Host: And we are back folks. What an amazing activity that was. I think it was very fun. I think it was challenging at the same time and equally fun. I can see in the comment section a lot of people appreciate the activities as well as the sessions. I would like to continue the day two of this boot camp with a panel discussion. Now as I mentioned before, before going off stage, that it’s on speed to profit, performance impacts sales, leads and LTV.

For this panel discussion I have two amazing guests with me on stage. I would like to call them upon one by one. First I would like to call upon stage Adrian Rus. He is the technical product manager at ShortPixel, a very popular image optimization tool that we all know, a leading SaaS product used by over a million users and specializing in scaling infrastructure and delivering high impact technical solutions. So Adrian, thank you so much for being here. It’s a pleasure to have you in this event. Next I will have on stage Igor Mateski. He’s founder of WebMaxFormance, a digital marketing agency that has generated over $350 million in additional revenue for clients across industries including SaaS, e-commerce, manufacturing, and telecom. So, thank you so much Igor for being here on this stage and being here in this performance boot camp for this panel discussion.

I would like to dive into the questions right away because I don’t want to keep our audience waiting. So my first question is from you Adrian, and it’s, can you share a case where performance optimization directly lifted conversions? So as you may know that the theme of this event is also something like, if you want to increase conversions, if you want to increase sales, performance may have a direct impact on that. So if you want to share a case or situation where you saw that performance increase had a direct impact on an increase in sales and revenue.

Adrian Rus: Definitely. So, first of all, I would like to thank you for having me and I’ll get right into it. So, one pattern we consistently see in WordPress e-commerce is that large images and unoptimized assets slow down the entire purchase journey. So in several stores we’ve worked with, simply reducing page weight and improving load time by around a second has led to measurable improvements in add to cart rate and completed orders. So when we optimize performance using WordPress plugins like FastPixel for example, the improvements typically affect the whole funnel. Pages load faster, users browse more products, and more sessions reach checkout. So I would say the important takeaway here is that performance compounds around the funnel. So faster pages mean more product views, more add to cart events, and ultimately more revenue.

Host: Awesome. My next question is from you Igor. Let’s talk about thought sequences, like how do they influence LTV?

Igor Mateski: Yeah. So thought sequences is more about taking like a big ask, which is give me your credit card information and buy this for me, and breaking it down into several smaller asks. And like one way of seeing that is, when you go to a bar, and I’m borrowing this illustration from another guy, this is not my illustration but it was beautiful. And the idea of breaking down the thoughts is that when you go to a bar to meet a girl, hopefully your next wife, you don’t just walk up to this first lady and kiss her and give her the ring. Because you will only get a slap and a big no. Instead, you break down the process of, hey, do you want a drink? Let’s talk. Blah blah blah. And then you break down the conversion journey from one big ask into smaller sections. And you want to do that kind of sequencing on the page itself.

So the opening statement, the very big title, is going to be this attention statement, and the point of the title is to win the attention and nothing else. You don’t want to say the whole story in the title because that is not going to be a title. So the title’s point is to start with attracting the interest, the attention from the audience. The next stage is going to be for the subhead or the first couple of paragraphs to get the interest from people so that they would be more interested in continuing to read about whatever it is that you want to sell. After that, after you’ve won the attention and the interest of the audience, now you go into creating a desire for them to buy whatever it is that you’re wanting to sell. So that finally there could be a clear call to action. And this what I’m describing is the well-known and very old and very rudimentary AIDA copywriting model.

There are much more sophisticated ways of sequencing the thoughts, and what kind of a thought sequence you pick will depend on who you are as a brand, who your buyer is as a brand, what is it that you’re offering, that you’re selling, how much time it takes for them to convert from being a first-time visitor to becoming a client, and then how competitive is your space. Now if the space is free, like there’s no competition, the storyline, the thought sequence is going to be much easier to go through, but if you have hundreds of other competitors, then the thought sequence is going to have a lot more elements, a lot more micro conversions, that we call them, so that you could have the big win and win a client.

