NitroPack Plugin for WordPress – Amazing speed increases for your website, a beginner’s introduction to Google Core Web Vitals, and does NitroPack cheat page scores?

NitroPack will speed up your website. I’ve been using it on pootlepress.com for the last month and the speed increases I’ve seen when testing through the Google Page Insights tool have been off the charts. NitroPack only takes ten minutes to set up on your WordPress website, and absolutely no technical knowledge is needed. You’ll start seeing incredible Page Speed Scores instantly.

I was so impressed with how much NitroPack was improved the speed scores that I reached out to the Founders, Deyan and Ivailo and asked if I could record an interview.

If you want see massive speed increases on your own website click here to get NitroPack and use coupon code : nitropootle to get a 5% discount.

Here’s what we cover in the Interview

• A beginners guide to the upcoming Google Core Web Vitals Update
• How to test your website for Google Core Web Vitals
• How NitroPack works
• Does NitroPack cheat the Page Scores?

NitroPack Interview Main Sections

NitroPack Interview transcript

Introduction

Jamie: Okay, so welcome everyone. This is as a talk with Deyan, and if Ivailo from Nitropack, which is a really, really exciting tool that you can use to speed up your your websites with WordPress.

What we’re going to cover today is really this huge update that’s coming in may that Google have pre-announced it’s called the Google core web vitals update. It’s going to have big implications for ranking. So this is a introduction for beginners around the subject who are  worried about their sites are going to be impacted come may.

So I’ve just got a list of questions we’re going to crack into them. So the first question really is could you, could you guys just give us  a beginner’s introduction to what  Google core web vitals update is and  , why Google are introducing it 

What is Google Core Web Vitals?

Deyan: Awesome. Thanks Jamie. Well, Google are introducing an update that in essence focuses on user experience. So the main point here is a better user experience on your website, leads to more conversions. Again, different brands have done studies on this, and it has been for less common knowledge that improving the way.

Your user’s experience, your website is going to have a positive impact on your business and others getting more formalized. Google is pushing this with three main metrics and they more or less focused on  load time interactivity and visual stability, they obviously have technical definitions that they’re using for those.

And you would see those when you test your website, but these are really the most important things to think about. How does my site load, is it visually stable? And is it interactive because those are the ground  foundations for a good user experience. 

Jamie: So I guess, I guess in simple terms, people will look at this update and a lot, I see this a lot on the forums that people are taking this as. Just a page speed issue that, slow websites are going to be affected. That’s that’s part of this, is that right? 

Deyan: They are more or less connected. And I’ll give you just a brief overview. I know. Let you by the elaborate on this, because there’s obviously a lot more to it, but you can think of your page speed as a combination of different factors. Some are more technical than others, but they all relate to more or less performance. How quickly things get on your site  

How to test your website for Google Core Web Vitals?

Jamie: And there’s the easiest way for people to test. This is to go to the Google Page Insights tool where you can punch in your website address and it’ll give you a score. And it’ll now tell you whether you pass or fail the core web vitals tests. Is that correct? That’s right. 

Deyan: So there’s a couple of things going on there. But if you go to page speed insights, that’s a fantastic place to start. You will see a score that is going to be go red, yellow, or green, which I think is a fantastic move on in, on the side of cool.

I think it’s a fantastic way to display results, but there’s quite a lot going on. It could be really frustrating if you haven’t seen this before. So I would take. If I were trying to optimize my site for the first time, I would take things one step at a time. So first I would look at, Hey, what’s the overall picture that I’m seeing no panic.

Even if it’s red, there’s a lot of things that can be done now, nothing to worry too much about. It may seem overwhelming, but there’s quite a few things that can be done.  . What you see there is how the so-called lab data is seen on your website.

Google Lab data and Field Data – an explanation

That’s in essence a snapshot of what your site is, how your site is being perceived right now. And then more importantly with time there is field data accumulated. So the expectation there is that’s going to be representative of how. Real-world users have actually experienced your website.

And that’s the tricky bit, because that usually takes about a month to update. So it’s more or less a trailing metric. This is something that you expect to see an update on with time. So to the takeaway would be, you can focus on how are things going on right now, which based, based on insights and lap data and how things have been going.

