Jen Buzza: Hello everybody, this is so exciting, I cannot believe we are here, the moment has come, day two of Web Growth Summit. I am so happy that you are here, and I cannot wait to bring on the most amazing guests I’ve ever met, I am best friends with these people that I just met, I love them and you’re going to love them too. Shout out from yesterday, we had a fantastic day for day one of Web Growth Summit, we were talking a lot about how to get traffic, how to get the people that you want to your site, to your store, to whatever it is you’re selling. And today we’re going to talk about how do you convert them, so you bring them to your front door, how do you get them through the front door, that’s what we’re talking about, website reliability, UX-driven conversions, we are doing the great stuff.

We’ve got an amazing giveaway later on in the day, we’ve got a gift card for y’all, so the person who is chatting the most, go ahead and be very active, because we do have a prize at the end of the day, it’s a Cloudways gift card, 150 bucks, that’s pretty great, so do participate today, we’re going to have lots of polls and surveys and questions. Today we have three amazing sessions, we’re going to have a panel, then an audit, which is really exciting, live, some people submitted stuff and we’re going to look at their websites and do this full audit, and then we’re going to go into another expert panel. So I’m going to introduce our first panel, are you ready? We already have a fight for the gift card, I love it. We are here to, honestly, big picture, we’re changing the world, y’all, Cloudways, UGURUS, we are here to change the world. Let’s introduce this panel.

First of all, Vladi, you’ll never meet somebody who’s more hilarious, so we’re going to bring Vladi up on the stage, Vladi is super phenomenal, head of implementation, there he is, he’s so wonderful, he’s going to bring us some brilliance. We’ve got Nick in the house, Nick, super excited you are here too, senior director of engineering. Love the energy, glad you are here. We also have Mike coming on strong here, Mike is the founder of Reaction Digital and the president of the Red Deer Chamber, so glad you’re here. And last but definitely not least, we’ve got Weston coming in, he’s the founder of Local & Co. This panel today is about to wow you and thrill you, we’ve got a lot of excellent questions, we are talking about being traffic-ready.

So if you weren’t here yesterday, we talked a lot about getting traffic to your site, now we’re talking about what happens when they get there, what if crazy things happen, being traffic-ready, enhancing website scalability and reliability. Y’all know that pain when your site is down, knock on wood, I don’t even want to mention it. So let’s go into some questions. Mike, we’re getting a lot of feedback from your mic, just to let you know it might be a mic thing. First one is, as we’re looking at websites and our livelihood, we were joking earlier about like, what if our power goes out, that’s not a joke. This reliability is so important, and we’ve heard all these crazy stories about websites crashing during big events, this dreaded thing where you’re sleeping and you just hope this doesn’t happen. What are some of the usual culprits behind these crashes and how can we dodge the bullet?

Vladi Iancu: Oh boy, do I have a story for you. It was back in the day, a lot of years ago, and I was actually running a blog with a couple of friends, and we were doing affiliate marketing, so basically our money came from other people buying, and we were preparing for Christmas, because around that time a lot of people make gifts and buy gifts, and we were making recommendations on our tech blog, and guess what happened, we poured money into ads and we tried to enter our site and it wasn’t working. And the usual culprit in most situations is the database, it crashed, basically couldn’t handle the load, couldn’t handle the traffic. So we poured money in, got nothing out of it, well, not nothing, we still got something out of it, but lesson learned.

Jen Buzza: Lesson learned, and it’s always a bittersweet prize, the lesson learned. How about the rest of you, what do we do to prevent this?