Host: Awesome. That was amazing, Igor, and interesting example nonetheless. So I want to talk about Core Web Vitals now, and Adrian, my next question is from you. A lot of people sort of, you know, obsess about Core Web Vitals results and, you know, they want the best score and the best grade. Are Core Web Vitals enough to predict business success?

Adrian Rus: I would say Core Web Vitals are extremely useful but they’re not a business metric. They measure the technical quality of the user experience but not whether your product, pricing, or user experience actually converts. So you can have great scores and still lose customers if your product pages are confusing, the checkouts are complicated, or the pricing isn’t clear. So yeah, but poor performance will almost always hurt conversions. So having a nice looking website that loads fast definitely helps when you’re selling online. But performance I would say isn’t enough. You also need to have a great product. So it’s a combination between these two factors among others that lead business success.

Host: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned user journey because my next question is on that, and Igor, I wanted to ask you, can a fast site still fail because the user journey is poorly designed? If the flows are not, you know, properly identified, if as Adrian says the landing pages are confusing or the pricing is not that clear. So can a fast site still fail because all of these elements, the other elements, the more important maybe elements are not clear?

Igor Mateski: Yes, unfortunately. And we have a lot more fast websites that have a confusing user experience than the other way around. I can pull up one example of a tech company that we worked with. They were insisting on having a separate shipping address and billing address. And these fields were just coming one after another. And then the user experience was like, I’m refilling my address, my name, my everything one after another. Why am I doing this? So that kind of double forms created friction. And even though the checkout pages themselves were performing very nicely from a technical perspective, from a user experience perspective, they were very confusing, and it felt like, I just filled out a set of information on the previous page and now you’re asking for the same information again without the big labels properly identifying the fields as billing information and shipping information. And in that regard, you can have a very fast loading site that is not really capturing, or delivering a good user experience. And thankfully the client did agree to fix this issue, which from his perspective was not a technical but it was a psychological issue, and we did fix it and the sales took off. Before that he was not really doing any sales.

Host: Yeah, I want to stick on this topic, Igor, and want to ask a follow-up question. Because I’m sure you must have interacted with a lot of agencies in the past and the work that you do. How can agencies connect speed improvements to long-term retention? So, say that you get the customers that you want, but how does retention relate to speed improvements?

Igor Mateski: Well, again, in the agency world, and I’m pretty sure that maybe everybody on this call will know this information that is attributed to Amazon, that every second of a faster loading website contributes to 7% more conversions. This was after the two second load time as a baseline. So if they would be increasing the speed more, they would be getting more conversions. Now for the agencies it is an issue of how do we communicate, how do we explain this, that speed does help with long-term retention. And in my case it’s usually not promising what we will make for you as the next client, but showing previous experiences from previous clients of what we saw, how improved speed helps in client retention and having repeat customers. This is especially important for B2C e-commerce.

Host: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned e-commerce because my next question is for Adrian. It’s related to e-commerce. What’s the biggest mistake e-commerce brands make with product imagery?

Adrian Rus: I would say the biggest mistake is uploading high resolution images and serving the same file for every user. Basically, e-commerce teams often upload beautiful product photos, but they either upload them straight from the camera or straight from their photo editing software. But those files are often several megabytes each. So when you multiply that across product galleries, the result is extremely heavy product pages, especially on mobile. So I would say this approach is automatic image optimization and next-gen formats such as WebP or AVIF. So solutions like ShortPixel compress images and convert them to formats like WebP or AVIF automatically, and also can deliver them via CDN. So basically you keep the same visual quality while dramatically reducing the file size of these images. So pretty much every visitor from around the world will see fast loading optimized images without sacrificing speed or changing anything related to your workflow.

Host: Awesome. I want to stick on the images topic a bit more and I want to ask you Adrian, from a product perspective, what’s harder, optimizing images or changing user behavior around media usage?