Over the past month with the field data. But I think Ivailo look in, elaborate on that as well. 

Ivailo: Yeah. So the, the main goal of the, of the update is to so user experience is very important for, for Google. So what they’re pushing is better user experience. So sites that provide better user experience overall.

We’ll get a boost in the rankings. So the results will be shown higher.  How Google are doing this is what Deyan mentioned with the field data. This is collected from the Chrome browser and it’s generally called the CRUX data, the Chrome user experience.

So this is data that Google collects from. The real world use each of your website. So visitors come to your website and some percentage of the visitors send data to Google. 

Jamie: That’s really interesting. I didn’t know that. And can you so can we track that crux data somewhere? Is that shown on the page? The page insights page somewhere? 

What is Google Crux Data?

Ivailo: Yeah. So when you run a test, you get two results. One is called field data. It sits at the top of the page speed insights result page and below that is the field, the, the lab data.

Sites that do not have sufficient tracking though. Do not have field data because the data, it needs to have enough data points to be able to show it.

Jamie: So just a couple of questions before we dive a bit more deeply into what you guys, how, how naturopathic actually works.

Why is there such a big difference in Page Insights between mobile and desktop scores?

And we’d get a lot of feedback from our customers that they see a huge disparity between the mobile results and the desktop results, like massive, massive differences. What’s the,   reason that they’re seeing that. 

Ivailo: Yeah, so that that’s perfectly normal. As you know, mobile devices are not as powerful as desktop devices, which is the one of the reasons, but the second reason is the mobile connection.

So the connection type that you have to, to your, to the website is greatly affects the learning experience. 

Jamie: And can you just explain the difference between lighthouse and just for our viewers and the page insights tool? 

Ivailo: the lighthouse is kind of like the engine. Page Insights Is just the website that you go to, you run a test in the background.

How does NitroPack speed up your website?

Jamie: So can you just tell me a bit about Nitropack and how it helps this process in terms of, if somebody sees the, their site is all red and they’re panicking about what’s happening in May.

And I should say I, I put Nitropack pack on my website and I’ve gotten, I guess I’m getting scores of a hundred, which is shockingly fast. So yeah, just, can you give us  the main bits  that Nitropack does? 

Deyan: So looking at a broad perspective, NitroPack pack was designed to effortlessly allow you to optimize your site speed. We believe that site speed. Shouldn’t be hard to get, but it is so right now. Yeah. There’s quite a lot of work being done on and has been our Nitropack.

The core engineering team started working on this problem back in 2012. So there’s quite a lot of know-how and experience gathered on this, which allowed us to build a service that gives you access to a range of optimization techniques that work super well in unison, things that no other solution out there will be able to provide you. And it sort of works as you can think of it as someone who works for your website optimize and get 24/7 , but it’s an automated piece of software that does that.

How to set up NitroPack on WordPress

Jamie: Just in terms of the sort of, cause in terms of the experience that you have, if you’re using NitroPack park, you basically install a connector plugin, and then that connects to a Nitropack practice service somewhere and then some magic happens. So can you just explain, just explain that a bit for people and for me, how that works? 

Ivailo: I assume that you’re familiar with typical solutions for optimizing websites and you know how some of the core strategies are optimize your images lazy load, the images. I mean, if I CSS, JavaScript, HTML these kinds of optimizations. 

Jamie: Oh, you’re talking about  caching plugins and things like that, I guess. Yeah. 

Ivailo: Yeah. Yep. HTML caching. These are core techniques that plugins do and Nitropack is no exception. We do all of these in Nitropack, but we have taken things a step further in terms that there’s a, how we have implemented these features. So for example Nitropack does the image optimization by default? So only we disrupt and not only. optimized, but they’re also lazy loaded. 

How NitroPack optimizes images

Jamie: That’s really great. I mean, I noticed that when I tried to save one of my images from my site and it’s suddenly in a different file format, so how does that, how does that actually work?

What happens?

Ivailo: So that scans your website, and we look for assets in the website. So if, if you kept the images, if you kept CSS files, JavaScript files we look for those types of files and then for everything that we can optimize, we basically make a copy, optimize it, and we serve it through our CDN in an optimized version.