Nick Silkey: I think Vladi came with a good point there. We’ve seen so many situations where marketing efforts and affiliate marketing, especially all the talks on day one of how to drive the traffic, a lot of focus gets put there, and just inadequate testing and resources are applied to how you’re going to scale when you actually get that traffic. I would say probably in my experience 80% of the time it’s the resources, so database being one of them, but anything from CPU, RAM, anything on your hosting structure that has not been prepared, and depending if you’re a Cloudways customer or DigitalOcean and you’re running WordPress, high chance it’s also a codebase issue, from a bloated theme, plugins, and off-the-shelf items. A lot of this stuff can be avoided through your load testing beforehand to identify any of those bottlenecks, but also preparing for that surge beforehand, and that will help get those conversions you spent a lot of money trying to get. I’d say it’s quite similar to a physical retail store, you can’t get a very small front-facing store with a real small doorway and expect to get massive traffic in, no matter how good your marketing is, they can’t fit, and you should see your technical back end and your hosting scalability in the same way, you need a bigger store so people can walk in and you have enough shop assistants to help them out.

Mike Szyszka: I’ll build on what Nick was saying there, I come from the agency world working with clients, so I’ve experienced this many times over the past 16 or so years. It’s always going to be, generally, a resource issue as to why you’re going to have some downtime when you’re getting hit with that flood of traffic. I always put this into two different buckets, so you have the unexpected flood of traffic, this is where you get mentioned on a blog or some social post goes viral that maybe wasn’t even shared by you, and then the second bucket is where you know this is coming, so we’ve had clients that have been on Shark Tank or know there’s some big media or event happening. When you have the opportunity to be proactive, making sure your CMS and plugins are up to date ahead of time, doing some load testing, making sure you have a backup server or application ready to go, that your caching is enabled, and you can actually pay for load testing services that will flood your website with thousands of concurrent visitors so you can see how it’s going to handle. So if you know you’re going to get that flood of traffic, this scenario is a little easier to deal with, but it’s really the unexpected flood that I think is the most stressful because you didn’t have the opportunity to be prepared.

A couple of the things I like to have in my toolbox when this happens, number one is having good active uptime monitoring, there’s lots of services, Cloudways will send you notifications, there’s third-party services, we’ve got this piped right into our company Slack so that if any website experiences downtime the whole team’s going to see that right away. And then right away you want to check your log files and see why it went down, what resource did we exhaust, and is that something we can just change as a setting on the server, because if it’s just your amount of memory going to PHP you could be adjusting that, but if you’re actually maxing out your CPU, now you need to move to a different type of server. This is where having a bit of a checklist that you go down of what do we do when this happens, do you have an SOP for moving to another server, and if there are different IP addresses is there now going to be a propagation issue. So I think it’s being proactive when you know the traffic is coming, but then being proactive with some good mitigation plans and processes if it happens unexpectedly. I live in Southern California, we have floods and we have fires, and the prep is really important, and that’s why everybody is here today.

Jen Buzza: And we do have a poll running right now on, has your website ever crashed due to traffic, so I just published that poll, would love for all the participants to fill that out. This is it, we are here to help that prep. Nick, any last thoughts on this?

Nick Silkey: I think everyone nailed it. Load testing is pretty big, 10, 20 years ago everyone just ran JMeter, that’s all there was, but there’s a pretty good sophisticated set of tools out there that make it easy for folks to do exactly what Mike, Weston, and Vladi ran through, it’s about being proactive and being able to go, will I be successful when I have a thousand customers a minute or whatever your projected target is of folks coming through and converting, and that stuff’s come a long way in the last decade or so.

Jen Buzza: So for these small and medium businesses, what are the must-haves around website scalability, what should we be looking for in hosting and infrastructure setup?

Weston Crew: I think, to go back to Mike, obviously be prepared, and step one there is make sure you have backups, so on your host, backups and staging is going to get you a long way, because during your testing you’re going to need to try something different, and a staging site will help you a lot so you do your load testing on staging rather than your client’s live site and risk messing anything up. But also, the first step will be any sort of vertical scaling, that is easy, to upscale your server or resources vertically, obviously there’s way more complex ones which we can talk about later, but for me those are the must-haves, vertical scaling, backups, and staging, without those I don’t think you can do anything Mike recommended, or you’re going to get yourself into some headaches working on a live site.

