Spring Cleaning Your Website with Jacob Feltner and Lauren Gray | Mediavine On Air Episode 45

Spring is here and winter is DONE! Well, sort of.

But that’s not going to stop us from our favorite annual tradition: spring cleaning!

Whether it’s your office or your bedroom, it’s important to stay organized, clean, and throw all the clutter away. As a content creator, your website is no different.

On today’s episode we have Mediavine’s Sr. Support Engineer Manager Jacob Feltner and Once Coupled’s Lauren Gray. Jacob and Lauren are talking spring cleaning for your site, with everything from auditing your plugins to their favorite tools to use.

This episode is packed with actionable tips so if you learn something, make sure to let us know and share what stood out to you!

Helpful Resources

• Once Coupled
• Our Help Guide to Site Speed
• Lazy Loading Ads
• How To Do A Plugin Self-Audit

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hey everybody, welcome. It is Thursday, March 12. It is a little bit crazy in our world right now. But we are here. I am Jenny Guy. I’m the Director of Marketing for Mediavine and the host of Teal Talk. And I’m very grateful that you are joining us today.

In current events, daylight savings time started for most of the US states over the weekend, which coincided with International Women’s Day and resulted in more confusion and deprivation for females, perfect. And then in other news, spring starts officially one week from today, the season of rebirth, and fresh starts, and green grass. And I think that that’s something we could all do with right now in our lives.

I know that on everybody’s minds and thoughts right now is what’s going on in our world and in our country. But what I’m excited about is we can have a whole hour to just sit in our home pods and talk about our websites and not the big elephant in the room, the virus elephant in the room. I’m so excited.

So as I was saying, spring, rebirth, green grass, fresh starts, which means it’s time for spring cleaning, which could be your closet, your pantry, pockets of your winter coats. Unless you are me, and you love the dollar pocket lottery to happen when the next year– you know, when you put on your coat that you haven’t worn in eight months, and you stick your hand in the pocket, and you’re like, $5. It’s– it gets me every time.

But what we’re talking about today, us being Mediavine, is your website. Have any of you guys ever done this? A deep and thorough cleansing to get rid of the things you don’t need anymore that are just taking up space and weighing and slowing you down. It sounds like a great idea. But how do you make this happen? Enter my amazing guests.

Lauryn Gray is the founder of Once Coupled and believes in doing everything with passion and transparency, which mostly means she sends really long emails riddled with exclamation points. Girl, same. She’s worked with over 500 plus bloggers on projects from reducing above the fold white space, to taking a site from a zero-page speed optimization score to green.

When she’s not making your site faster and easier for you to manage, Lauren enjoys crime TV, mojitos, and long walks on the beach with her dog. Hi, Lauren. Welcome back to Teal Talk. It’s been a while.

LAUREN GRAY: It has been. I think we did a spring talk like this last year.

JACOB FELTNER: We lost Jenny. She was the glue. She’s what kept it together.

LAUREN GRAY: She is. I can’t even tell if we’re still live.

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah, I don’t know. Andrew just waved at us. So–

LAUREN GRAY: OK.

JACOB FELTNER: –potentially.

LAUREN GRAY: So that might mean we’re still here. We don’t know where Jenny is.

JACOB FELTNER: No.

LAUREN GRAY: Jacob, should I introduce you? I’ve got your–

JACOB FELTNER: Dude, that’d be awesome.

LAUREN GRAY: –info here. Great. Well, I’m here with Jacob Feltner. He is a Support Engineering Manager at Mediavine, as well as a husband and dog dad. He’s an expert in all things Mediavine ads, more specifically what plays nicely with them and what breaks them.

He spends his day trying to make publishers all the dollars and his nights adding to his knowledge as a movie buff and all around info junkie. Welcome Jacob to this Facebook Live.

JACOB FELTNER: Thank you Lauren. This is– it was a good recovery, very good recovery. We’re doing great.

JENNY GUY: That was super new.

JACOB FELTNER: Ooh, there she is.

JENNY GUY: I am– my computer legit went black screen for no reason.

LAUREN GRAY: Well, we made the best of it.

JENNY GUY: I’m sure you guys were brilliant. And I’m sorry that I had to come back and wreck whatever awesome conversation flow you had happening just now. But I am here, hello.

JACOB FELTNER: It was perfect timing.

JENNY GUY: And I apologize for that. I was about to introduce our amazing intrepid Jacob Feltner, who is our support engineering manager at Mediavine. He is also a husband and a dog dad.

JACOB FELTNER: Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again.

JENNY GUY: He’s an expert– I’m so sorry.

LAUREN GRAY: I did technically read his bio out for you.

JACOB FELTNER: You know, Lauren actually already did that but if you want to do it again–

JENNY GUY: Oh, you read his bio.

LAUREN GRAY: I did.

JENNY GUY: Oh my gosh. Awesome. Girl, you don’t need me.

LAUREN GRAY: Couldn’t have him not having an intro here.

JENNY GUY: I don’t even need to be here. This is awesome. OK. So I’m glad– I just got all the comments that I’m reading all the things. We’re so glad you’re here. OK. Let’s talk about– let’s dispense with the formalities. We’re going to be doing some fun stuff here where we ask a good audience interactive question.

So the one we’re going to start with is just a pretty simple one, which is how is your site speed right now? Post your late– your last mobile score in GPSI in the comments, if you dare. And then any other questions you have for Jacob or Lauren, please feel free to post in the comments. We will be talking about all the things.

So to start out with, let’s kick off with telling me a little bit about yourselves and why I’ve asked you– why you think I’ve asked you to share your expertise on this particular episode of Tale Talk– Teal Talk, other than the fact that you’re lovely humans. I love hanging out with you and spending time with you. So Lauren, will you start for me please?

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah, absolutely. I’m Lauren with Once Coupled, as my bio originally introduced me. I just love working one-on-one with clients, personally. I really like getting to build relationships with my clients. I’m personally very intrigued by complex problems.

So I love bigger projects where we get to solve stuff and a big part of that has been site speed. And I’m personally a perfectionist. So as high as we can get your scores, with as much compromise on functionality as possible, really what drives me. And I don’t know, kind of what I like to do in my day-to-day.

I’ve got a team of another three to developers, depending on the projects, that work with me. And they are experts– their expertise is either in custom themes or in site speed. And we’ve done a ton of site speed projects. I mean, all of my custom themes focus on that.

But Eric, a couple of years was like, site speed’s going to be big. Get into site speed now. And when Eric tells you to do something, you better do it. So we started doing site speed. And it did become a big trend. And I’m so excited there’s so many other– because it became such a big trend, so many solutions have been put out to help everyone do better with their site speed.

So we’ve done a lot of audits and a lot of work with clients. And we love to see that clients have come, not even just clients but through blogs in general have come so far.

JENNY GUY: I mean, there’s so many things there. But it’s so wonderful to hear that people outside of those that he is paying are– do the thing that we do, which is when Eric said something we do it. It’s good to know, good to know. We– yes, I don’t live in a world, I’ve never lived in a world where speed was not a thing.

It just is, the need for speed Hochberger lives that life. OK, Jacob, same to you. Tell me what you do on– on the daily, and why I invited you to be here, other than your delightful beard.

JACOB FELTNER: Oh boy, well, yeah. I joined Mediavine just under two years ago. And I came with a background in web development for a couple of years. And that was my initial, kind of, professional goal in life. But, you know, I’ve always loved helping people.

I’ve had a job since I was abo