For images, we, we also, we optimize the images, but we also convert to webp so browsers that support the webp format will receive. Even more optimized.

What is a CDN (content delivery network)

Jamie: Can you just explain to everyone briefly what a CDN is? Because a lot of people will have heard it, but won’t actually know what it is.

Ivailo: CDN is short for Content Delivery Network, which is basically a network of servers placed in strategic places around the Globe. And a goal is to have to always have a server that is close to your visitors. So let’s say you’re you, you, you get, you cost your websites in the UK for example, but you get a visit from the US.

So instead of the visitor from us having to transfer all the files across the ocean and which is slow when you have a CDN, you will have servers. In the U S close to the visitor and they will download the assets from there, which is much, much faster. In essence, this is what CDN does. And it’s also one of the, the very important parts of optimizing your website website, because you want to be able to serve your site as fast as possible to your visitors.

So NitroPack by default includes the CDN. This is something that no other solution provides. But the CDN is core part NitroPack back. It, it actually can not function without it.

Jamie: I’m hosting my site with WP engine who also use a CDN. What happens if there’s you guys and also your hosting company using CDNs what’s what’s the deal there?

Ivailo: Normally, if you visit our site, it runs through the preconfigured CDN. So if that is from WP engine, you will use that. But that will only be for pages that are not optimized by NitroPack.

Once a page get up, gets optimized the assets will be transferred. I mean, the physical files are not transferred, but the links to these assets are now. Pointing to NitroPacks CDN. So only the optimized pages we’ll use our CDN and all pages that are not yet optimized. We’ll use the existing CDN solution.

So both can coexist. They do not interfere.

Jamie: We use a lot of videos on our site with YouTube and Vimeo, you and I noticed those are optimized as well, I think. Is that right? 

Jamie: Yeah, but it looks like the player, it looks like the players only called once somebody actually clicks on the video.

Is that right? So it’s not calling it. It’s not calling the resource before anyone actually clicks on the video, correct? Yes. Which is really complex to do. If you’re not using NitroPack.

Ivailo: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s very important because if you’re not going to watch the video why load resources.

Jamie: Yeah. No, it’s huge. It’s huge for us. So that was one of my gold stars for you guys that, you know, solves that problem really quickly. Brilliant. I’ve been following you guys for probably six weeks and using Nitropack on my site and, and, and a few other sites actually, and I’ve seen enormous page speed improvements.

Are NitroPack cheating the Page Insights Scores?

And I did see in fact, I shared with you guys, some chatter that I’ve seen on forums around, is Nitrapack for real, and are they cheating The Google Page speed scores?

Without getting too technical. Is there an easy way to answer some of those criticisms or explain them without getting too technical?

Deyan: I’ll try to give you  the most important bit about it and then it can fantastically elaborate on that. The way you can think about it, this that what more or less works in a fashion where you can think of it as when you go to a supermarket. And there’s only one checkout. All the folks have to line up in a long queue.

Things get really bogged down and they have to happen one person at a time. So I would make that analogy with a lot of how things are being processed with the web. And one of the key things that as NitroPack allows an essence more than one checkout to be open. And then the traffic will be flowing. A lot faster through it.

This being a different approach may seem to regular tools to be something that they wouldn’t detect. So if you’re used to looking only for one checkout, you wouldn’t even think, Hey, there might be more than one checkout that I should look out for. Yeah. That will be a new thing to think about. 

Jamie: And what’s the technical answer. What’s the technical answer. Thank you. That was great. By the way. Wasn’t the technical answer?

Ivailo: Like I mentioned earlier one of the, one of the main reasons is that NitroPack pack is able to do the, even the, the basic and the standard optimizations to, to in a much better way than other solutions.

So if you’re, if you take laser welding, for example natural packer, lazy loads, every image on the, on the webpage. So that means the images that are using the picture or the image stack in HTML. But that also means background images, which are, for example, typically in style attributes. But this is something that others, other tools can also do, but they needed to do to manually configure that with NitroPack, this automated automated, but we also lays you out.