Nick Silkey: The other thing I’d mention, Jen, would be, for an SMB, it’s putting food on the table, it’s not a hobbyist, so I’d be looking at what concepts or capabilities are available to your platform when it comes to managed hosting, because an SMB’s got a sizable amount of investment and probably some revenue involved here, where peace of mind and the ability to utilize experts in order to help you be successful is pretty important. When you first start out as a founder you do it yourself, but then once you start being successful you really need to look and go, what can I exchange money-wise with my provider to have them provide me some sort of best-of-breed capability for what it means to manage my hosting for me.

Jen Buzza: Yeah, and to make it easy for you, what Weston said about vertical scaling, if it’s simple as making a selection and clicking a button, that’s wonderful, that’s what I would be looking for, a hosting setup where you’re not having to talk with two different experts, finding them, making sure they’re in sync, and somehow tears later, oh now we’re better, no, not that. And this goes straight into this idea of costs, so what are some smart ways to scale your website without overspending, how do we balance performance and budget throughout our growth, because you don’t want to overspend at the beginning, you can’t put the cart before the horse. What have you guys learned around this idea of not overspending and that balance?

Weston Crew: I think it goes to preparation, but also to go back to what Nick said, it is the bread and butter of a lot of these businesses, so there has to be some investment. If we were talking about anything with a physical presence, a real business people can walk into, you wouldn’t cheap out too much on that. But where you come in and become a little bit smart with your budget is ensuring what you put on there is optimized from the get-go, so don’t upload a 10-megabyte JPEG file as one of your main images, optimize images beforehand, make sure your codebase is optimized, and your caching, and test that before, because a lot of your payments will go into using those excessive resources, as much of them can be static, and that’s served by CDN or from cache, which will reduce that stress on the server and reduce the amount of resources you actually need to run your website, e-commerce store, or application.

Vladi Iancu: My go-to tool is also caching most of the time, and caching is at various levels actually, so there’s not one type of caching. But there’s a catch, you might be going into some troubles, I’m not going to go into the technical part, but it’s not necessarily a wonder tool where I just activated it and poof, my problem is gone forever, no, you need to apply it carefully, so maybe contact somebody to give you some good advice and start implementing it the right way.

Nick Silkey: One other thing to think about, Jen, would be, one of the things we talked about was your ability to resize, we talked about the magic button, the easy button, so when you’re looking for a platform, understanding how much you can either scale up or scale down. If you think of how hosting used to work a long time ago, it was very bespoke, and so there’s a dynamic here with cloud, so when you’re looking at your platform, how easy is it for you to go, my gosh I’m being wildly successful, I need to scale up, does your platform provide the ability to do that in a reasonable, native way, which could include you scaling down too, if you’ve got some big event you might want to spin up and spend a little bit of extra money, and then let’s go ahead and spin it down and right-size our costs.

Vladi Iancu: Sorry to interrupt, I want to add, there are two types of growth, there’s the unexpected, sudden spike where now we have 100 visitors and in the next minute we have 10,000, but there’s also the linear growth where the website keeps getting a bit slower each day. These two problems have different solutions, but they both come back to how easy it is for me to go into my infrastructure account and make some changes.

Jen Buzza: Vlad, you were talking a little bit about caching, and it’s a popular solution, how does it boost scalability and performance, especially during traffic spikes, and what are some best practices for implementing this?

Vladi Iancu: Coming back to my horror story with the affiliate marketing and our database crashing, the issue was that each time we had a visitor, we had multiple reads from the database. With caching we don’t have that multiple reading for each user, we could have 100 users and only one process reading that stuff, so essentially that’s something caching can help with, and you’d still have the same server, the same size, which can hold much more traffic than before activating caching. And CDN also is an option which helps, because the CDN distributes your content geographically, so being closer to your visitors means they’ll have a better experience, they’ll download the content faster, and also it’s not a single point of failure, they’re distributed, so in case something goes wrong they can automatically be directed to the one that’s working.

Jen Buzza: And on that, we did just publish another poll, thank you all for filling it out. We’re talking about these CDNs, what else do you guys have to say about caching and CDNs?

