In this episode of the HIPAA Insider Show, we dive into how Google Lighthouse can diagnose and fix performance issues on your WordPress site. A sluggish site can hurt SEO, user experience, and even HIPAA compliance if it affects protected health information (PHI) portals.
Transcript
Adam Zeineddine
Hello and welcome to the Hip Insider Show. My name is Adam Zenithine and I’m joined as always by Gil. Hey, Gil, how’s it going?
Gil Vidals
Hey, Adam. Doing great today. Looking forward today’s podcast.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah, I’m really excited to dive into our topic for today, which is analyzing WordPress sites that are slow and potential solutions when it comes to optimizing site speed. If you’re listening to the podcast, you might want to switch over to YouTube because we’ll be doing a screen share as part of this. So yeah, it’d be helpful to watch it on YouTube or listen along and we’ll try and describe what we’re doing as we go. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the channel and the podcast on YouTube. We’re on our road to 500 subscribers. So if you haven’t already, click the subscribe button and be sure to like the video. All right, so let’s get started here.
Adam Zeineddine
Gil, could you give us a little bit of an overview of maybe framing this a little bit in terms of who’s going to be looking into the site speed and what’s the scenario here?
Gil Vidals
Yeah, great. I think you pulled up our expert solutions as I were going to go over. But yeah, the context is when you’re, when you have a website that is important in terms of marketing efforts. I know not every website that you have for the healthcare community, you care about marketing. For example, a lot of customers of ours have a portal site where somebody logs in and then they do. Those are not marketing sites because Google can’t log in to index the site. So we’re talking about primarily public facing sites that you want the public to find, your potential customers to find it. You want to have that site work streamline, perform well, load quickly. You want it to be responsive on a mobile device. A lot of people do research on mobile now.
Gil Vidals
So the consensus is that most of the research is done by the information gatherers. A lot of times they use cell phone. But the final decision maker and buyer is probably going to be an owner that’s on the computer on a laptop. So he’ll see the full thing and he’ll hit the buy button. And what we’re trying to do here is just demonstrate, well, what do you do with the site, how do you know if it’s performing well and then if it’s not, how do you fix it? How do you improve it?
Adam Zeineddine
Okay, so what is a lighthouse scan? And I’ve got some steps here that you’ve graciously provided me with. And I can pull it up. But while I do that, what’s a Lighthouse scan?
Gil Vidals
Yeah. So one of the great tools that we find very useful, that’s freely available to our audience, to anyone that has Chrome. This is part of the Chrome browser. There’s a section called. Yeah, Google Chrome. In Google Chrome, in the menu, there’s something called Developer Options. And within that you’ll find a Lighthouse report. It’s very simple to run. You don’t need to be a tech guy. You could be a business owner that’s not a technologist and you could just hit the Lighthouse report. That’s something that Adam’s going to be demoing here in just a moment. But once you run this report, it takes a little while to run it. It’s gathering a lot of information, is scoring the performance of the site, gives it a score. And you want the score to fall in the upper range.
Gil Vidals
Obviously, if it falls too low, then that could be a problem. Now, when we say a problem, what do we mean by that? Let’s say the site loads in a few seconds. You’re happy with. You’re like, it seems fine to me. I’m okay. Well, you may be more patient than most. You may be more patient than Google. And Google’s Crawler that indexes the pages has a certain level of performance they’re looking for. If it falls below that level, it could negatively impact your rankings. By that I mean, instead of appearing at a certain position, you might fall several positions below that, all because the performance was poor. Again, and this is in terms of what Google and the indexing algorithm things. Not. Not so much my opinion or your opinion. So it’s important to realize that.
Gil Vidals
And then also you want to have fast performance loading on the mobile device, because that’s where people are searching for things is on the mobile. So you want it to respond quickly there because people are always in a rush. If the page loads slowly, they’re going to move on to something else.
Adam Zeineddine
Okay, so let’s dive into it. So I’ve got the Instructions to press F12 if I’m on Windows or Linux. So press F12. And then up here there’s a bunch of elements that show up. Depending on how your Chrome sets up, you might have to click on the arrow at the top and click Lighthouse. Then it gives me a couple of options here. From what I can see, the mode is navigation by default, time span or snapshot the device, mobile or desktop. So this is, I’m assuming Gil, it’s going to run the scan based on either the mobile site or the desktop version of the site. Is that right? Then there’s categories. So what categories for it to assess Performance, Accessibility, best practices in SEO. It’s free, so I assume we’ll run all of these and start with the desktop site, shall we?
