Have your questions answered in a live AMA with Wix’s Performance Tech Lead, Dan Shappir. Plus, take a deeper look into how Wix prioritizes performance and what this means for you and your clients.
Transcript: Understanding Wix high performance and CWV scores
Speakers
Brett Haralson, Community Manager, Wix
Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead, Wix
00:00
Brett: Hey, hello everybody and welcome to this week's Partners live AMA with Dan Shappir. Today we're going to be talking all about Core Web Vitals understanding Wix's high score and performance. And let's just kind of jump into it. This is a 100% live AMA. So everything I'm about to ask, is what you've submitted. Dan, welcome, Dan is the head of Wix performance—Tech Lead here at Wix. Dan, everybody knows you as “Dan the Beast”, welcome.
00:27
Dan: Thank you very much. I'm so excited to be here and engage with the community. Looking forward to the questions, let’s see if they can stump me.
00:35
Brett: Yes, yes. Can you stump Dan? So by the way, the questions, here's just for those of you who are joining us, here's kind of the flow, what you can expect. To sign up to this and register you submitted some questions. I've got them all ready to go. However, I'm going to try to get some in chat. So as we're talking about things, if you want to ask Dan a question, please go ahead and do it. And I'll try to get to it towards the end.
And also, there were a lot of questions that were submitted about, you know, what [are] CVW, what is SEO and any tips? We did that webinar with Dan and I and Dikla from Google. It [was] a little while ago, but I added it to the description if you want to go back and refresh yourself. So with that being said, Dan, it's been a while since we talked. And I think the only thing I can do to show where we've come is this right here. It's this graph, Dan.
01:31
Dan: Yeah, it's a great graph. And it's important to note that this is not our graph. This is a graph that's actually hosted on HTTP Archive, which is this open source project sponsored by Google. And the data that's coming in, that's feeding this graph, is data collected by Google with their Chrome user experience report and database, it's the same data that they then use for the SEO ranking boost, that you know, that performance can now give. So this is not Wix data. This is, you can call it objective data about Wix's performance as it's reflected by Google data.
02:16
Brett: So I think it's important to note too, that it's, it's not Wix, so I want to thank you for clarifying that. Wix has come really, really far. And I love this graph. And then I'm gonna jump into the questions. But I want to just spend two more seconds on this. I think it's really important to note that on this graph, if you go back to 2020, Wix is really at the bottom of the pack. Now, if you look at this, Wix is leading the pack. This is incredible Dan, this. What the heck are y'all doing over there?
02:46
Dan: I have really, yeah, I have to say that this has been a company wide effort, you know, this, I’d love to take credit for it. But really, hundreds of people at Wix have been working on this diligently. It's been designated as a top priority, strategic task across the entire Wix organization. And essentially, everybody in Wix R&D, Support, QA, Marketing, everybody has been engaged in pushing Wix’s performance, up and up, you know.
03:17
Brett: So it's funny, because it's all the results. Alright. We said, we said, you know, the Partners, that was one of the pain points, and we needed to be fast, we needed to load faster. And I remember saying and sitting down with so many Partners and you, and we're this is our top priority at Wix. This will happen. I remember even executive levels with some of our roundtable saying that it's so great to see this. I'm glad to be where we are.
But we still have questions, Dan. Let's see. Let's see. So I'm going into the question bank, and I'm gonna start pulling questions. If you have some, please go ahead and drop them. I'll try to get to them towards the end. So here we go. First up, Jose wants to know, “Do I need to republish my site to benefit from performance improvements?” Now I saw this a lot. Dan, is there something the Partners need to do to see something happen? Are there any backend widgets they need to work on? Or does it just happen?
04:09
Dan: Okay, so let's distinguish between, let's say, modifying your website to get the most bang for the buck. And as you said, in the webinar that we did with Google, we did provide a whole bunch of tips and suggestions of things that you can do to get the most performant website that you can on top of the Wix platform.
That being said, in order to just benefit from the improvements that we're making, you don't have to do a thing. One of the great things about Wix is that, you know, we don't break your website, you don't need to update plugins, you don't need to update themes. You don't need to worry about security or scalability. We take care of all these things for you. And the same goes with performance. If somebody built a website on our platform eight years ago, and didn't touch it since then, didn't publish it or anything, it's much faster now than it's ever been.
05:06
Brett: I don't know if anybody, I mean. I really think if you were to look that up in Websters, it would literally be defined as sorcery. I'm serious. That's incredible. That's really incredible. But I do have other questions, too. I think I'll touch on those that actually want to elaborate a little bit on that. But I'll circle back to that. So I'm tossing another one at you.
Ray wants to know, “How can partners utilize these scores to help promote Wix to their clients?” And Wellington has a secondary follow-up question to that, “How can you correct the assumption that Wix is slow?” And you know, and Dan, I'll chime in here for just a second. I understand that, you know, as a Partner, your creativity, your business, is building a web presence for a client. And a lot of clients have different conceptions of something, or they may have seen an ad on Facebook or Google or something, and they're interested in this site. So— or this platform, a lot of Partners, I think, battle that—convincing their client to go a certain way, because it's what they love. What would you say about this to help Partners put a feather in their cap?