Adrian Rus: Changing user behavior is always harder. Technology problems can usually be solved with automation and infrastructure, but human behavior requires constant training and discipline. So if you ask marketing teams to manually optimize every image before uploading it, it probably works for a few weeks but then deadlines take over. So I would say this is why the best performance strategies remove human workflow or such changes and just add automation. WordPress plugins like FastPixel automate caching, image optimization, asset delivery and performance optimization. So teams can keep moving fast without slowing down the website or making any such workflow changes.

Host: Awesome. My next question is from you Igor. How does performance affect trust and decision-making psychology?

Igor Mateski: Yeah, it is an important thing to consider that not only performance as in speed but also design quality and layout, especially layout stability as things are lazy loading. These are all important things, and it’s not really just an inconvenience for people, but when the site is slow and it’s like jumping around when it’s loading images, it becomes an issue of credibility. So people would not really want to buy from a slow loading website, and especially if the website is loading and as it is loading the buy now button keeps on jumping up and down. And we have had that kind of a situation with an e-commerce where, as Adrian mentioned, you can’t really change people’s behavior. They kept on uploading five megabyte images, and these were all gallery images. So the page load was like 30 megabytes of just images. And we were discussing about this, the page was loading for 17 seconds, and you can’t convert with a 17 second load for a product page. So we did discuss and we changed the imagery, and we brought it down to maybe five megabytes, which is still a lot, but at least sales started coming in, which was a very good example for the owner to understand that, look, you may have a very fast server, but the server itself is not going to undo the mistakes that you do on a daily basis of mismanaging images. So yeah, it’s a huge win, speed.

Host: Yeah. My next question is from you Adrian, and it’s related to again e-commerce sites. So let’s say there is an e-commerce site with hundreds or thousands of SKUs. What’s the scalable image strategy here?

Adrian Rus: I would say that at this scale manual optimization simply just doesn’t work. So the only sustainable strategy is automatic media optimization combined with smart delivery. So this usually includes automatic image optimization, next-gen formats like WebP or AVIF, responsive images, CDN delivery, lazy loading. So with solutions like ShortPixel, that entire pipeline can just run automatically. So every product image is optimized the moment it’s uploaded without you having to do anything. So I would say this is the only way to maintain performance when catalogues scale, mostly on very large e-commerce websites.

Host: Awesome. Igor, my next question is from you and it’s a choice question. So let’s say you’re given a choice. You have to improve load time by 1 second or you have to increase conversion flow clarity. Which will drive the more LTV?

Igor Mateski: That’s a tough one. It will depend on what’s the bigger problem. From experience, usually the bigger problem is in how the money maker pages are worded. Usually these pages are, we do this and we do that, and when a person comes on the website, nobody cares about what we do as an agency. They care about what we as an agency can do for them. So it’s an issue of switching the language from we to you, what we can do for you, where you the visitor are at the center of the conversation, the imaginary conversation with the page and yourself. So definitely fixing how the website talks to the visitor will make sure that that same person will come over and over and over again. And that’s how you turn a one-time buyer into multiple sales and increase the lifetime value of the customer.

Host: Awesome. Igor, I would like to divert this conversation to you now and wanted to ask you, have you seen cases where improving clarity and messaging increased conversions more than technical speed improvements?

Igor Mateski: Yes. Yes. So, and this is one of the reasons why a few years ago we stopped positioning ourselves just as a technical web development agency and more as a website modernization agency. And this was with especially this one case. It was a commercial real estate company that was selling commercial real estate. So, millions of dollars per sale. And they were trying to get ads from Google for their commercial real estate needs, leads basically, and they were getting two leads per month with the existing landing page. We went in and, again, it was this we conversation, we sell commercial real estate and all. So what everybody else does. So we changed the language of the page following a very good sequence of micro conversions, and after the first couple of months of Google’s algorithm figuring out where to place our new ads, so from the same effort that they were spending around $3,000 and getting two leads per month, with the same budget they were now getting 20 to 25 leads per month. So it was like a 10x improvement of conversion just by fixing one page.

