🔥 Fast Fonts, Optimizing YouTube & Better Billing Updates!
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!