06:17
Dan: Well, first of all, let's start with the fact that as the graph shows, if we go back two, three years, four years, Wix was slow. You know, we did do a lot of work, we have come a long way, you know, I can give examples of other places where Wix has substantially pushed the envelope forward, like SEO, or with accessibility, where, you know, we knew that we needed to up our game, and we were able to do that.
And performance is yet another example of this. So if we look at that graph, and compare, then three, then let's say two years ago, if you built a site on Wix, or you built a site on WordPress, then with WordPress, you would have been three times more likely to have a good Core Web Vitals score. Now, with Wix in the US, you're twice as likely to [have] a good Core Web Vitals score, then you are with WordPress.
So there's a definite improvement and shift here. So if somebody says, you know, “I heard that Wix is slow?” Well, the answer to that is your information is simply outdated. Wix has come a long way forward. And, you know, that's kind of the benefit of using a platform such as ours, that you get all these benefits and improvements over time, like we said before, without you needing to do anything.
07:48
Brett: Who doesn't love Dan, your information is outdated. I want a shirt, I'm gonna brand that me and the Partners are going to start wearing shirts that quote, Dan the Beast, “Your information is outdated.” Wix is the GOAT. I saw that, by the way, that was great, who said that? Oh, gosh, it was great. We need more, we need more GOAT icons. Okay.
So let me go to another question. I think you answered both of those. That was great. Thank you for that. Matt. I think this is Matt. This is a great, great question, “How can we view more detailed CWV metrics?” And more importantly, he wants to know, “Is it possible to import, export and share with clients?” I think this is a fantastic question, Dan.
08:28
Dan: Well, the great thing about Core Web Vitals and what Google [has] done is that they've kind of standardized the market around these, these metrics. And as a result of this, you can literally see these metrics in almost any performance measurement tool that you use.
So currently, we don't yet show them in the Site Speed dashboard. And you know, you can take my use of the word yet as an indication of things to come. But you can definitely check them out in other sources. So for example, if you're interested about your own website, and if you have enough traffic, then you know, if you just go into the Google Search Console, you will see there is a Core Web Vitals tab in there. And you can actually get information about your code vitals for your own website within the Google Search Console.
They will actually highlight, you know which pages have good Core Web Vitals, which pages need improvement, and then you can kind of focus on those. So that's one place where you can see this information. Another place where you can see this information is in Google PageSpeed Insights, where you can literally put in any website, your own, your competitors, you know, like CNN, whatever, and if that website has sufficient traffic, you will see the Core Web Vitals information for that website.
Now, unfortunately, PSI is kind of confusing, the way that the data is presented. A little bird at Google whispered in our ear that they're looking at revamping their user interface and hopefully making it clearer and more understandable. Because you kind of have the score at the top, which—it doesn't actually have to do with Core Web Vitals, it's actually based on lab data.
10:25
Brett: And I have a question about that, it’s queued up. So let's talk about that in just a second. Because that's interesting. I want to know about that. But Dan, I'm curious about what the Partners do. I know a lot of the SEO-specialized Partners have like a report that they show a lot of their clients to show how they're gaining local organic SEO traffic? Are any Partners doing anything with performance, are you sending this to—just drop it in the chat? I'm curious. So I [because] I would Dan, what do you think?
10:53
Dan: Well, for sure. I mean, you know, you can, for example, that graph that we showed at the beginning that we said that it's from HTTP Archive. That graph is available to anybody. We can we, you know, we can share the link to that. And it's a really nice tool that the people that the HTTP Archive have created, because you can filter and compare various CMS platforms or website builders or eCommerce platforms, you can look at different geos. By the way, I highly recommend that you filter it for the particular geography that you're in. So for example, if you're selling in the States, and you want to compare to others, to other platforms, then, you know, filter that graph to the States or, UK or wherever, because that is a better indication of what you can expect. And then you can definitely just show that, you know, I'm going to build a website for you, if I build it with this platform, it's that much more likely to get a good Core Web Vitals score than if, you know, you build it with some other platform.
12:04
Brett: Yeah, and again, here, I think it's a really great opportunity here for Partners to share some of the other sites that they've done and show those scores. And you know, so I think this is a great question. And I think every Partner can handle it a different way. But I think it's a good conversation for us to have as a community, Partner, so whatever you do, I'm curious. Okay.
12:26
Dan: Yeah, just just one more comment on that one of my favorite posts on our Community group in Facebook, was this post where people started posting, you know, screenshots and grabs of their GT metric scores, and you know, boasting how far like, "We had a C, and now it's an A", and it's all green and whatnot. So that, you know, I really enjoyed watching that conversation. It was really great.
12:53
Brett: That's great. It's great. A lot of Partners are actually doing this. And by the way, there are some really good questions that have gone into chat that I've taken note of, so we may actually get to stump the GOAT today. Okay.
