Join Mikey Spice Evans and Johanna Patrice Hagarty at 3PM EST, Mondays on Clubhouse for a weekly discussion all about live event marketing and branding.  Every week, we will discuss a new topic around digital marketing, branding strategy and implementation, and then we will invite users to ask questions and get live feedback on their event website, messaging, and branding.

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**cue hooded figure typing at 1000 words per minute on a computer**

I recently became a Certified Data Privacy Agency Partner with Termageddon.  I was quizzed on my knowledge of data privacy, and fortunately, I passed with flying colors.   

Does your business have a privacy policy in place?  When you’re brainstorming the pages that you need for a website, you may overlook the fact that you need a privacy policy on your website.  Here are some common objections that I hear:

• My website is a one page brochure-style website, so I don’t need one!
• I don’t do business in Europe, so privacy laws in Europe don’t matter to me.
• I’m not collecting any personal data!

The simple truth is that you should have a privacy policy to protect you from possible litigation down the road.   Privacy laws are changing on a regular basis, and even here in the United States, individual states are enacting privacy laws that are changing the internet for everyone.  The issue has been apparent for years, but as with many laws pertaining to technology, privacy laws haven’t kept up with the landscape.

Do you remember the golden era of Facebook quizzes?  Just like everyone else, I had to find out which Spice girl I was. Think back to 2016 with the Cambridge-Analytics / Facebook scandal.  In the mid 2010s, Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest a large amount of personal user data when these users took a quiz called “thisisyourdigitallife,” and not only were they able to harvest that user’s data but also that user’s friend’s data. This allowed a company to have access to the personal data of millions of Facebook profiles.  From this big data, Cambridge Analytica was able to develop “psychographic” profiles of people, and political campaigns were able to hypertarget emotional narratives to select groups of people.  A great documentary about this is The Great Hack (2019) on Netflix.

Personal data has become the most powerful asset on Earth, and privacy laws haven’t kept up with the technology.  Nonetheless, we need to address privacy policies before it becomes too late.

What is a Privacy Policy?

Generally speaking, a privacy policy is a legal agreement that explains what personal information a website gathers from its users, how that personal information is used, and how it is kept safe.

Personal data includes names, addresses (both physical and email), IP addresses, telephone numbers, date of birth, and financial information, such as debit and credit card details.

In addition to outlining how a company uses the information, a privacy policy should also include how it will stay transparent to its users, and how those users sharing their data can seek recourse should the company fail to stay transparent.

Even a website having a simple form asking for a name and an email would need to have a compliant privacy policy to avoid possible fines and litigation. If you use Google Analytics on your website, you must have a privacy policy.

Why is a Privacy Policy Important?

Fines and lawsuits.  We want to avoid them.

In the United States, there are already many states that have already enacted privacy laws, and many more states who have bills in committee or introduced.  According to the IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals), there are currently 3 states with signed bills and 16 more states whose bills are in the legislative process.

There are currently four laws between the United States and the European Union that require that most websites that collect personal information to have a Privacy Policy.

• The California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA)
• The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• Nevada’s Revised Statutes Chapter 603A and SB220
• European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

These laws protect consumers of these states and countries, though not businesses.  If you collect data from consumers within the European Union, California, or Nevada, you could be subject to these laws.

Privacy laws will become the norm in the next 5-10 years, and we foresee them getting more complicated down the road, not less complicated.

Writing your own Privacy Policy

Writing your own privacy policy can be problematic, because you’re probably not a lawyer and these laws are ever evolving.

Copying another business’s privacy policy doesn’t work since how a two businesses deal with data can widely vary.

Using a privacy policy generator doesn’t guarantee that the policy is actually correct and usable.  There are many of these so-called “policy generators” out there that exist just to make a quick buck from unsuspecting people.

Enter Termageddon.

Termageddon was founded by a privacy and technology attorney and offers a solution for privacy policies and other common legal documents (think Terms of Service, Disclaimers, and they are even branching out to Canadian, British, and European law).

For $10/month or $99 for an annual license, you can have compliant policies that are up to date as laws change and are specifically created for your website.  How though?  The process is easy.  It takes less than 10 minutes to go through their policy generator; you answer questions about your website and the type of data that you collect.  When you’re done, you get a piece of embedded code that you can embed on your website to display the up-to-date policy.

Termaggeddon can update these policies remotely, since the policy isn’t actually hosted on your website.  Since they can stay up to date with the world’s changing laws and remotely update policies for their customers, you can know that your website is compliant with privacy laws around the world.

I use Termaggeddon to protect my company, and I recommend it for all of my customers.  I include it in my monthly care plans, further ensuring that my customers are well taken care of.

What’s Next?

If you don’t have a privacy policy or you are not sure if it is compliant, contact me and we can dive into it together.  You can sign up for Termageddon yourself and start setting up your policies, or I can help you get set up.  I know it can be stressful not knowing if your website is protected or not, but fortunately, we have a solution that is reasonably priced as the ever evolving world of privacy laws change. 