Weston Crew: I’ll add to that, you have to do a real quick audit of your project, application, or website, how many static resources can you get away with, yes there’s a lot of dynamic elements to any flow, if we use an e-commerce store, price and stock, but there’s a lot of things that can be static, as many of those can be cached and served from the CDN, product images don’t change too often, so try to limit the amount of dynamic resources you really need to be querying your database, and all of that can be stored on your edge cache in your CDN or from the server. Basically for everyone else, it’s been processed on the first visit and it’s ready to go at the edge of the server, there’s no more querying that needs to happen again, and that will help you have that cost-effective way. Unfortunately, if you are going into a lot more dynamic resources, like a learning management system course, or a high-traffic, high-revenue e-commerce store, there’s obviously transactions going through payment gateways, that stuff can never be cached, you don’t want to be caching someone’s payment information or an API call, but then you look at the features and say, can I vertically scale this in a cost-effective manner, and I know a lot of my resources, my images, my library that is static is cached, and I’m focusing on scaling my dynamic resources and the server to be able to push that out.

Mike Szyszka: I think one thing a lot of business owners need to consider, we brought up the question about cost and investment, well, definitely when you’re in the startup phase you as a founder are going to try to do as much of this as possible, and we’re all sitting here on a Cloudways webinar so we’re probably all fans of the platform, and I think it’s fair to say Cloudways is a really good platform for those who don’t have a ton of technical experience because the vertical scaling is essentially one or two clicks, the support is really great and they’ve got a good team helping diagnose problems, the caching plugin through Breeze and the integration with WordPress and the Cloudflare Enterprise setup is all very simple and straightforward, and I think it does provide a new business or founder-led company the ability to start to enable some of these more technical features in a pretty user-friendly way, and that’s going to get you pretty far in the first few phases of your growth. But like anything, once you get into a little bit more complicated problem, you do need to have an expert behind you, whether that’s a company on retainer or at least someone you can reach out to and trust, and if your business relies on revenue coming through your website, a lot of companies don’t think twice about hiring a bookkeeper, an accountant, or a lawyer, and I don’t think your website should be put into some second or third-tier asset class when in reality it’s probably generating a double-digit portion of your revenue.

Jen Buzza: I just want to comment on that really quickly, because in my world I’m working with digital agencies every day and mentoring them on growth, and one of the things I find is that with digital agencies we’re newer, this whole internet thing is newer, we’re not lawyers or priests, we’ve not been around for thousands of years, so we really are pioneering this. So it’s interesting what you said, Mike, about this idea that of course we’re going to go to an accountant, of course we’re going to go to a medical doctor, and now, of course we’re going to get help with these extremely important issues that provide our business success, so I love that, thank you for talking about that, I think it’s really important to normalize not doing it all yourself once you get past the very beginning founding stage.

Mike Szyszka: I was just going to add, I think we’ve also seen, especially in the last four or five years, this explosion of the freelance marketplace and work from home and remote workers, it’s always been around but it’s really exploded, and I think when you’re a business that relies on your website for a significant portion of your revenue, that is not the time to go to Fiverr or Upwork and find a random freelancer, and there are really great talented people on those platforms, but you need to find them before you have a problem, and just like a doctor or lawyer or accountant, you want someone who knows your business and where your revenue comes from and what’s important, so they can provide the right advice. So whether you’re hiring an agency or an individual freelancer, you need to find them when you don’t need them so they’re there when you do, and they’re already onboarded to not just your website from a technical perspective but they actually understand how your business works, and that’s when you’re going to get the best results.

Vladi Iancu: I agree with Mike 90% of what he said, there’s a bit that I’m a bit in disagreement with and I want to say it out because I think it’s important. You mentioned, Mike, at the beginning, that if you’re a non-technical founder you should go and use these managed services, well, I would actually suggest that even if you are technical and in the early stages, you would still need to go to these managed services, because it removes a lot of headaches and you can focus on real issues that are more important for your company at that point in time, and later on you can go more in depth on other routes.