So let's—I'm gonna keep going. So let's go to another one. Alright. So here's a great one. How do I check current performance and measure impact of site changes? Is there a way to see if I've made some changes? Maybe some changes that we've talked about in the previous webinars, Dan. I make those changes. How do I know if I've measured or if my performance is shifted? That's a good question.
13:31
Dan: So you know, all the tools that we've mentioned are totally relevant to measure your performance at any point in time. One of the great things about the Site Speed dashboard— currently it just shows the Time to Interactive metric, but it definitely shows it over time. So you can see, so you know, there's this nice graph in there that you can see how the changes that you're making, impact your site, or likewise, you can measure different points in time.
One of the problems with the Google tools is, you know, it, actually, let me clarify that. If you use the Google Search Console, they use a moving average of, you know, looking at a month back, but it's from today, until a month back. In PageSpeed Insight, they only look at like month segments. So you need to take into account that changes that you make, will not show for example in PageSpeed Insights in the field section for about up to a month. So be aware of that when you're trying to measure the changes that you're making.
So either use like a lab score to see whether the score is going up or down, you know, we'll talk a little bit about PageSpeed Insights and how to, you know, consider that score in a bit. So I don't want to go too deeply into that right now. But I will say that it's really useful for seeing whether you're improving or regressing, you know, so forget about what the actual score is right now. Just compare it to a score that you had before, see whether it's higher, or whether it's lower. And that's a great way and again, you can actually run it directly from within the Site Speed dashboard, you don't actually have to go to PageSpeed Insight.
If you go to the Site Speed dashboard, in your Google, in your sorry, in your Wix dashboard, you can scroll down, and you can see your PSI score for both, Lighthouse score for both desktop and mobile. And you can click Refresh to rerun it again and again. So you can check the impact of changes that you made.
Now, what I usually recommend for people to do—so first of all, you know, one of the great features, one of the best features, in my opinion, that we have in Wix, is our Site History. So you can always make changes. And then if you don't like them, well, you can just refer to a previous version. You know, it's useful for performance. But it's also useful, just you know, in general, if you're testing out various changes, and now we also have the, what's it called, the Release Candidates within the Editor that do like, which is an amazing feature, you can run like A B test. Now you can't A B test for performance, at least not yet. But—
16:17
Brett: Is that a not yet, Dan? Is that a not yet? Yeah,
16:20
Dan: We'll see. But, but you can, you can use that mechanism. Or you can even really go old school. And you can either duplicate the page, or duplicate even the entire site. And so for example, you can duplicate the page, make whatever changes you want, then, for example, use PageSpeed Insights to compare the score for this page and compare the score for that page.
One more thing that I will say about Google's PageSpeed Insight, it's a known issue with that, that scores within it fluctuate a lot. So if you're looking at the PSI score, I would recommend for you to essentially run it several times, like I don't know, five times. And then take the average score, or something like that, or the median score, something like that. And not just, you know, run it once and assume that whatever you get is the actual, like, absolute score that you have.
17:18
Brett: I hope everybody's taking notes. I'm pretty sure that there are some notepads smoking right now, there's so much heavy writing or typing keyboards burning up. I think that whole segment just needs to be turned into a blog. Everything you just said needs to be a blog right there.
17:32
Dan: Yeah, that's probably gonna happen. That's incredibly good. Yeah, that's probably going to happen as well.
17:37
Brett: Okay, good. Good, because we need that. Alright, let's, I've got another good question. Rhen wants to know, now, this is kind of a double part here. Rhen wants to know, “Why his mobile PSI score is low?”
And Ari wants to know, similar, but specifically about Stores. So maybe this is the same, or maybe they're different? I'll let you, I'll let you answer this.
17:58
Dan: So I'll start with the general one, about talking about the mobile PSI score. So you know, when you run, when you put in your website, or anybody's website, inside PSI, and you press the Go button, it does two things.
Again, as we previously explained, if you have sufficient traffic, it will actually go and retrieve your field data from that Google database. But in addition to that, it actually loads your site on a Google virtual machine somewhere in the cloud, and does a whole bunch of measurements on it.
So it effectively does the single session, and just tries to measure the performance of that particular session. Actually it does two sessions, one to measure desktop performance and one to measure mobile performance. In the case of mobile, Google are intentionally simulating a low-end device, the device that they're simulating in PageSpeed Insights is a Moto G4 phone, that's a phone that was released, like the beginning of 2016. So it's over five years old. And they're using a simulated 3G network. So you know, our experience is that the vast majority of visitors to Wix websites have much better devices and connectivity than that. So it's not surprising.
You know, sometimes people ask me, why do I see green Core Web Vitals, but I'm seeing, you know, a relatively low score in PageSpeed Insights, especially for mobile. Well, that's the reason. The reason is that your users, probably your actual users, your actual visitors, probably have much better devices and much better connectivity than what Google is simulating. Now why is Google simulating such a low-end device?
Well, because they want to be inclusive, because, you know, we're living in a global economy. They want you to think about potential customers in Africa, or in Southeast Asia or whatever, where they might have, you know, not such good, not such powerful devices or slower conductivity than what you might have.
