand it and feel intimidated by it. It is not something that you need to feel intimidated about how which is sorry, I’m not even saying what it is your DNS, you don’t need to be intimidated by it. But you need to respect it. And understand the basics, at least with the basics, you can you’re perfectly capable of doing what you need to do for your website. The DNS is what routes, everything from your website. So you own your domain name. That’s a registrar, you have someone hold this one over here, that’s your registrar, you have your website hosting, you understand that that’s where all of your files live and your database lives and everything. And then there’s something else that is called your name server. And that’s where your DNS is managed. And a lot of people just lump that in with either where they buy their domain or where they host their website. And like we talked about the beginning, I don’t advise that I think it’s better to keep all of that separate, because it’s just too many. It’s like it’s too much riding on any one point of failure. So if you manage that separately, you can run your DNS through a company called Cloudflare. And you can do this for free as well. And it’s scary because you have to point your name servers to CloudFlare, which seems like you’re moving your hosting and all this other stuff and you’re not, but you have to use caution when you do this, follow some tutorials online or maybe by that hopefully by the time this is live, I’ll have my little tutorial out for it because this isn’t what I want to do. But, but basically, if you use CloudFlare, then that becomes this sort of navigational hub. So if somebody typed Send just your domain, it’ll say, oh, that goes to the hosting, boom, it’ll point them over there. If somebody sends you an email, it’s like, oh, that gets routed through Google workspace boom, sends you an email, if it if it’s somebody’s trying to FTP it, whatever any of the things are, if somebody wants to go to a subdomain, where does that point, you know, any of the things that are happening on your site, it runs through Cloudflare. And it’s this little like, it’s like the old lady with the little button, little cords at the telephone company, right? She’s like, you know, answering the phones and sending you to where you need to be, I’m going to plug in right here, right there. That’s what Cloudflare is doing. There’s a little old lady behind the scenes, I think, doing all that every time somebody goes to your website. And it’s, the other thing about that is, it adds a layer of security to your site. It helps to prevent a ton of bad things from happening. So when we install a security plugin, or an admin user, you know, we audit our end users and all of that they’ve already gotten to your website. So they’ve already gotten past that routing bit and gotten to the website, and then we’re trying to defend it. Well, Cloudflare does is it doesn’t even let it get it blocks them a step earlier. So you could see that that’s a big advantage. And some still get through, of course, but you know, that’s just another layer of protection. Plus, it’s just, it’s just so much better to have it through there. It’s such a great service. Yeah,

Chris Davis 31:23
I’m gonna give you all a couple use cases. One is, I was moving hosting. And because I had all of my name, and

Stephanie Hudson 31:37
I tell you, what, can I predict what it is? Yes. Okay, you moved hosting, and you moved your name servers? Because you were moving just this piece here, right? Like you weren’t changing your domain. You weren’t changing your email, you weren’t changing that stuff. You moved your hosting. But when they changed the name servers to point to it, it broke, everything else

Chris Davis 31:57
broke everything else. And I had to tie you

Stephanie Hudson 32:00
down. Yes, your everything. Yeah.

Chris Davis 32:04
And speaking of email, I’m using I was using Google domains, which got purchased by I think, Squarespace now or whatnot, wherever they got purchased by makes me feel yucky about. And I had all of my Google workspace email stuff configured in Google domains. So when it came time to change my hosting and point elsewhere, I had to go to Google and try to like, reconfigure that. And I think that was the thing that you’re like, you know, you should put that in Cloudflare. Because if I had it in CloudFlare, I’m just literally going in updating what’s called an A record every one that’s still the little thing that the lady who routes,

Stephanie Hudson 32:49
one of those little things in the in the punch, but what is that thing called? There’s a word for that? workboard? I don’t know. wires, right? Yeah,

Chris Davis 32:58
John Wick, they still had that in John Wick. So maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s

Stephanie Hudson 33:03
somebody there is great. He’s really fast.

Chris Davis 33:07
She’s amazing. One day, we’ll meet her. And then I just had to update the a record, which she took it from here and plugged it in here and then went to my new host doesn’t

Stephanie Hudson 33:16
even that doesn’t even touch your email. It doesn’t in any way it doesn’t your email doesn’t even know what happened. It’s like completely over here on doing its own thing. I’ll tell you something else for you. Marketing automation, folks. You know, speaking of your emails, you do those little law, SPF records, and your demark and your DKM. You guys know all those acronyms.