Jen Buzza: This kind of bleeds us into this idea of Cloudways Autonomous, how is this helping with scalability, we’re talking a lot about reliability and scaling up and needing to adjust, how does Cloudways and Autonomous really address the pricing concerns and availability?

Weston Crew: I’ll kick-start a little bit, just adding to what Vladi started, as agencies or founders and businesses looking towards managed solutions, I think we found ourselves in that boat. I have experience of managing my own servers, and coming across many high-traffic, high-revenue sites even using the current Cloudways flexible, being introduced to Cloudways Autonomous just made that whole experience a lot easier, from not having to constantly monitor New Relic and the performance of a website and the error rates. With something like an Autonomous implementation, it’s a little bit elastic, so it kind of pulls the other way, and that is something that Autonomous allows you to do, so you don’t just have to worry about the resources on one front, it will scale vertically and the other way, so it’s a little bit elastic. And from a technical point of view, even if you are well-technical, Vladi, you don’t have to worry about too much, basically what I do is I look at the logs and see how many pods are firing up and verify that everything’s running normally. So Autonomous has a place for both the technical user and the end user for the client, I wouldn’t recommend people try to explore that themselves and make an autoscale infrastructure, it is easy to get onto but you need a little bit of expert understanding, there’s always a place for an agency, that’s where we earn our bread and butter, experts are always there to have help in hand for the client in terms of what solution they need, are they fine with being on flexible, when do they need to take that step to go to something like Autonomous. But it’s been an easy integration of everything we spoke about, the vertical scaling happening as and when the traffic is coming in, cost-wise you’re only paying when that traffic comes through and it’s scaling back down. Traditional methods, you always go in and scale up in preparation, like Mike spoke about before a Black Friday, but if it’s unexpected you’ve got a problem if no one’s on standby to quickly address those issues, that’s where Autonomous comes into place, it says, cool, spiking traffic, low balances are in place, everything’s fine, how it worked with 100 users it’s going to work just fine with 100,000 concurrent users, obviously you still need to do the base testing, your caching and everything else we spoke about, but once you’ve got that, the need to manually intervene is sorted.

Vladi Iancu: I agree, and I don’t want to sound like a dinosaur, but back in the day people used punched cards to do some programming, and we’ve come a long way, we have Kubernetes and a ton of tech, but it’s still difficult, it’s still complex, so a managed solution is an abstraction on top of this, which are other abstractions, but that’s another point, and it makes it much easier for you to focus on what’s important, handle the traffic, convert your traffic, win, get some money.

Nick Silkey: That’s a huge call-out, Vladi, because what is your core competency, what is your differentiator, you’re probably not a Kubernetes administrator or an autoscale guru, you’re here to make money with your website as an SMB, so when I think about something like Autonomous, it’s really about taking a pattern of how to utilize cloud technology to meet a business need and packaging it together in a way that meets customer needs. It does a really great job of going, if you would like to unlock this pattern that works well for scaling websites, you can buy it here, and especially when you couple it with things like managed support, that’s perfect for an SMB, because that’s what they want, they want to be able to deal with all these other challenges and failure modes and surges and spikes and going viral, everything we talked about before, you kind of get something like that by going with a solution like Autonomous.

Jen Buzza: I love it, and honestly, this idea that your image as a business, I love, Weston, you’re talking about the analogy of an actual physical store, that’s very helpful, like you have a thousand people show up but you have a little door and they can’t get through. When it comes to website reliability and impact on user trust and overall business performance, what do you guys have to say about this, when a website goes down or the door doesn’t even exist?

Nick Silkey: It’s huge. I think it can be proven in a couple of different ways. One, whatever the data is that says, hey, if the page doesn’t load in one and a half seconds, people bounce, so if it’s slow you’re going to lose people, and I would definitely close the tab if it’s sitting there wheeling. And the other thing to keep in mind, your search engine optimization is impacted by how fast you load, if your site is slow these crawlers and indexers like Google observe that and it impacts where you land in people’s organic search results.