Gil Vidals
Sure.
Adam Zeineddine
Okay, I’m going to click analyze page load. Okay. Looks like the scanner’s completed and we’ve got a couple of different metrics here. So we got a low score. So the scores are 0 to 100. Right. And the performance is a low score of 29. It’s shown here in red. Accessibility is fairly high. Best practices 74. SEO 85. Gil, what’s your first impression on. On these scores here?
Gil Vidals
So the scores, the good thing is you have color coding here. So when you see red, that’s bad. Yellow is in between and green would be what you’re aiming for. So this performance of this site is on the low end. I would expect this to affect the search engine rankings for this particular site because it’s in the red, so you don’t want to be in the red. And I cannot tell you exactly what number to achieve. Say, well, Gil, I want to know exactly what number to achieve to avoid the rankings being lower. I don’t know that there is a magic number. I think it’s a spectrum. Your higher the score, the better it is for your rankings. And so this site right here needs a improvement, definitely for performance. There’s no doubt about that.
Adam Zeineddine
Okay. And it allows you to print either a summary or an expanded view of the report. So I’m going to do that and then we can pull that up in a PDF form. And Gil, typically for the site owner, are they going to be addressing these issues or are they going to send it to the developer? What’s the action to be taken here?
Gil Vidals
The action to be taken, it’ll be the technical designer, usually the person that. Now to be clear, not every web designer has the experience of optimization. So a good designer would be designing the size so it can perform well. But frankly, most designers are really, they’re looking for the design, the look and feel, the interaction. So on performance is at the top of their view. And so you have to consider that. But I would say good designers I’ve worked with, they all know how to optimize. Especially with the Lighthouse report, it tells you exactly what the problem is. You’re not guessing. Like I’m not sure what to do here. It tells you this is the problem, this image is too big, there’s too much JavaScript here, etc. It’ll mention it.
Gil Vidals
The designer who doesn’t have experience with performance optimization should still be able to optimize it. Now someone who has a lot of experience optimizing is going to get more juice out of this report. They’re going to be able to get a higher score than someone who’s not familiar with optimization.
Adam Zeineddine
Here is the downloaded report. The headline is 29 performance and then it gives a couple of metrics in red here. First content for paint, largest content for paint, blocking time, etc. Talk us through should be looking at this.
Gil Vidals
One thing you can do that’s interesting before we go crazy go too deep into this thing is that if you just take this report and make it into a PDF and then upload it to ChatGPT or Claude or Grog3, it can walk you through this. So even if you’re a business owner, it’s non technical. You can pump this whole report into AI and say, hey, I’m not a technical person, I’m a business manager, business owner. Walk me through this report, give me the top three things that should be changed from this report and then you make sure your designer says, look, of all these things, here’s the top three that are going to have the most impact on my performance. I want these done by Friday at 2:00 and now they have an exact task and objective.
Gil Vidals
What is going through here is telling you how much impact these changes will have. It describes here like this one. It says if you reduce your JavaScript execution time, you’re going to save 2.9 seconds on the load time. It breaks down by giving you the name of the actual JavaScript, all the components, lots and lots of detail again for the developer to look at and say, okay, I have to refactor my code. Now before you get too concerned, we’re not asking your programmer or developer to redesign your site or recode things. There are some things like JavaScript, if it’s too heavy, they may have to do some refactoring. But most of the work here is not going to be involved redesigning your site or reprogramming it. Okay, that’s not. We’re talking about performance improvements. So let me see.
Gil Vidals
The ones in red are the most severe, so you want to address those first. And the ones in yellow are less severe. By severe we mean the severe ones are the ones that impact your performance the most in a negative way. Another example here says avoid large layout shifts, six shifts found. And it has a little thumbnail and it shows you a picture. If you scroll down a little bit, it says a late network request, adjusted page layout. It’s telling you what the problem is. It tells you the exact line of code. These things, again, the developer would know about this. And if they don’t, they can just Google it or use AI to tell them, hey, what does this mean? How do I fix this?
