527 – New image format makes your site load faster: Tom talks WebP Image Format

Episode 527 – WebP Image Format
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:23] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and twenty seven of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm going to tell you about a new image format that will make your website load way faster, which is one of Google's big deal ratings factors. In other words, you could have a close to perfect website, and if it doesn't load fast, Google is going to bury you in the search results, and this is very easy to implement, so that's what this episode is about. I hope you didn't miss episode five twenty six. This was a follow up to last Monday's episode five twenty three. And that was my simple five step social media strategy, so episode five twenty six was engagement techniques, which is one of the most critical things you can do if you want the time you spend fooling with social media, which I call the necessary evil. If you want it to be successful, you must concentrate on engagement, and that's what episode five twenty six was about. All right. How'd you like to make money off of me? Well hey, if you're in my referral or affiliate program, we'd be happy to send you a big cheques or PayPal or gold bullion or whatever the heck you want. All right. So all you have to do is refer us.

[00:01:47] Sign up for the program. And anyway, you know, I'm always happy to help people that want to promote me so you can email a Tom@screwthecommute.com, and we'll give you the ways you can promote and talk to you about what's makes most sense for you to promote based on who your audience is and so forth. Now, make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. This has saved me millions of keystrokes, and hey, my neighbor just got carpal tunnel syndrome. Hey, not me, because I automate stuff on my computer because these cheap and free tools are right at your disposal. If somebody would just tell you about them. So make sure you download a copy of that book and then implement many of the things in it. And you will say, Oh my God, I never know. This is so fast compared to, you know, the stuff you've been doing and allows you to reach more customers and prospects and make more money. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And then also, while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app, and you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Hey, it's coming up on Christmas pretty soon.

[00:03:07] And one of the best Christmas presents you could give yourself as a tax deduction and helping out people with disabilities. Yeah, we've got this scholarship program. I'm sure you've heard about it. If you're a regular listener to the show and these people are making progress, we're going to get them hired and good paying jobs and or get them their own business and change their lives for the better. So if you talk to me about this, I can show you how to make this a tax deduction for you and training for you and help these people out. Boy, a triple whammy right there. So. Email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and I'll tell you all about it. Or you can look at the program and the Go Fund Me campaign we have going at Screw the Commute RT.com No, I'm sorry that my school website, IMTCVA.org/disabilities. But anyway, if you just email me and you're interested in tax deduction and training and helping these people all at once, then go ahead and email me right away.

[00:04:15] All right, let's get to the main event. I'm going to talk today about the WebP image format. This format for your images is twenty five to thirty four percent smaller than comparable JPEG images and 26 percent smaller than similar PNG images. Jpeg is what most of you probably know about. PNG is a little bit fancier, but those are the big kahunas when people put images on their website. And I might add the file size is way smaller, but the image quality is identical, it's just beautiful. In other words, your pictures and graphics will look just as good, but they'll load way, way faster, making both your visitor and Google love you. See, people don't want to wait around, and they're used to these other big sites that load like instantly because they have a whole team of geeks working for them. Well, you don't need a whole team of geeks to do what I'm going to tell you today. You see, graphics and photos usually take up more than half of the total size of your website. So if you can reduce the size of your images and graphics photos, you know, when I say graphics, it's images and photos and graphs or, you know, whatever is not text. This can make a massive increase in how fast your site loads. Now, Google did tests on over 11000 images to come up with these load speed increases. So these are absolute if you do what I tell you today. Your site is going to load faster and they even use the famous Lenna image if you don't know what that is. This this is a cropped image of Playmate Lena Forsen, and it's the most used image ever in computer history for these tests. And don't worry, it's not X-rated or anything.

[00:06:29] It's a cropped image of her face. And by the way, when you're looking for it, if you want to look it up, you see two spellings for it. One is Lenna and the other was Lena. And that's because Ms. Forsen did not want to be called Lena, which is what people would probably say if it was spelled Lena, which is how it is spelled. People started writing, it Lenna so that they normally pronounce that Lenna, which is how it is pronounced. And of course, the use of the image has produced controversy because Playboy is seen by, you know, a fraction of the people as being degrading to women. And I'm not going to get into that argument. But the bottom line is is that as we frolic down the Playboy History Lane. All right. As early as 1960, MIT people were working on image algorithms using playboy images right there. I guess there must not have been any other magazines worthy of such testing in the male dominated I.T. industry. But anyway, back to the web image format. So. Is it compatible with modern browsers? Well, the answer is yes, but it's not universal, but I got a way to help you with that. So the estimates say that ninety five percent of web browsers can recognize this format. Some real old Macs using Safari can't and Internet Explorer, which is currently way less than one percent of computer users, can't do it either.

[00:08:12] So who cares about them? Anyway, I'm still going to show you how everybody can see it, your pictures. Now, the super speed you're getting in front of the bulk of the computer world is worth way more to you than the loss of a tiny percentage of old computer users. But like I just said, I'm going to show you how to please everybody. All right, so how does this work and what should you do? Well, if you have the gold standard of websites, which is WordPress, and if you've been keeping it up to date and by the way, if you haven't, if you don't have WordPress, I'll be able to help you. But shame on you. Why don't you have WordPress? That's the gold standard. Did you get sucked in by some TV ad for Wix or Webley or whatever that crazy stuff is? But anyway, if you've been keeping your WordPress site up to date, starting at WordPress five point eight, you don't have to do anything. Just upload your web graphics to the media library as usual. Now, where did you get the Web graphic, so I'll get to that in a minute. All right. But there is one caveat here if your web host does not support WebP images yet, this won't work. Just call them up and ask or pressure them to get busy and get their their act together, because that's the wave of the future.