Vladi Iancu: For me it’s one word, and that word is choices. Users now have a ton of choices, if you’re not in good shape I won’t wait, I won’t stay, you’re not the only one who could offer me that service or product, I’ll just quickly, instantly go to another place and my money would go there, so that’s the main issue with websites really. And especially when you think about mobile, mobile is so pervasive, the phone is an absolute distraction machine, it’s full of apps and notifications, so it’s begging to take your attention away, so if something is slow on mobile you’re going to lose those visitors.

Weston Crew: To add to that, it’s your brand’s credibility that’s at risk, you’re having a customer come through a campaign you’ve been running on socials or advertising, and you expect them to put their credit card details and spend a couple hundred dollars, but the whole experience is very slow, that breaks that trust, and going flat, they have many other options, but your brand credibility and that trust the customer needs to build to become a lifelong customer or recommend your brand can be totally ruined by bad reliability and really bad performance on your site.

Mike Szyszka: And the truth is, we do judge a book by its cover, especially when it comes to businesses, and I think there’s an easy case to be made if you’re selling a product or directly generating revenue through the website to invest in this presence, but I think we’re at a point now in 2024 where most customers will even judge a physical business’s presence based on their online presence. Maybe you’re looking for a massage therapist or a chiropractor or someone to do work on your car, you might not be doing that transaction online, but if you visit their website and it seems slow or kind of broken, you do start to project that onto the business itself. It makes me think about a story from a long time ago where there was a contractor that was going to quote and do some business for a friend of mine, and there was a big glaring typo on their business card, just a typo, not a big deal, but my friend ended up telling me that contractor was terrible and had low attention to detail. That’s an example where you have to, as a business, take pride in anything that customers touch, and I think that’s very easy to do when you have a physical presence, you want a welcoming showroom, offer a coffee at your auto repair shop, have a nice couch for people to sit on, but we need to start thinking of that pride in our online presence as well, because that actually will translate to more customers that trust and respect and want to do business with you.

Jen Buzza: And I think it’s even gone to a new level, y’all, where we don’t even consciously know why we don’t trust somebody, you’re just like, well, the site was okay, but not great, and it’s just like, no, I don’t have a really good feeling, I’m moving on.

Vladi Iancu: Your example is very subliminal, I remember something, sorry, Weston, I’ll give you the floor in a moment. I was visiting a website and it was working, but it had some errors in it, and I saw the error messages, they weren’t hidden in a console or something, and my next thought was, I can’t enter my credit card details on your website, I can’t make the purchase, I’m sorry, bye. So this is another example.

Weston Crew: I was just going to add to that example, we onboarded a client about two months ago and went through this entire process of getting them scaling-ready, they were on shared hosting before, which is obviously not ideal, so we went through the entire process, went through a little bit of a rebuild, not too hectic on that side, but no marketing efforts, traffic was exactly the same, and within a month they four-times the revenue. So it just shows that the customers were there, they just weren’t converting because of the subconscious reasons, that trust, that credibility, that feeling you’ll get, and again the reliability, if it doesn’t work once, you’ve got other choices, you’ll go away frustrated. It was very interesting for us to see the actual impact it has where you take the marketing side out of it, they’ve got x amount of users per month, traditionally over the last year they’ve been making x amount of revenue, and all of a sudden just having this change increased about four times.

Jen Buzza: So we’re talking about these sudden spikes, and there’s some we know are coming, like Black Friday, and it can really be make or break, especially if your site’s down. So how can people prep their website for an event such as Black Friday, and what metrics should people be watching?