And, in fact, they've recently written a blog post. We can share a link to that as well, although it's a bit technical, about why there is a potential significant discrepancy between their mobile, their lab scores, those simulated scores and the actual field data. The important thing to note here, is that the ranking boost within the Google Search Console is just based on the field data. So the lab data that you're seeing in PageSpeed Insights has zero impact on the Google ranking algorithm, you can use it as you know, as an indication, and like, you know, I want to move up the score. So you know, I'm making changes, I can see the score going up, because it will take time until these changes are reflected in the field data. But it's important to remember that this is only used as a tool to give you an indication of what a low-end device might experience when visiting your site. I hope this was clear—kind of a technical explanation.
21:26
Brett: I feel like every time I ask a question, you pull out a book open and start reading. And then we close the book and go to the next one. It's like the library of Dan here. I don't know what's going on. So yeah, it makes perfect sense to me, that makes perfect sense to me.
21:41
Dan: Now, going back to the specific part about Stores. So there are a couple of points I wanted to make here. The first and important point is that, you know, in many ways, a store site, or a blog site, or an event site, or fitness site or restaurant or whatever. They're all just Wix sites, and most of the changes that we're making are essential infrastructure changes that impact every site, regardless of which Wix features it actually uses.
That being said, you know, it's not possible to move the needle equally across the board. So some aspects of Wix might be, let's call it further ahead, in terms of performance than others. But we're not stopping. We're not holding, you know, we'll talk about this later on, we keep on pushing forward. And, our goal is to be, you know, the fastest best option across the board.
22:45
Brett: Okay, we'll close that book. Let's open another one. So Daniel wants to know, “How well does Wix's performance scale with large databases and stores?” So is there like a breaking point where too much affects performance? Is there a sweet spot?
23:04
Dan: So we built Wix to scale, this whole change that we made with the introduction of dynamic pages and collections, and stuff like that was implemented exactly for this purpose. You know, it used to be that if you wanted to have lots of items within your Wix site, you basically just needed to build manually, lots and lots of pages.
These days, that's not the way to go. You build a single dynamic page, you bind it to a collection, and off you go. And the great thing about that, is that, you know, the mechanism doesn't really care how many items are in the collection in terms of the performance of that dynamic page.
Because these are databases running on fast servers, they're built to scale, there's literally no problem. Every page is wholly independent of the other pages in the site. So the fact that you know, you have one page, which is heavy, and another page, which is lighter, you know, the heavy page does not impact the lighter page. For example, that being said, you know, sometimes you show a lot of content within a single page.
So for example, you might have a product catalog, or a blog feed, or gallery, or what have you or a repeater. And in that case, if you decide to display a lot of items within that, let's say catalog, that will result in a bigger page, and that page as a result will be heavier, and that will have an impact on performance. So usually, my recommendation is not to overdo it in terms of items on a page.
You know, when reviewing websites, occasionally I see mobile pages that are 30, 50, even 100 screens long. And I, you know, I kind of asked myself, you know, who expects their visitors to scroll through 100 screens on their mobile device to find the item that they're interested in.
If that's your approach, you're creating a cognitive overload for your visitors and it's unlikely that they will scroll through that entire page. And that huge page has a performance cost. We are working on mitigating it, we've done some work, we're doing more work to be able to handle bigger pages. But there are no free lunches. The more stuff you put on a page, you know, it will impact your performance. So generally speaking, in the context of you know, having large databases is, you know, you know, go wild to have as many items in your collection as you would like. But make sure not to try to overload your visitor with too many items on a single page.
26:01
Brett: It makes perfect sense to me, Dan, perfect sense. So for those of you who are just joining us, we are live, we're having a live AMA with Dan the man, the GOAT, the legend. And I'm taking questions that you have submitted, but if you have one that you want to ask, please drop it in chat. I'm gonna, I've got a few more to go. And then I'm going to go to some of your live questions. And we're going to keep going. So great question. And thank you, Dan.
So let's jump to this. And I think you sort of asked this. I mean, I think you sort of answered this, but let's maybe go a little bit more in deep, a little more in-depth, how does adding content or functionality to a page impact and you kind of touched on that which is a perfect prelude to this question. So I'll ask it again, how does adding content to a page impact CWV?
26:50
Dan: Well, first, yeah, so as I said, there are no free lunches. The more stuff that you put on the page, the greater the impact on the page's performance. It's almost impossible to add stuff with zero impact. You know, like I said, we are doing all sorts of optimizations, like, for example, lazy loading images. So for example, [on] a Wix page, you know, you, we initially load low-quality images that, you know, are replaced with the final high-resolution images.
The images that are below the fold, or, you know, outside the initial viewport that you need to scroll to get to, we only download them when you start scrolling towards that section. So we don't download them upfront. So in this way, we kind of tried to mitigate the impact of adding more content to the page. But like I said, at the end of the day, the more stuff that you put in, the heavier the page becomes, the bigger the HTML, the bigger, you know, more stuff.