[00:09:37] All right, so let's talk about plugins for WordPress, so and I have a link here to a really nice article about all of this stuff. If you want to link to it on a web hosting service, I believe it is called kin stuff, kind stuff. Anyway, they have a whole article about this stuff, but you can use a WordPress plug in that converts your original images to web format. And here's the kicker, though, it also keeps a copy of the original image as a fallback if the visitor's browser doesn't support WebP and I was telling you, I promise you everybody can be happy. Well, in that case, if, if. Usually, Chrome, Firefox, Edge and stuff will easily handle web graphics. But if they can't, this plug in automatically shows the person the original graphic so that even old old browsers can look at it. See, so that's beautiful. So if you use one of these plug ins, I'll give you the name of a few of them here in a minute. It's what's it going to do, it's convert the JPEG file that you upload to web format and it's going to give the web format to people on Chrome and Firefox and Edge and people that can handle it. And that it's going to show the original JPEG file to visitors with older versions of Safari, I think Safari is going to get their act together here pretty soon. And if they haven't already, I didn't really check anyway if it doesn't support Web.

[00:11:16] It shows them the original version, so you don't lose anybody by doing this. But in those ninety five percent of the people that can handle the web while your site is going to load way, way faster and the more images you have, the faster your site's going to load compared to what it did load. So. All right. So a couple. Plug ins that you can get for this, and most of them have a free version for up to like 100 images or something like that, you'll have to look. This one is called short pixel. The other was called Imagify and the other one is called Optimole. Now this will all be in the show notes. And Optimole, this even shows different versions to different people based on their screen size, all in an effort to increase speed, man speed is one of the big determinants. And like I said, if you have a website that you do everything else, right, if it doesn't load fast, you're going to get buried, you know, nobody's ever going to see it. All right, so what if you're not on WordPress? Well, shame on you. All right. Indeed. I mean, I got old, old sites that I don't depend on anymore that are on, not on WordPress.

[00:12:46] If you're doing anything modern or if you have a relatively small site now, that's not going to be a big hassle to switch over. Get off your butt and switch it to WordPress. Get up to date. Get all the plug ins. You know, we'll teach you how to do this and my mentor program. But but do it because you're just shooting yourself in the foot. All right. But anyway, in a minute, I'm going to tell you about a couple of places where you can convert anything off your your iPhone camera or I mean any camera, any picture you have, and then upload it to your non WordPress site. It's not using a plug in in this case. So before I tell you about that, I just want to remind you about the this great program. We have to help these persons with disabilities. We'd love to have your help with go fund me and or if you contact me directly, I can give you training. All the money is going to go towards the helping the people, but because it's training, in many cases you'd have to check with your advisor. But I mean, I've never heard anybody say that this isn't tax deductible in all the years I've been doing this. But I'll give you training and that'll make a tax deductible. But I'm going to give the money to the Go Fund Me account to help the persons with disability.

[00:14:09] So that's the the nature of it. So give me a buzz that on my, you know, my numbers everywhere on the website, screwthecommute.com and or you can email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com, we'll get you details. We'll get you a nice tax deduction, get you training, and you don't have to use the training before the end of the year. You can, you know, whatever you happen to get off of me, you can use it as long as I'm breathing and I breathe pretty good. Ok, so anyway, there's two places. There's first of all, there's loads of places. If you just typed in to Google Web or JPEG to WebP converter, there's loads of free places that you can just upload it and be done. I used one and I just did a test on one. Where? And it's called cloudconvert. And I did it on one of my headshots, and the headshots started out at two hundred and twenty seven kilobytes. And I just uploaded it. I don't know, 15 seconds later. I downloaded the conversion and it was one hundred and sixty four kilobytes and then I did the math. That's a 28 percent reduction in the file size, and it looks exactly the same. It's just as ugly as I am at the JPEG format. So another one is called cloudinary.com. But like I said, there's loads of them out there.

[00:15:45] I don't have any particular preference on them as long as it gets the job done for you. So start paying attention to your website. These things you can't believe the things when we critique websites for people that we find because they trusted some wet behind the ears web designer that made their site look pretty. But they got all these bad things going on like we had found one with forty one plug ins. That's a recent episode we did about WordPress plug ins with Larry, the guy that runs my sites and you can't believe the crap we see behind the scenes that's hurting you and you don't know it because it's not your thing to know these things so, so easily. You at least need to know about them so you can take steps to fix them, even if it's not me helping you. Somebody needs to help you because these things are killing you. You're spending all this money and time on your website, and it's not bringing back the results that you want, so. So pay attention to these things and, you know, get get going on this this new image format because it's just going to help you. And the the faster you do it, the faster you're going to pass up your competitors who are not paying attention to these things or listening to this podcast. All right. That's my story. And I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.

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