Chris Davis 33:40
We gotta get savage back on here and break those down here doing those?

Stephanie Hudson 33:44
Yes, where those things all live Cloudflare. So, again, they’re all in one place. So that if one of these properties or elements or something, if you want to change your email, or if you want to change your switch, not that you would ever switch from Active Campaign, you know, but if you wanted to change to it, maybe from something else, or whatever, right, like you, any of these changes you want to make it can all be done in that one place without affecting the other bits and pieces that are connected. Yeah,

Chris Davis 34:12
it’s really secure everyone and we’re at a deep level of technical here. I should have put a warning on the beginning.

Stephanie Hudson 34:20
That’s what you said. You want to start down Cloudflare I’m like really? Right. Okay.

Chris Davis 34:24
So I can they can listen, it’s up to my neck right now. Everyone does shredding just a little higher than most. And I’ll say this, don’t go at it alone. I had to get my new hosting provider to do it for me, which I met through Stephanie. He logged in and configured all the Cloudflare stuff. And I’ll say this everyone, the first pass that he did it, my website was faster already, just by letting Cloudflare handle the routing. So uh, Again, there’s, you know, Stephanie, I went to the, the focus WP website to do website maintenance, and I got in there and truth be told foolishly enough, I thought it was like a button that you’re gonna do, you’re gonna go into my website, click a button, do some things. But as you educated me on all of the things that we’re talking about on this podcast, which, by the way, is why I invited her, I’m like, nobody’s ever told me this, I never knew it. I, when you go and hire a web developer, most people are hiring, you know, the ones who can do it for the cheapest or the fastest. And this is just a wealth of information that you need to know about, if you’re going to keep your website up and running, which means your business would stay up and running. So let’s go to the last s because I can I can, we’ll go on forever. Seo, what what do we need to know about SEO and have have covered?

Stephanie Hudson 35:54
So we’re talking about the basic levels of all of these things, right? SEO is its own whole entire ocean of information, and techniques and tactics and all of these things. But if you’re going to have a website that is set up for success, you you need to have what I call, I like to say I make my websites SEO ready. And what I mean by that that’s not so if I launch a new website, and they’re not hiring me for SEO or anything like that, or if I’m auditing a website, and they’re not hiring me for ongoing SEO, I will still check all of these things to make sure that this website is ready for an SEO endeavor. And there are a few things that Google looks for in, in the technical side of things, right, you want to have the meta tags that that’s like a, it sounds like the early 2000s kind of slang, like the meta tags, people would put words in there. But what the meta tags are on your site there, it’s the title of your page. It’s the description of your page, it’s things like that, you want to make sure that all of that stuff is if there’s an excerpt or not, you want to make sure that all of that is there. And it is clear that those are the things that will, by the way, in 90% of the time anyway, show up on a Google search. So those things are very important for click throughs and stuff like that. You want to also make sure that you have like a featured image things, you know, have you ever seen somebody share, like a personal site of theirs, and it’s like the middle of a big wide image that got cropped, or it’s something completely unrelated to what they’re sharing or whatever, and it throws you off and it doesn’t feel legit. The other thing about oh, what was there was one other thing I was just gonna say about this, and I forgot, oh, I remember the H tags on your website. Here is this is going to be it’s not hard. But this is important. You guys, the H tags are not for styling, your website. We sometimes were like, Oh, this is a big, I want this to look big. I’m gonna make it an h1. Yeah. Okay. The reason that that’s defaults to a big size is because that’s supposed to be the most important thing on your page. So if you ever remember like back in, in school, when you would make like an outline with Roman numerals, right, like Roman numeral one, and then it would have like, underneath that, it would be like a, b, c, and under those would be like the little eye, two eyes, three eyes, right. So think of those as your H tags, they are making up the outline of your page. The H one is the title of the outline. So there’s only one of those, and then you go down, you have h2, and then you can break down under there. And you can have some H threes under there. Maybe even H fours it goes all the way to six. But I don’t know very many people who go that deep to build up a pretty long, detailed article. And then you can have another h2. And you can have some more H threes and fours under their little, it’s the little points within there. And that is one of the things that Google scans. And that gives them an idea of what that page is about. So that they know whether or not that’s going to serve the person who is searching for information. So if that’s clear, and you are the one that’s going to answer their questions, then Google will serve your site up for them to click on. So that’s a little thing. And if you it doesn’t matter what those look like on the front end. So sometimes what I will do is if I want the if like the page title, if it needs to have keywords in it and things like that, I will make a big fancy word that’s like, check this awesome thing out. And then underneath it, it will be the keyword rich, which is smaller. So it’s two, don’t get caught up in how the H text looks on your site. Make sure that you’re structuring it the other way the styles can be done, like the styles can be changed. But you want to make sure that Google because Google’s not looking at it visually. It’s reading the code. So you want to make sure that Google and Bing and everybody else can read those that outline of the page. Yeah, that’s