Now—so you do need to take that into account. And also, as I said, there's also the concept of perceived performance, or the cognitive overhead, the more stuff that you put on the page, the greater the load is on your visitor to try to figure out what that page is about. So don't just think about the performance in terms of how long it takes for the browser to load and display your content. Try to also think about how long it takes for the visitor to kind of comprehend what you're showing to them and being able to understand what your website is about, you know, what is your primary message that you want to get across.
Which brings me to an important point—it's a term that's familiar in marketing, I don't know how many of our listeners are familiar with it, that's a call-to-action or CTA. It basically refers to that message or that action that you would like your visitors to perform. So for example, if it's a store, what obviously what you want for them to do is to make a purchase, if I don't know if, let's say you're a fitness trainer, you may want them to book an appointment or something like that.
So, anything that is [conducive] to your CTA, you know has a place on that page. Anything that does not contribute to that CTA should probably be removed. It will improve your performance, it will reduce the cognitive overhead and will likely improve your conversion. And you know, sometimes I look at pages that are all messed up and you know what happens there begin— you know, somebody in the company wants to promote one thing and somebody else wants to promote another thing. So ultimately, they just tried to put everything in there and at the end of the day, that's just a bad idea. And you do need to try to figure out what your website is all about and try to focus on that.
Another point that I would like to make is that not all components are created equal. You know, there are obviously some heavier things and some lighter things. So obviously a gallery is heavier than a single image. So when you're putting stuff, especially in the initial viewport, again, what is known also as above the fold, think about the stuff that you're putting in there.
For example, I usually recommend for people to make sure that they have some text, at least some text above the fold, not just images, not just galleries, not just videos, but also some text, because that text will appear usually faster, and it will provide meaningful content for the person who's visiting your website. You know, I kind of strayed off from the original question.
30:59
Brett: I like it. I think there's—I hope people are taking notes. I mean, there's just so much knowledge. I kind of like it when you kind of wander off a little. It's still very interesting, but relatable, right? It's related to what we’re talking about. Can we close that book? And can I go to the library and pull another one out?
31:17
Dan: Yeah, for sure. Go for it. You know, okay.
31:20
Brett: So, here's a good one. I'm watching the chat. There's a couple questions. By the way, Patricia, your question I pulled and it's coming next. So hang tight on that one. What exactly is Wix doing for CWV for Wix Stores? Is it separate Dan? Is the performance different for eComm sites versus regular, earlier you said it's all the same. So I'll give you an opportunity to hit this nail on the head.
31:44
Dan: So it's kind of the same, but not exactly the same. So as I said, all Wix sites share the same infrastructure. And the same underlying technology. And the same core—let's call it code, by the way, and it's also true, whether you're using ADI, or the Wix Editor, or Editor X, whatever editor you used to build your website. It's all running on the same infrastructure, and using the same core code to actually render the site.
And so as a result, improvements that we are able to make within that infrastructure, and within that core code impacts every Wix website out there. And by the way, I want to give—you know, use this opportunity to give this huge shout out to what is known inside Wix as the Viewer Company. That's the team working on the core code that displays websites, they made a huge improvement in terms of performance, they've effectively rewritten that entire component from scratch. Much of that upward trend that you saw on the graph is a result of their work. It's amazing work that they've done. And, and as I said, that impacts every Wix website of any type, regardless of the functionality that it uses.
That being said, obviously, there are also some elements within a Wix Store website that are specific to Stores, like you know, the shopping cart icon, you only get that if you've got the Store functionality. Or you may add chat in a Store that you might not add, for example, in a Blog. And those things also have their own code. And we are working to improve the performance of all of these components.
As I said, you know, some are further ahead than others. But obviously Stores [are] really important for us. And, and it's one that we're focusing a lot of effort on, in particular. And as you saw, when you looked at the graph, you know, I'll say it quietly, I think that one of the companies shown in that graph was Shopify. And they are as you can see, they're the one just behind us now. They're also making improvements. They've also upped their game in terms of performance, so everybody's kind of doing it with one exception. But, yeah, anyway, but we've managed, at least in the US for—no, well, not at least, but for example, in the US to actually pull ahead of them in terms of the performance of websites built on the platform, or more accurately stated, the percentage of websites built on our platform that get good Core Web Vitals versus the percentage of websites built on their platform that get good Core Web Vitals.
34:54
Brett: Yes, and I think it was either this week or last week, I saw a Partner drop an article that was specifically talking about how another platform is now trying to put together their own team similar to what Wix has done. Because it's evident that the performance that we've—the progress we've made in a year is incredible.
And I love, here, and I'm not gonna, this is a question I'm gonna ask you in a minute. But I love how you're saying, you know, we've done well, but we're still there's so much more for us to do. And I love that, I just love that. So I'm gonna go back to the library, Dan. I'm gonna get another one. And then I've got a few that people have asked in the chat that are just outstanding, I want to do a little bit of overdrive and get to see if we can stump the man. Okay, here we go. Here we go. So Patricia wants to know, “Is it better to upload WebP files to make the page faster?” And then Gordon has sort of like a really close question to that. And this question is, “What is the best format to use for fast and clear loading images, specifically ones that are extra large?”