Host: Awesome. Thanks Igor. Adrian, my next question is from you. You describe speed as a vital KPI. How should businesses start treating performance as a measurable revenue metric, not just a technical score?

Adrian Rus: I would say the key shift here is connecting performance data with business metrics. So instead of only measuring technical indicators like LCP or page weight, teams should start correlating them with things like conversion rate, add to cart rate, revenue per session. So for example, what happens to the conversion rate when load times improve by a second? Once companies start measuring this relationship, performance stops just being an engineering concern, it becomes a growth lever I would say. So that’s when plugins like FastPixel start making strategic sense because speed directly supports revenue outcomes. So when optimization runs automatically instead of just relying on manual tweaks, teams can keep performance high while focusing on the business and on the growth side I would say.

Host: Awesome. I want to jump into the comment section now and take some questions from our audience. So Ivana has a question. I would like to pin that on the screen as well and read it out for you folks. So Ivana says, “In 2026, how do we stop chasing the perfect score and start focusing on making the site actually feel instant for a real customer?” I want you both to sort of chime in on this, and starting off with Adrian, if you can just take a few minutes to answer this question.

Adrian Rus: Sure. Well, here I would say the goal is to make the website also feel instant and not just have a perfect performance score. So in this era I will prioritize content visibility. I will make the website as simple as possible. I will reduce JavaScript. Optimize the critical content first. Maybe use progressive loading. Also remove any loaders or effects that aren’t really useful to the website. For example, at ShortPixel, every time we design a plug-in, the main things we think about in the beginning is how to make it as easy as possible for the non-technical user. So this is what I would personally do. I would make the website as easy to use as possible and the content as easy to use and to find as possible, besides the certain optimizations.

Host: Awesome. Igor, you want to chime in?

Igor Mateski: Yeah. Sequencing the elements that you’re loading. But I will also say that, and this is off of Rory Sutherland, I don’t know how much you guys have heard of him, he works with Ogilvy as a creative director in London, and he was saying that when waiting happens online, it’s really not the waiting that’s the problem, is that you don’t know how long you need to wait. And one of the ways to solve that problem is that load bar, or that one two three counter that tells you that the page is going to be fully loaded in x seconds. And taking the ambiguity of waiting can actually help without even trying to fix the speed of the page, but just eliminating the anxiety of how long do I have to wait. So when something does happen on the page, I as a user will know that, okay, I need to wait for a couple of more seconds, I can do that, but I can’t do a wait of two seconds without knowing if it’s going to be only two seconds or 20 seconds.

Host: Yeah, awesome. There are a few more questions in the comment section as well and I want to make sure that we answer as many as we can. So this question says, how can we use AI to distinguish between a genuine performance bottleneck like a slow database query and a Slowloris or layer 7 DoS attack that is intentionally draining resources? Igor, do you want to go first on this?

Igor Mateski: Not sure I’m the best person. And I think this feels more like a question for the previous session. I can’t really answer this question without just making things up at the spot.

Host: No worries. Adrian, do you want to sort of chime in and see if you can answer this one?

Adrian Rus: Well, yeah, while this feels like a question for the previous session mentioned, I would say that AI can definitely help by analyzing logs. So if you can gather any type of logs about either the bottleneck itself, AI could definitely help us analyze it and help us pinpoint the exact issue. So we could eventually see if it’s a slow database query or a DDoS attack, like Ganesh has mentioned.

Host: Yeah. All right. I want to dive into the Q&A section now and see if you have any questions over there for this session. All right. So we have a question from Danish and it says, it’s a bit lengthy so let me just read it out for you folks. We often hear that faster sites convert better, but in real projects speed improvements compete with marketing features, personalization and richer UX. From your experience, where is the tipping point where improving performance actually starts driving measurable increase in conversions, leads or LTV? Adrian, do you want to go first?