Disclosure: By making a purchase through links on this page, I will receive a very small commission at no extra cost to you.

One of the factors they are circling in on for next year is called Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are quantifiable and measurable performance factors that affect a user’s experience on your website.  Simply put, how fast does your web page load?  In May 2020, Google announced a major algorithm change expected in 2021 that will be using these core web vitals to rank websites.  More and more, they are looking at user experience on the web.  So what is involved with getting your Core Web Vitals up to speed? Let’s jump in.

Every Second Counts

Have you ever been frustrated as a webpage takes forever to load, only to smash that BACK button and go to the next search result? Page speed affects bounce rate and shopping behavior in a big way.  Bounce rate, a statistic you can view in Google Analytics, is the percentage of users on a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.  A high bounce rate can be the sign of deeper issues with your website, such as poor user experience or poor audience targeting.

Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• 40% of consumers will abandon a web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• If a website takes 10 seconds to load, the probability of a user bouncing increases by 123%.
• Ancestory.com improved the render time of web pages by 68%, reduced page bloat by 46%, and load time by 64% which resulted in a 7% rise in conversions.
• A Google Study of over millions of page impressions finds that when a website meets the recommended thresholds for Core Web Vitals metrics, users are at least 24 less likely to abandon a page before it finishes loading.

Think about it from a user’s perspective; you don’t want to wait a long time for a web page to load.  It is frustrating going from page to page and having difficulty getting the information you need.  Google knows this as well!  When you go ‘back’ to the search engine results page on Google before the page is done loading and click through to another search result, Google assumes that you did not find the right information.

Now that we know how this affects user behavior, how we can access this information?

You can find information on the Google Search Console, underneath the Enhancements section. Google Search Console is an crucial addition to find out how your website is doing within Google Search. The information pairs well with Google Analytics. If you aren’t set up with Google Search Console, it’s important to get set up ASAP, because they will only start showing you information from the point when you installed GSC. If you need assistance getting set up with Search Console or Google Analytics, contact our team and we can help you.

You can also get an analysis of PageSpeed Insights from inside Google Chrome or by visiting PageSpeed Insights. 

Now, what can we do about this?  First, let’s define the Core Web Vitals that Google is looking for.

Core Web Vitals

These are the quantifiable metrics that Google takes into count for ranking signals.

Loading Time: (referred to as LCP or largest contentful paint): The amount of time to render the largest content element visible in the viewport when a user requests the URL.  This is usually an image or video file, and this is important because it tells the user that the webpage is actually loading.

Interactivity: (referred to as FID or first input delay): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (by clicking a link, tapping a button, etc) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction.  This is important, because at this point, the page has become interactive and available for the user to interact with it.

Visual Stability: (referred to as CLS or cumulative layout shift): The amount that the page layout shifts during the loading phase.  This is scored between 0-1, with 0 being no shifting and 1 being the most shifting.  This is important, because when a webpage has elements that shift as it is loading, the user won’t be able to focus on the element or information that they are trying to access.

Other Web Vitals that Affect Page Experience

These vitals are important to a user’s experience as well, but are not related to Pagespeed.  They are worth mentioning, as some websites still struggle to fulfill these.

Is your website mobile friendly?  Google measures this within Google Search Console.

Is your website safe to browse?  Is it free of malware and spyware?

Is your website being served over a secure connection?  Check for the lock or an https:// vs. an http:// URL.

Are there popup ads on your website?  Google defines these as “Intrusive Interstitials.”

What Actions Can I Take to Improve Core Web Vitals?

You must know where you started to get to where you want to be!

When I first look at a website, I will input it into GTMetrix.com to get the baseline before optimizing it.  I use GTMetrix over PageSpeed Insights, because will give a more technical look at how to fix performance issues on a website and you can keep tabs and check progress over time.   GTMetrix will give you a waterfall view of what resources are being loaded on the website.  With that, we can pinpoint what resources are taking the most time to load.  I look at 3 metrics on GTMetrix: Fully Loaded Time, Total Page Size, and Requests

All of these should be as low as possible!  Let’s look at some of the low hanging fruit that inhibits the performance of website.

As with any tool that is a robot crawler, whether that is GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights, you should sometimes take the information with a grain of salt. Remember to optimize for a human’s experience, not the robots. We can’t let the robots win. Now onto some ways to optimize.

Optimize and Compress Your Images

The most common problem I see on websites are unoptimized images.  The images are unnecessarily large in size and this problem has exponential returns. If you are forcing users to load large files, not only are you putting additional strain on their data plans, but you are putting additional bandwidth strains on your own hosting server.  Modern technology allows us to have compressed images with the same quality to the human eye. 

You can use programs like RIOT for PC or ImageOptim for Mac.  All of our Care Plan customers using WordPress sites utilize the plugin ShortPixel, which will automatically optimize an image after it is uploaded, regardless of who the user is.  This guarantees that images on your website will always be optimized.