Chris Davis 40:02
really good. Those Those H tags everyone there, they’re there for instructing Google to find you quicker not just for design where I know that’s where I initially found is like, Oh, this is how you make a blog stand out bigger text, small and text, big, bold, black, Indian, this is off gray. And so yes, you can make it look good later. But use those H tags effectively. And here’s one thing that I stumbled upon. And when you mentioned, featured images, this is extremely important, everybody. Now I use an SEO plugin that allows me to do all of this stuff without one I don’t, I really don’t know how you would do it. But it’s a little, it’s a, it’s not a hack. This is just functionality that you need to understand how it works. When you share your your your page on social media, it’s going to pull your featured image. And it’s going to pull from two places, you can do it at the page or article level, or you can do it at the website level, you can do like a fallback image at the website level so that if you never upload a featured image I forget to in displays. Here’s what I will say to you, that featured image is so important, because sometimes you can use it like an ad. So that if someone else that is unknown to you comes across your article was like, hey, check out this cool article, all they’re doing is copying and pasting is sharing that article. But now in Apple messages, I know in Google messages, it does the same thing. It pulls that image. So you’ve got real real estate to make something compelling, you could add text to that image, but I don’t I no longer look at it as a featured image, just like the ad, the organic add to this page or post is how I design you know, for those for that that particular

Stephanie Hudson 41:52
and I’ll throw a couple more tips on top of that if you’d like you don’t actually have to have an SEO plugin to do a featured image. The SEO plugins are a great idea. We use all in one. No, we use SEO press Pro. All In One SEO is another good one. Yoast is another good one that they have, you know, there’s just different ones that different people prefer they all basically are good. So when you even without an SEO plugin, if you look at a page or a post, in that right hand column that’s got like the Update button in the upper right and all that and there’s all that stuff down below. If you get all the way to the bottom, it will say Featured Image. And you can add an image right there from your media library or upload a new one. So you can do that on each and every page. The SEO plugins offer the fallback, which is really useful in case you forget or if it doesn’t have something special. There’s also a setting in some themes. Excuse me, I think it’s in the themes that that will let you use the first image in that poster page as the featured image, which is also useful, especially if you’re doing a blog post. And you’re gonna put the big fancy like cover image on the top, and then it just will automatically grab that and use it as your featured image. However, you want to make sure to again, that it shares well, because sometimes it looks junky, here’s another little tip, excuse me, sorry, I keep choking. The if you go and I can never remember the URL, I always just Google it myself. Go Google Facebook, debug, and it will pull up a link. And this is another free tool. Man, I’m giving all the freebies away today, because it’s another I’m giving away all my secrets, that stuff for free. It’s a tool where you can put in the page has to be public. And you put in the link to your new post or page. What if you’ve just put a new blog post up, let’s say you put that link in and click the button to crawl. I can’t remember what the button says. But you click that button and it will show you what that page will look like if you share it. Or if it comes up in search results. If you don’t like how it looks, go change it. But remember to come back and re scan it. Because if you don’t, it’s like Facebook at least has now saved in cash that previous way. So go back and redo it again until it looks right. And then you’ll be so then you have competency you know how to do it and you don’t have to go like I pretty much all of us have done at one time or another right? You go and share it on social media and then delete it really quick once you see what it looks like.