Adam Zeineddine
So it sounds like it gives them a great roadmap to be able to solve the problem in every area.
Gil Vidals
It doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it, but it lays out the problem in great detail. Like if you go to the mechanic and you say, hey, my car doesn’t work, the mechanic fix it. The mechanics like, well, what’s the problem? Well, I don’t know. Well, I can’t tell. My problem is I can’t fix your car. So same thing with this, but this report has excruciating details, is the problem is on this page, this line of code and exactly where it is. So you don’t have to doubt where the problem is, you just have to figure out how to fix it. And again, the idea, you don’t have to fix every single one of these go through. Get the low hanging fruit, the ones that have the most impact, fix all those first. Get your performance into the yellow range.
Gil Vidals
So from a 29, get it into the yellow score and that’s huge, right? You’ve had huge improvement and then you can keep working, chipping away at the other ones later. Your objective, you don’t need to get a score of 100. Okay, that’s, I, that’s not necessarily your goal. I mean if you have the time and the developer has the skill set and the time to get every single point out of it, well then go for it. But at least try to get into the low green band if you don’t have the time to get every single point out of it. So your goal is to get into the green zone?
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah, absolutely. And I also noticed that in the developer settings we go back to here, there is a, there’s a turn on AI assistance option.
Gil Vidals
Oh, that’s great. I haven’t seen that from Google.
Adam Zeineddine
Which promises to also help with what you were mentioning earlier about maybe instead of having to manually upload Things into an LLM, ChatGPT, etc. That Google has developed services here that will help as well. So that might be an option then Gil we also offer these services to our hosting customers. Is that correct?
Gil Vidals
Yeah. Recently we started offering optimization services. Hippo Vault has been around for a long time. We had a lot of customers and they get frustrated when their site’s loading slowly and they’re like, can you help us? We decided we’ve got some bandwidth and some web design internal resources. So we’ve been doing some of that work and it’s very helpful to them. They like it because they don’t have to go hunt down some other resource. They could just pay us to do it because they’re already. They’re already our customer. And we’ve been very successful with that. We always get them in the green. Sometimes we hit 100, but we always can get them in the green. And it’s a big. It’s a notable improvement. Right.
Gil Vidals
If you go to the site, check it out, they run the two Lighthouse reports that show the original and the new one. You’ll see the score is vastly different.
Adam Zeineddine
Oh, it’s fantastic. Any anything else to add before we wrap up?
Gil Vidals
Yeah, I do want to say something else. What question you asked at the beginning is a really good one. So the Lighthouse report is for a specific page. So you want to run it on the home page ww your website.com and then you want to optimize based on that. And the reason why is because especially WordPress sites, most of the elements on the template, on theme, they’re the Same theme, same JavaScript, same everything across the entire site. So you don’t have to worry about, oh, I better run the Lighthouse report on every single page. Just run it on the homepage, do all the work there. When scores in the green and you’re good to go, then you should run the Lighthouse report on a couple of interior pages just to verify, to say, okay, this one’s also green.
Gil Vidals
Now you might come across an interior page that has a big fat image on it that doesn’t exist on the homepage and it loads very slowly and say, oh, here’s a case where optimizing just the homepage didn’t help. I have to go in and fix that image. Well, then fine. You found that. Probably the best thing to do, Adam, is just to make sure you optimize those pages that are ranking highly in Google.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah. Because mostly it’s the homepage that you want people to find on Google.
Gil Vidals
And if you’re not sure, well, what pages are ranking high in Google, you could go to your favorite keyword tool like Semrush or a HREF Search Atlas, any one of those tools for free. You can go in there, put in your site, it’ll tell you all the top ranking pages that your site has and just focus on those.
Adam Zeineddine
All right, Fantastic. So hope that helped provide you some insights on how to Troubleshoot Optimizing your WordPress site and making it faster. If you have tried it out before and have experience with it, let us know in the comments. If you like the Lighthouse scanning tool, if you have any other tools that you like as well, and if you have any questions, as always, reach out to us at hipaavault.com and we’d be happy to answer them. That’s it for this episode. Thank you for joining us as always. And Gil, as always, thanks for your time.
Gil Vidals
Thank you.