36:02
Dan: Yeah. So images, you know, they're a very interesting topic, because on the one hand, it's really obvious to everybody, you know, we want to have good clear pictures on the website. But then when you kind of start delving into this topic, there are a lot of technicalities in there. And also it turns out that there are a lot of myths.
So first of all, I want to point out that in that webinar that we did, I discussed media in particular, so I highly recommend for people who are interested in this topic, to go back and check it out, you know, beyond what we just say in this AMA. Because there are a lot, there's a lot of useful information there about what you can do to get the most out of it. I also want to say that Wix has some of the best media people that I've ever encountered in the industry, working for it, you know, the Wix Media services are amazing, you get out-of-the box functionality that you need to, you know, purchase separately on other platforms.
One of the things that we do is that we automatically optimize images for you. For example, when you crop and clip images, we just download the parts that are actually visible on the screen, we don't, so you can upload this huge image that contains, for example, you want to show a portrait of yourself, but you know, your favorite image is the one that you actually took on vacation, and there's a whole bunch of stuff all around. You can upload that huge image, then within Wix, within the Editor, just crop the part that you actually want to show, and you don't have to worry about it, we won't download all that stuff that's outside the cropped area. So that's one example of some of the optimizations that we automatically do for you.
Another optimization that we do for you is to automatically use modern and optimized image formats. WebP is another one, we'll discuss maybe more of them when we talk about—if we have time to talk about future plans that we have. But you can upload your images as you know, standard JPEG or PNG formats. And we will automatically convert them to WebP for browsers that support it. So we actually recommend that you use the original format, don't convert to WebP yourself. There are some browsers out there that don't properly support WebP. And by uploading the original format, it enables us to use that on those older or less capable browsers, and then do the optimal conversion to WebP for browsers that actually do support that format. So you know, you don't have to worry about WebP, we take care of that for you.
And as another advantage, when a newer image, a media image comes along, that's even better than WebP, we will use that—automatically. And again, you won't need to do anything. So just as an example, we talked before about old websites. A person who built their website, six years ago, seven years ago, before you know WebP was even out there. Well, they're now serving WebP automatically from their website, because we do this automatically for each and every Wix website out there. So that's one important note to make.
In terms of the format to load, without going too much into details. It's generally preferable to use JPEGs over PNGs where possible. Sometimes you need PNGs because you need transparency, for example, maybe you're creating some sort of a parallax effect or something like that and you need that transparent background. But if you can make do without, then I would generally recommend to use JPEG, they result in smaller files. And they result in smaller WebP files. So JPEGs that are converted into WebP are smaller than PNGs that are converted into WebP. So that is what I generally recommend using. Oh, and do avoid GIFs if you can. GIFs you know, people use animated GIFs. I prefer animated clips, you know, video animated, we just use a looping video or something instead, because animated GIFs are huge. They don't get converted into WebP so it's just this GIF and I've seen websites where a single GIF was like three times bigger than the rest of the website.
40:43
Brett: So Patricia, I hope you got all of that. I hope, I mean, I know you're out there. I'm just curious. How do you feel about that response from Dan, because that was, it blew my mind too. And Sam, awesome. Thanks for the love man. That's, I agree, Dan, and everybody at Wix is doing a really good job. But we don't stop there. And that kind of leads me into my next question. Before I jump into the questions from our Partners that are viewing Dan, and I'm gonna ask for just a moment of overdrive.
So one of the Partners actually asked this Simon wants to know, “So what are the next updates for Wix Performance? What's on the horizon?” So we've come a long way. Absolutely. But we're not stopping there Dan. Can you tell us all these—maybe in the future things, these air quotes we're using. What’s next on the agenda?
41:33
Dan: So obviously, you know, putting all the required restrictions and whatever about forward looking statements and whatnot, you know, we have plans, but then, you know, fate intervenes. But that being said, we are definitely not stopping. One thing that I do want to know, if you look at that graphic, and if you can put it up again, you will see that some in some months, we move forward, and then we kind of we kind of—it seems like we stop, and then we move forward again, you know. So I can't promise that we will be able to move forward at the same rate in each and every month.
But we have put systems in place that first of all are intended to prevent regression. So we don't expect to see ourselves ever going backward. And we do intend, and we are continuing to push forward. So overall, you will continue to see that graph keep on going up and up and up and up. For sure. And we do have a lot of stuff on our plate. You know, there are people at Wix, even right now, specifically working on performance related advancements to our platform. So you know, to give an example of something that just got recently rolled out. So it's already out there. But it came out so recently that it's not yet impacted that graph. It's support for HTTP/3. HTTP/3 is like the little one of the latest and greatest web standards, really, really new, not widely used. And it improves the performance of downloading content from the web servers down to the browsers. And we've stopped and we've rolled it out. So we use HTTP/3 where we can and it can deliver content much faster. So that's an example of something that's already been deployed, but is not yet impacting that graph that you showed before.
Something else for example, that we're looking at, I mentioned before, that we're looking at support for newer media formats. So you know, WebP is currently the hotness that some websites are using. By the way, I'm sometimes surprised that so many websites aren't yet using WebP because it's really widely supported. But really recently, for example, a new format has come out called AVIF, which is supposed to be something like 20, even sometimes 30% smaller than WebP and we're looking at it. So this is something that we're currently investigating.