Adrian Rus: Sure. I think the answer here would be pretty similar to one of the other questions I’ve asked here. While the marketing side and the design of the website definitely helps, I would personally not use anything that’s not really necessary for that website. I would make it as simple as possible while having a great user experience. Making things easier for the customer. So easy to find the product he needs. Easy to use the filters on the website. Easy to add to cart and see different offers, while also having very good performance of course, while not having to wait. So yeah.

Host: Awesome. Igor, do you want to chime in on this?

Igor Mateski: Yeah. I mean it’s, the tension in this question is something that we regularly have with our clients when they have some crazy demands for, especially for marketing and for tracking cookies, or for interesting renderings of products. Usually what we have actually done with one client is that we said, look, this extra feature that you want to make the product rotate, it is a gimmick. It may drive some sales but it takes, it did take about three to four, so it was a significant load time, three to four seconds to load. And it was loading everywhere on all of the pages. And we were trying to convince the owner of the business that you may win with a 3D product rotation to close some deals, but that win is probably not going to be as big as all of the losses that you’re generating because you’re having a slow website. So instead of trying to prove that performance wins, as Danish says, driving measurable increases in conversions, I would say start proving, or start talking of how slow websites are reducing increases of conversions and leads, because that’s going to be an easier win for you in a boardroom than trying to convince them that they should spend $10,000 to shave off one second from the website.

Host: Yeah. We have more questions in the comment section. This one says, “In your experience, what is one performance improvement that can quickly make a noticeable impact on conversions or lead generation?” Adrian, do you want to go first here?

Adrian Rus: Sure. I would say one of the quickest improvements is reducing the page’s initial load time, especially the LCP, so the Largest Contentful Paint. So often the hero image can cause issues. So compressing that image or not using a website slider when it’s not necessary, that would definitely help in this case.

Host: All right, Igor, you want to chime in?

Igor Mateski: Yeah, when it’s specifically for performance it will always be the speed, but I would also pitch as a close second the stability, the Cumulative Layout Shift. Try to keep it as low as possible, zero if possible.

Host: Awesome. I think we can take one more question from the comment section, and this one says, do you think businesses today clearly understand the connection between website speed and revenue, or is performance still mostly seen as just a technical concern? Igor, you want to go first?

Igor Mateski: I don’t think that there’s a one answer to rule them all. I think that with the technical clients, with software companies that we work, they obsess over speed. They obsess to that point where they would truncate the message so that the website would load faster. With other non-technical business owners, they want everything and they don’t care if it’s going to take a minute because everybody that came on the website is just going to wait. So it’s like, know your audience, know who you’re talking to, and then try to convey the message, the importance of speed as a revenue generating thing, with the language that they can understand. Like if you talk way too technically, if you start talking especially with a non-technical person, you start talking about Time to First Byte and load speed and Cumulative Layout Shift, you’ve lost them, and they can’t connect. So simplify the conversation and try as much as you can, and understand that it’s really not going to be up to you if they don’t want to change. Some people don’t want to change.

Host: Yeah, true. Absolutely true. Igor, Adrian, do you want to go here and add your thoughts?

Adrian Rus: Sure. I would say many businesses are becoming more aware that website speed directly impacts revenue. So since faster websites improve user experience, conversions and SEO. However, in many companies and organizations, performance is still often treated just as a technical issue owned by developers rather than a business priority. So I would say the companies that perform best usually see performance as a core part of the customer experience and growth strategy, and not just as an engineering task, while also not removing parts of the website like Igor has mentioned previously just to improve the speed.

Host: All right. That was awesome Igor and Adrian, and with that I would like to conclude this panel discussion, and I would like to thank Adrian and Igor for being here and sharing your performance knowledge and expertise and answering our questions and the audience’s questions as well. We have a few more sessions left in the day two of performance boot camp. Coming right up, we have a very special session with an even more special guest. The session is called optimizing WordPress with the right data, lab and field metrics explained. And to give that session, we have someone from GTmetrix who will tell you how you can measure your performance and how you can improve it on your live websites. So stay tuned for that session. We will be back in just a couple of minutes.