Serve Scaled Images

In simple terms, your website should be showing the correct sized pixel image right off the bat, before sizing it down to your browser.  What’s the point of having a 1200×1200 logo if the browser is rendering it down at 200×200?  That is wasted resources. 

In WordPress, we utilize ShortPixel Adaptive Images with our Care Plan customers to take care of this.  Regardless of if a user is shown a website on desktop, tablet, or mobile, they will see the correctly sized image.

Reduce the Number of Requests

When a website loads, it loads from many different scripts and elements to create the page that you see on your device.  With every script and element comes more resources that are required to load the page properly. If you use Chatbots, tracking pixels, Hubspot integrations, Google Fonts, Adobe Typekit, or Font Awesome Icons, you will be pulling in scripts from outside resources and relying on them to be fast.

Requests are important to the functionality of your website. Try to keep these to minimum.

Get Rid of Slow Plugins

Not all plugins will negatively affect your page speed, but a lot do.  Each plugin has its own scripts and elements to allow it to run.  By using one plugin to cover multiple uses, you can reduce the number of requests and scripts that your website needs to load.  For example, we use Elementor to build our websites, because it gives us the ability to create forms, add website animations, add image lightbox capability, and more. 

Over the years, we have developed a “stack” of plugins to use on every site we build that allows businesses to get the most functionality with the best performance.

Evaluate your Hosting Server

Sometimes you can optimize a web page so much, but if the pages are being served by a slow web host, it doesn’t matter. One metric to look at is the TTFB or “Time to First Byte.” This is a measurement used to determine the responsiveness of a web server. It is literally how many milliseconds for your web browser to receive information from the web server.

We steer our clients away from big box hosts like GoDaddy and EIG web hosts, whose quality has greatly deteriorated over the years. Web hosts we recommend include Kinsta, WPEngine, and Dreamhost. While you don’t want to be migrating your web site to a different web server year after year to get the best performance, it is worthwhile to take a look at how your website is performing before making the decision.

We can help improve your Core Web Vitals.

If you have any questions or need help with improving your core web vitals to improve your overall user experience, reach out to us. We are happy to help!

Resources

Neil Patel – Loading Time

Think With Google – Mobile Page Speed New Industry Benchmarks

Hosting Tribunal – How Speed Affects Websites

Loom

Available as a Chrome extension, PC desktop app, and Mac desktop app

Sometimes you don’t want to type out all of your thoughts; it is much easier (and quicker!) to speak your mind.
Loom allows you to easily record your camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously, and it immediately allows your video to be available to share.

I use this both internally with the team, and externally with clients.  With clients, it allows me to quickly explain different processes and talk through results.  Within the team, it allows us to get quick feedback on processes.  It is easy to give instructions and direction here.

When you are finished with your Loom video, simply hit the red ‘Stop’ button and it will immediately upload to Loom’s server.  The video will render in minutes, and you will be able to share a clean link to Email, Slack, or your preferred communcation channel.

Loom has a great page detailing all of the possilbities for its software.

FireShot

Google Chrome Extension

I had to find a solution for taking screenshots within web pages, because I take screenshots DAILY for different uses.  Originally, I was relying on the “Print Screen” button on my keyboard.  I would take that copied screenshot, throw it into Photoshop, hit save and be done with it.  Too many steps.  FireShot takes care of this entire process from top to bottom with a click of a button.  Not only can you take partial screenshots of a web site’s sections, you can also have FireShot take full screenshots of pages and it will piece those together automatically.

I used the free version for a long time, but after discovering that I was using it DAILY for my business, I decided to support the developers making this excellent Chrome Extension.  I was happy to discover new features on it; with its one-time payment, I am now able to quickly annotate and add shapes within a screenshot, before saving it to my computer.  This takes care of another step I didn’t mention above, annotating screenshots

Zoom

Available for PC and Mac

Okay, Zoom has gotten a lot of flack lately.  I can give a company a break when they go from having 10 million daily users to 200 million daily users; there is bound to be some growing pains, especially with all of the new use cases.  Zoom was originally an internal video conferencing platform for for large institutions with full IT support.

I use Zoom to connect with clients all over the world.  I use Zoom to connect with my mentorship group, The Futur Pro Group for our weekly video call.

Flux

Available for PC, Mac, iPhone, and Android

Since my remote work is mostly on a computer, I spend long periods of time in front of the computer in front of that artificial light.  The blue light emitted can have a negative effect on my sleep schedule and can strain my eyes over time, even with my blue light blocking sunglasses.

This is where Flux comes in.  By automatically dimming my screen light and blue light output according to my local time.  I can also set my ‘earliest wake up time’ and Flux will automatically adjust my computer’s blue light output as the sun goes down.

Be careful if you do any color work while you use Flux.  The colors you are seeing on your screen are different from the ones that are normally displayed.  With a few clicks, you can disable Flux for an hour or until you turn it back on.

What tools have you found helpful within remote work?  Shoot me an email; I’m always curious to learn more.