Weston Crew: Again, your testing, your preparation, exactly like Mike spoke about, having those operations in place, there is always a chance something can go wrong, so your standard operating procedures need to be in place, but your load testing can be done beforehand, per stage, on-site, test everything, make sure your hosted infrastructure is up to scratch, if you’re expecting it, put the vertical scaling a little bit higher before that point. Look at historical data, your Google Analytics data from previous years, you can run your Pingdom tests, you can see with 100 users how many resources you’re using, with a thousand how many, so you can kind of predict, but there’s always that unexpected, you don’t know how well your campaigns are going to work, and that’s the point of something like Autonomous, that you don’t have to worry too much. Still do your testing beforehand, and then it’s monitoring during that time, looking into success, looking for error rates, and if you’re e-commerce you’re looking for that transaction drop-off or people dropping off on their payment pages, those are your red alerts, and there’s so many monitoring tools out there, Clarity has been an amazing free one that you can heat-map your site and have the live recordings to really see what’s going on. But then also reduce the load on the processing side, if there’s no need for certain features to be live for Black Friday, focus on your main call to action, you can turn quite a few things off just for that period to reduce that excessive load you don’t need, but again if you’re on something like Autonomous, less of a worry.

Jen Buzza: Any other thoughts on what to watch?

Vladi Iancu: I mean, besides the obvious, it depends, I hate this word, but I actually think that the key metrics to watch depend on your current stage and what you’re selling. I could be looking at something like the number of purchases made on the site in a certain period of time, so knowing my averages, knowing my maximum, if I prepared myself so I would kind of know, oh, we are close to maximum, we need to do something about that, but again it could vary from business to business quite a lot. And to offer an alternative to what Weston said about cutting some things off that are maybe not important for that time period, which is an awesome idea, I’m going to steal that, I did something a bit different. In preparation for Black Friday what we did was make some very specific landing pages which were completely separate from the actual website, on completely different servers, they didn’t have a lot in common, and we made them very static, so everything loaded really fast, and the only thing we loaded dynamically was the stock, because it was important to actually show products that were still available to be bought, and that separation helped a lot, because those static landing pages can take a lot, and the website was able to perform almost as normal in those periods. It’s not easy to do, so it’s not something you can do and two hours later it’s done, you need prep, you need somebody to do it, so a managed service is a bit better, isn’t it.

Mike Szyszka: I really like that point and the idea, I think it’s actually a key takeaway for this Black Friday conversation, about putting landing pages off of your primary site, so it can be on a subdomain, on a different server, then you can just cache the hell out of it because it’s not going to be dynamic, and then the product links go back to your main catalog, and I think this is a really good strategy for also making sure that the mission-critical parts of your site don’t go down when you’re getting a flood of traffic from Facebook ads or something like that. And I think that also goes back to the point about having somebody who can help provide that kind of advice and guidance because they actually know your business, there were a couple of comments in chat about how good freelancers can get onboarded to sites quite quickly, and I do agree, a good freelancer is going to be able to jump into a site and within an hour or two get a lay of the land, but it takes longer to get onboarded to the business itself and understand how they market and where their traffic swings come from, and you can’t provide that kind of advice, like, hey, you should move all your landing pages to a subdomain with a separate install of WordPress, until you know the business a little bit better, and that’s the difference between looking for someone in a reactive situation versus being proactive and building that team behind your online business.

Jen Buzza: This has been so wonderful, y’all, we are going to be ending in just a second. Thank you to everybody out in the audience, filling out the polls and asking great questions, we didn’t get time for questions because this conversation was so good. Thank you, panel, I really appreciate it. We had a lot of gold dropped on us here, and one of the main things was this idea that you at home, you in your offices, you are the professionals, you might not feel it yet, but you are, so get the expert help you need so that you can focus on your area of expertise, your gift, whatever special thing you’re bringing to the world, and get professionals around you to help, especially when it comes to your livelihood. Business is not a joke, we do it because we love it, but also because we need to do it, because of things we want in life like electricity and health care. So thank you all so very much for being here, this has been absolutely wonderful. We are going to end this session, we’ve got a next session coming up which is an audit, performance, we’ve had people put in their sites to see how they’re actually performing, so we’re going to consult on that with a specialist in just a few minutes. There is a survey overall, because we’re always trying to get better, so do help us with that survey, and we will see you all very shortly.