Every image that is defined in the css has file, which no other tool does as of right now. So just looking at the image optimization alone, we are able to save, so much space so much data being transferred just by lazy loading, more images than other other tools. The, what the analyst said is referring to how we try to optimize the use of the multi-core nature of mother CPU’s.

So the web is typically a single threaded, so that’s why the main thread is so important. And that’s why Optimizations and speed measuring tools. They measure what happens in the metric because it’s the most important threat. And the typically the only thread that you can use for web application for a website, but Modern CPU’s use have multiple threads and what for multiple cores, which can process data and information in parallel.

So. You can process more and you can do more without effecting the main thread without blocking it. And that’s what NitroPack PAC is trying to do. We are trying to utilize these cores and trying to basically change how things typically load in a webpage. So it can be faster like, like the onset with the checkout analogy by utilizing.

The more of one course in the CPU is basically like having more than one checkout. You can even process multiple streams of data at once. That’s why we also. You have a CDN, it helps in improving the site speed, even if you have a faster server it’s, it’s a common misconception.

That fast server is enough to have a good experience, but it’s not a fast service. Something that helps you just have a better first that first bite and better faster. Loading of the HTML, but then when the device has to render the site, even if you deliver the HTML to the client very fast by upgrading your server if your HTML is not optimized, if your site’s structure is not well built, the site still loads low.

So these are all things that NitroPack takes in inconsideration. And we think about them and we try to optimize the entire journey. Serving the HTML file is just the beginning of what that pack does. And in essence, it’s the end of what the server does. So if you do several organizations there’s very, very little kind of overlap between what NitroPack does and what server optimization does.

What’s your advice for some-one with a really slow website?

Jamie: I have one final question, which I’m not sure how I’m going to phrase it, but looking on some of the forums and some of the sort of chat around this, that there seems to be some purists is probably too strong, a word, but people that are very much, you know you shouldn’t need a caching solution if your sites are built properly, but a lot of WordPress users can never get to that sort of level or are they using.

Plugins or page builders or shared hosting that that can’t possibly you know, they’re not gonna be able to be that their sites in quick time. I guess my question next, get to my question. My question is, do you, do you think do you think somebody should go through that process of optimizing their site in terms of looking at their code base and the theme they’re using on the plugins they are using in addition to NitroPack park, or do you think they don’t need to do that?

Given they have NitroPack pack and they’re seeing amazing scores anyway, 

Deyan: That’s a very good question. I wouldn’t say it’s an either or type of thing the way I start thinking about, Hey, how do I best. Make use of my time, because as a business owner and someone who’s found in different companies before, I want to spend my time doing what I’m best at and how I provide value.

And it might, it may be the case. And it very often is the case with our customers. That site speed is something that they need to sort of. Deal with, but they don’t necessarily have the expertise to deal with that. It can be quite a daunting, complicated thing to do. It can be quite technical. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect from site owners to become web performance masters and a couple of weeks.

I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to expect from folks. And this is the sort of design intent down that Nitropack. We think that you can get an enormous benefit from getting. An automated solution that utilizes years of expertise built in. And most importantly, you can try it out very quickly.

There’s a free plan that you can go and just test anytime of the day, no credit card required, and you can see results immediately. Whereas it might make sense in the long-term to consider, Hey the building blocks of what I’m using with your, did they make sense? Is this something that I can use 10 years from now, but this is a sort of completely different ballpark completely different game. My thinking would be, you know what, there’s something that I’m really good at that provides value. One of my favorite examples is favorite customer of mine who sells carpets out of Cyprus. And he needs to focus on selling those carpets. They, they cost 5,000 euros, a pop fantastic carpets.

It needs to focus his time on talking to his customers and not sweating over, Hey, what’s my FID today. And how do I change my JavaScripts that I can make it better. It may be the case that this is something that’s worth while looking into, but we like to give you the opportunity to be able to benefit from performance.

Now and try it out now, and then you could be improving things in the long run that make me make more sense. Experience shows that that’s not easy to achieve that’s non-trivial to achieve and more often than not, it doesn’t really make so much sense. 

Jamie: Well, thank you guys. That’s been really helpful for explaining Nitropack pack and also Google core web vitals.

Deyan: Thanks you Jamie. That’s great.