And if we find that it actually delivers on its promise, and is actually able to reduce the size of the image downloads without adversely impacting quality, then we will automatically enable support for it. And again, you won't have to do anything.
Brett: Nobody has to do anything.
Yeah, anything. Yeah, it will just—you'll just start getting AVIF. And yeah, another thing that we're looking at is being smarter about how we do this gradual image display. We already have it but we're looking, but currently it's either low-res or high-res and we're looking at making it [a] more gradual kind of build up to the final form. Let me see, I've actually made a list of some of the things. So I'm—
45:08
Brett: I'm gonna jump in while you're doing this, I want to preface this because I'm going to start bringing in questions from the Community that have asked about this. And Rhen had a really good question kind of about that, “With these increases in the scores, do you anticipate future optimizations will be incremental? Or do you think there's going to be things that can make some huge jumps in the future?” And I don't know if that's what you're getting ready to show? Or—
45:30
Dan: Yeah, well, the reality usually is that these things are incremental. You know, if there were obvious ones, that would make this a huge change, then we would just, you know, go for it. We are working on some changes. So you know, the Core Web Vitals, there are three of them. Again, I won't go into too much details, but we are looking at making some significant improvements on, you know, one of them. So you might, you might see an occasional jump.
But overall, this is going to be a gradual thing, if for no other reason [than] there are so many different types of Wix websites out there. So for example, there are some websites where the primary content is an image. And there are some websites where the primary content is text. And so if we make an improvement in how quickly we are able to download and display an image that benefits, you know, those sites, but not the ones where the primary content is textual. And that general graph that we showed was across all Wix websites, so you know, we might make a change that would make a particular website suddenly really improve in terms of performance. But if you look at Wix as a whole, I expect more of a gradual improvement to be honest.
Brett: That makes a lot of sense.
Dan: Yeah, so I did want to mention a few more things that we're looking at. So you know, we've introduced a Site Speed dashboard, that was definitely a version one. We are looking at ways to make that dashboard better, provide more actionable metrics, and in general be more applicable when you're looking to improve your performance. So expect to see improvements there.
Oh, another really cool one. You know, a lot of people when they use PSI, the Google PageSpeed Insights, all the recommendations there are really generic. And a lot of them are not really things that you know, you as a Wix website owner can actually do anything with. So for example, you might see recommendations such as reduce the amount of JavaScript, well, you don't really have control over the JavaScript, this is up to us. Well, you know, you can remove functionality from the page, that will likely reduce the amount of JavaScript that you're using, but you know, short of that, you know, you can't really keep your functionality and reduce the JavaScript, that's up to us. Well, guess what, we are working on it. We are working on significantly reducing the amount of JavaScript that we reduce in order to provide a current functionality by essentially being smarter about, you know, identifying exactly which functionality each page is using, and only downloading what the page actually exactly needs. And this is a work in progress. This is, you know, not something that will likely happen overnight, it will happen gradually. It's something that we will keep improving over time. But going back to Google PageSpeed Insights, we are actually looking to integrate Wix specific suggestions into Google PageSpeed Insights, so that when you put in a Wix website, it will identify that it's a Wix website, and in that Recommendations section and Suggestions. In addition to the generic ones, you will also get Wix specific recommendations and suggestions for things that you can improve. I think that's a really cool, cool thing that we are looking to do.
49:21
Brett: And for those of you he's not reading this off of a script, like it's incredible to me, Dan, how you just, it's you have there's, there's you know, more than you've probably forgotten more than I'll ever know in my life. Okay. I've got another one. And this kind of touches—you touched on this a little bit, but I love when the Partners are interested, technically. So looking at the graphs, Wix improved significantly. I mean, can you talk about specifically things that you did, and you touched on this a little you talked about the viewer. Do you want to add anything? Or just kind of talk about how the viewer—talk about that again, for this particular question, because I thought this was incredibly interesting. Yeah.
Dan 49:58
So just to clarify FID is First Input Delay, it measures the time when a visitor visits your site and the first time that that visitor interacts with the page in any way whatsoever, for example, [they] click on a button or on a menu. Anything other than scroll and zoom. Scroll and zoom don't count. Any actual interaction that requires the page to respond. The browser measures the time that it takes for that first interaction, and, and sees how quickly the browser, the web page responds. And that's the FID. And ideally, by the way, FID which should be under 100 milliseconds, because according to research, that counts as an essentially instantaneous response.
And, as you correctly stated, that's one of the main things that we improved, you know, if we look at the graph, we really like went from having really poor FID to being right up there, with almost perfect FID. And that has to do with that you know, I shouted out to the Viewer team before, that mostly has to do with the work that they've done. We've shifted a lot of the computation that used to take place within the browser, off to our own servers, so that instead of having to do a lot of heavy lifting, using JavaScript inside the browser, we just now do it on our fast servers. And we were you know, we offload this effort off of the visitors device. And, you know, by offloading this processing off of the device, it frees up the device to more quickly respond to the visitor's interaction. So if you're asking specifically where, how did that happen? Well, you know, that's kind of a really short explanation of what we did.