Chris Davis 44:31
Yep, yep, yep. And some people do it. And they’re like, how do I change this? Why does it keep doing that? That’s why folks that is why so oh my goodness, such such goodness. And again, it it’s worth repeating. Listen, I’ve been using the internet in websites on it and building for over a decade and I’m just now finding the stuff out and that’s what technology does definitely it low As the barrier of entry to absolute zero, and anybody can get in and start doing this stuff in, there’s no body mandating or no quality control to say, hey, wait a minute, you’re using those H tags wrong. So until you get it right, your website won’t work. No, this is the Wild Wild West, people can just put any and everything out there. So I don’t want you all to be lost. And I can feel it. Stephanie, I can feel it. We’re about 40 minutes in ish. And somebody’s eyes glazed over. They’re like, Man, I really liked this podcast because it teaches me so much marketing stuff. This isn’t that this one may have short circuiting their breach, they’re just like, Okay, you actually lost me at DNS. I just tapped out. Yeah, I

Stephanie Hudson 45:43
went for the record. That was Chris’s idea. I knew that was pretty much I knew that was

Chris Davis 45:49
they needed it. Listen, go back and rewind. They were on the elliptical, and they just couldn’t do it. I just like, I just gotta keep listening to it. Or they were jogging, driving something. But since you made it in the shower,

Stephanie Hudson 46:00
I’m a big shower podcast listener, right, you can hit some buttons, then

Chris Davis 46:05
it hit it, just had to listen to it. So those of you that have endorsed now, on the flip side, there’s people that are just like, give me more where who is Stephanie? Let me find out more. Right. So I got a mixed bag. But for both, there is an extra s that as Stephanie was talking, I was like, Hey, wait a minute, there’s one more. And that’s service. All right. You should not be doing this alone. Stephanie and I were Facebook chatting. And she asked me she said, Who’s Who’s maintaining your website. And I was like hesitantly the second she asked, she wasn’t judging me, she was just trying to get a gauge. I instantly felt small. And it was like, I couldn’t tell her the truth. And I said me, and she just responded with one of those astonished emojis. And the reason being is because I am now a firm believer after working with a company, you should not be doing much of anything on your website, if you don’t have to, I really, really recommend that you let

Stephanie Hudson 47:09
you know, I don’t know much of you shouldn’t do much of anything. But the things that are the crucial Hi

Chris Davis 47:16
know, the crucial, so it’s all those who endured this podcast know some of the crucial

Stephanie Hudson 47:24
guys handle the content and the automations, leave the rest of us.

Chris Davis 47:29
It’s just like, if you if you’re gonna get a home built, don’t ask your cousin, your brother, your neighbor, just just go to the reputable company, you don’t have to worry about the floor falling in and the house collapsing. I’ve seen too many websites go wrong, I really have. And you have a means now, there is a service available to you, where they will maintain your website and be your eyes and ears when you don’t know what to look for what to listen for. So Stephanie, give the listeners a little bit of insight of what the service is, how they can get started with it and where they should go.

Stephanie Hudson 48:10
We do we offer care plans, it is a white label service that we do that means you can use it for yourself or you can use it for your customers or your clients websites. And they won’t even know that we’re there. We will we we update everything. Every week, all the plugins themes, anything that needs updated, we clear out all of the junk messages in the back end that are trying to sell you something. We optimize things clear out the database, we do all the things that are like, you don’t even want to know about it, right? It’s just boring technical stuff, we also we run backups every single day of your site. So just in case something, you know tragic were to happen or something breaks, we can roll it back. And we send you a report at the end of the month that you will have your logo on it. So if you want to just forward it to your clients if you do that. And by the way, did I mentioned Chris that it is stupid cheap? It is $34 a month, it’s $34 a month. And if you want to resell this, you can charge easily $99 a month for what we offer some charge even, you know 50% or 100% More than that. And then if you have three customers with us, then we’ll maintain your site for free. So

Chris Davis 49:27
there you have it. Yes. So where where do they go? Stephanie? Where? Wherever?

Stephanie Hudson 49:31
You mean? You mean I need a call to action? You marketers? Yeah, gotta get the market. My website is focused wp.co And if you guys go to focus wp.co/all systems go. You will hear you’ll get to see some more info about all of this. And you might even get a fun little discount code just for being friends with Chris L Davis. Like I am Yeah, and, and also, I didn’t really talk about this, but we also offer development services and other agency services as well. We’re basically a full white label provider. So we do these care plans. And that’s like a small little thing. It’s just the thing we do. It’s just our bread and butter, we just crushed it out. But we also have six different agency teams that you can use as if they’re your own team. Like, we’ll just be your team. And we have developers, designers, copywriters, video editors, anybody, SEO experts, and we also have some vas, if you need just a little bit of admin help. So any of those teams, you can just come and buy some hours submit a ticket, it’s all just hourly, at a what I like to refer to as a markup double rate. Depends how many hours you buy at a time. And that’s it. I don’t know, I’m,

Chris Davis 50:55
no, that’s a little

Stephanie Hudson 50:56
lonely up here, Chris. I don’t know what, oh, good, you’re back.

