Websites speed contributes to your rankings and a faster site can convert more visitors into leads.
In the spirit of our Carrot core value of consistent improvement and innovation, we’re excited to share some improvements we have been making to all Carrot member sites!
We continue to take your website’s performance very seriously and invest in optimization.
Here’s a bit of what is new lately…
Optimized Web Fonts, No Compromises
What’s new?
- Fewer Downloads
- Less Javascript
- Fewer Domain Lookups
- Improved Readability
Carrot sites have beautiful custom fonts available to help differentiate your site and look great. Previously served from Google Fonts, we’ve now simplified the font loading process and moved font files to the Carrot CDN (Content Deliver Network) – reducing lookups, and optimizing delivery.
We’ve also audited all Carrot site themes and improved font weight selection to ensure your sites have great readability across more devices and rely on fewer different weights to load
🎉 Result: An average of about 2 points increase in PageSpeed score, but more importantly, a visible speed improvement in your browser for when the site looks loaded.
Bonus: If speed is your only goal… there is now an option to forgo web fonts all together and just use the default browser fonts.
Embed YouTube Videos w/ No Slow Down!
What’s new?
- Better looking YouTube Embeds
- Faster page loads with YouTube Videos
- No performance hits for adding multiple videos
Video is a great interactive way build credibility. Whether it is an informational video on your home page, or a series of testimonial videos. Unfortunately… loading up a YouTube video can take a lot of resources, and performance (especially on mobile devices) is worse the more videos you add to a webpage.
We’ve solved this issue by implementing deferred loading of video embeds!
Now, rather than loading all YouTube embed assets, scripts, etc. for every video on your page immediately, your Carrot site automatically shows a preview placeholder for videos until the visitor clicks the play button.
Once the play button is hit, the YouTube embed is loaded and starts playing!
🎉 Result: We have seen dramatic load time reduction, for a page with single video this can improve PageSpeed scores by 15+ points (out of 100). Adding multiple videos, this can show an improvement of multiple seconds on your page load and as much as 25 PageSpeed score points!
More Responsive Billing Feedback
We also want to take a moment to share some more behind the scenes updates – we’re hard at work improving the visibility of your billing status for your Carrot membership.
You will now get real-time updates in your account about the status of your credit card expiration or missed payments.
We are also rolling out new systems to ensure that billing related communication comes your way more reliable, should there ever be a problem with your card.
You’ll now also be prompted immediately upon sign-in if your billing has lapsed past the 10-14 days when your account will go temporarily inactive. That way you will have the quickest path to keeping your account current and your Carrot sites live!
How to activate these new updates?
You don’t! We’re already on it for you – that’s the beauty of Carrot 😄
Nothing to install, nothing to update 😎 We’re on it!
Let us know what you think!
Check out your own sites, and reach out to Carrot support if you have any questions – we love hearing from you!
No Change Here, still a slow 6sec for mobile to load
Hey there! I’m looking at your sites and seeing huge gains just from the video optimization alone! Hit us up in support chat and I can shoot you direct links so they aren’t shared here publicly.
Carrot sites give you a very fast starting point, then the tradeoff you need to test and make a decision on is how many third party services you need to integrate to see the results and data you need.
I’m looking at one of your sites with LOTS of third party scripts like Callrail, BBB, Facebook, Tag manager, a third party review aggregator…
Just with the video optimization update your Mobile PageSpeed score went from an average of about 45 → up to 62! (desktop 93 → now up at 98) and your site’s mobile Speed Index dropped almost 2 seconds. Those are big improvements!
These types of ongoing optimizations at Carrot give you more flexibility to accommodate those third party scripts, but if you are looking to optimize for speed only… you’ll probably need to reconsider some of those scripts next.
Again, hit up support chat with some specific links and we can dive into it with you –Thanks!
Thanks Chris!
Yep N.C.R.S. let us know what tool you used to do the test, because we ran it on your site just now and the results we saw are what Chris our CTO mentioned below.
When we run a test on a default Carrot site out of the box it’s fully optimized and crazy fast, but everything that’s added to a site add some sort of a load time. For example, every image that’s added and every tracking script it’ll increase the load time.
But this update w/ fonts and the video load optimization it added a big boost to all sites using video.
Reach out and we’ll help get you dialed in.
Great work, team!