52:01
Brett: Thank you. And by the way, I have to say that there was a secondary question that was asked, and I also want to grab this, I think this also is a pretty good one. Wix has comparable performance to Shopify in the US, but not in other places. And this is kind of not to compare with Shopify, but on more of the horizon, are there other geographies that you can maybe speak on that Wix is working on? And increasing the performance in other geographies? Or is there anything you want to touch on there?
52:33
Dan: So you know, for sure, so first of all, I have to, you know, the reality is that some geographies will have better performance than others, if for no other reason [than] mobile networks are better in some places than in others, or that the device that the average person might have, would be better than those, you know, faster that's not to say, then those that you might have, that people might have in other countries. And that's something that obviously over which we have no control, although, and here, I don't actually want to go into the details, we are looking at ways to even mitigate that.
That being said, there are things, definitely things that we can do and that we are doing. So for example, way back when I joined Wix, we effectively had one data center in the US, which would serve the entire world. Now, Wix has many data centers, spread around the globe, which is obviously better for reliability and uptime. But it's also better for performance because you will be served by a data center that's closer to you. Beyond that, we are working with using CDNs to quickly deliver content, you know, Content Delivery Networks, stuff like Fastly, or Akamai or Google has a CDN there are various CDN providers out there. And you know, one of the cool and unique things that we are doing is that we actually try to optimize CDN per geography. So a particular CDN might be better in the States, but another CDN might actually be better in India.
So we actually try to measure the CDN performance that we are getting in particular geographies. And if we see that one CDN is potentially better than the other one, we will actually automatically switch. So yes, we are working hard to improve performance around the globe. I can give as again, a concrete example. performance in Australia, for example, has improved dramatically over the past you know, years and months, because of you know, such changes that we have made in our infrastructure.
54:55
Brett: That's interesting because somebody actually asked that so you know, [are] these performance improvements only in the US? And that's actually what they're talking about the clients that are in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. So I guess what you just said sort of answers that question as well.
55:11
Dan: Well, yes, we improved around the globe. And by the way, you know, we just showed the graph from the HTTP Archive website for the US. But you know, go in there like I said, we should provide the link and select the UK instead, and you will see the same thing. You will see that the graph is, you know, going up and up, and that we are much better than most of our competitors, if not all.
55:41
Brett: And that's a great question. So I can, what other resources Dan, and and this is, a great question here that was a follow-up. Are there other sites and tools? Can I add some of that, if you can give me a few of those links I'll add that to the description. So the Partners can sort of—
55:54
Dan: Yeah, so yeah. So we saw that HTTP Archive site where, you know, if you want to sell Wix as a platform, not a specific site, that's just a great research tool to use. Or you can use Google PageSpeed Insight or GT metrics, if you want to use it to measure the performance of a particular website, even one that's not your own to do comparisons. If you're looking at your own Core Web Vitals data, then Google Search Console, the Core Web Vitals tab in it. And of course, our own Site Speed dashboard that you can use to look at performance data for your website on Wix.
56:37
Brett: So this has been incredible. And Dan, I just have to say, you really are a GOAT, you're the greatest of all time man. And it's incredible, because we asked you a question and you just amazingly explained it and go into so much detail. Like I said, there are keyboards smoking, and pencils and pads on fire from all the notes, we're definitely gonna have to dissect this. This has been absolutely incredible. So there's more to come. Wix isn't done. But I want to thank you. First off for taking the time and just coming in and sitting with us and answering our questions. This is such great content for our Partners, you know, they love this, and I appreciate it.
57:18
Dan: You're very welcome. I enjoyed this a whole lot myself. As you know, I love engaging with the Community. By the way, for example, I'm on Twitter. You can hit me up there. I'm slightly, occasionally on Facebook. Not much. But you know, you can also try to drop a question there. I'm sure, Brett, and you know, you can always contact Brett and our amazing Support team. We've got amazing support. One of the things that we've done in terms of performance is we've trained a lot of our support people to be able to answer support questions related to performance. So it's not just me by not by a long shot.
57:57
Brett: And by the way, by the way, huge shout out to them. They've been in the chat. They've been answering questions. Amazing job. I saw a lot of actual Partners comment how great their interaction with Support was. 100% Agree. Awesome, awesome team efforts all around, right?
Dan: Exactly.
Brett: Look, you're getting some shout outs. Mike. Michael wants everybody to follow you on Twitter, because you tweet about interesting stuff.
58:22
Dan: Yeah, it's Dan Shappir on Twitter. Just so you know. So you know, feel free.
58:27
Brett: Awesome. Dan, thanks a lot. I want to and by the way I do see sometimes comments in the Community and you write dissertations and it just blows people's minds. Okay, so, so awesome. Thanks, y'all. I'll see y'all in the Community. If you're not in the Community, what are you doing? You got to get in there with us. Okay, for sure. So, thanks, Dan. Thanks, Partners, and I'll see you all out there. Have a great day. Bye.