Chris Davis 51:02
I’ll say this help has arrived, everyone. I am saying it, I am not trying to push products, I have nothing against pushing products, by the way, especially when you stand by him. But I just want to say I’ve dealt with this pain for so long. And I simply didn’t know where help could come from. So I just want to help you all. Just imagine with me, as we close everyone a day and age where you’re not logging into the back end of your website ever seeing all those red,

Stephanie Hudson 51:34
red circles? Oh,

Chris Davis 51:37
I’ve logged into websites where it’s like 50 updates available, and you just don’t want to touch anything at that point.

Stephanie Hudson 51:43
Do you know why it’s important to run those updates?

Chris Davis 51:45
I don’t, I think I do. But I’ll let you you say it,

Stephanie Hudson 51:49
there’s usually only two reasons. It’s either a feature or effects. So if, if it’s new, if it’s you know, if you’re running your LearnDash thing, and somebody’s they’re like adding on new modules or new whatever, that will be an update, if you are running LearnDash. And it’s a security patch. That’s because something is vulnerable in there. And the way to tell there’s also major and minor. And this is a little trick, if you guys aren’t super geeky, like me, it will be like maybe you’ll be on version 10 point 2.13 Or something like that, right. So the farther down to the right the numbers are, the less significant it is. The first number is a mate. If that first number is changing, that’s a major update. And you want to use extreme caution, make sure you have a backup and everything. The second number is kind of big. If it’s the third number, it’s probably something minor, like a little tweak or minor change to it, that probably won’t break anything. But you still want to use caution. And you don’t ever want to run updates without having a backup that you know how to restore. It doesn’t matter if you just have them, you got to know how to restore them. But But anyway, those are those are some tips. And one other thing. Like, Chris is sending me out on my website. And that’s great. I’m happy to have you. But I will almost always teach you how to do stuff and even tell you these all these free tools and things. Because I figure like, I didn’t make any of this up. I just figured out how to do it. And if you want to do it yourself, go for it. But if you get in there and you’re like this is awful. I want you to do it for me. Then we’re

Chris Davis 53:24
here. They’re here. Listen, people you see Stephanie has a wealth of knowledge. There’s just little bitty things that you didn’t know you didn’t know that will improve your life drastically. Thank you so much, Stephanie for coming on to the podcast. This has been everything I hoped for. And more

Stephanie Hudson 53:45
prayers I will speak out with you any day of the week my friend

Chris Davis 53:48
Yes, this is probably one of our shortest meetings everyone by the way. One of our

Stephanie Hudson 53:54
right Wait, Chris was on my podcasts already.

Chris Davis 53:57
I was yes, yes. Yes, the Divi chat was on there. If you’re in my community you have the link and I also emailed so find that blew everybody’s mind there. Yes. So So now you’ve returned a favor and blew everyone’s mind on mine. Thank you again Stephanie. Greatly appreciated. listeners. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Even if you have a headache right now. You’re welcome for that headache because you’re going to be better because of it. I promise you you will. I hope you got the value from it. I want to say thank you for taking the time out to listen whether you’re on the elliptical or in the shower, jogging, or next to your spouse or your best friend just listening to good old Chris and his next guest listen, I appreciate driving trucks. I met I met folks that drive trucks for a living and listen so thank you all for your listenership. I greatly appreciate it. Everyone. As always,

Stephanie Hudson 54:54
I would like to make an apology if you are before you finish your tag. Yes. If you’d like to listen at one point get to five speed like me. I’m sorry, because I talk way faster than Chris. So this is gonna be like a torture episode you either gotta listen to me super fast speed or Chris really slow.

Chris Davis 55:13
I take my time. I hope I hope one, I’m usually a 1.5 1.75 type of guys, sometimes I can get up to two. So no harm, no foul here, but again, everyone’s Stephanie’s wealth of knowledge. And we have the same middle initial. So anyways, thank you all. Thank you all for listening, as the shirt says, Everybody continue, can

Stephanie Hudson 55:37
I do it? Can I do art going? Automate responsibly,

Chris Davis 55:41
my friends. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends