Kimp.io Review: Unlimited Design Services

Are you struggling to get decent-looking creative designs for your business? Maybe it’s your personal blog, like mine, that you want to look more appealing?

Having good quality creatives on your site can certainly lift the bar and make you stand out from the crowd.

This has been the case for me ever since I started working online. Getting a quality designer to work on my creatives is not easy, which is ironic considering the number of options available online.

I have tried them all; hired graphic designers on Upwork/Fiverr, design competitions on 99Designs/Designcrowd, and subscription-based unlimited graphic design services from Kapa99, DesignPickle, and Pebbled.

The guys at Kimp.io reached out to me last week suggesting I give them a try as they had seen my review of unlimited graphic design services.

Although I was at first I was a little reluctant, the timing was perfect as I am in the middle of producing creative for my supplement brand (SuperGreen TONIK).

So, here is my experience working with Kimp.io during their 7-day free trial. In my Kimp.io review, I will also reveal some of the designs they produced.

What is Kimp.io?

Kimp is a dedicated outsourced design team that gives you unlimited graphic design requests for a fixed monthly fee of $389.

Aimed at entrepreneurs, marketers, agencies, and small business owners, Kimp.io offers a cost-effective solution to getting the creative design work you need without the need to recruit freelancers or hire designers.

The idea is simple, you can make as many design requests each month as you want, Kimp.io then outsources it to a team of professional designers.

Once completed you are shown the creatives and have the option of making revisions or accepting them and completing the task.

The attractive point of this service is the ability to have “unlimited graphic design”, which means you literally have a design team at your disposal as and when you need it.

Signing up and Onboarding with Kimp.io

Signing up with Kimp.io is really easy, you just enter your email address into the “start free trial” box on the home page.

You then complete your name, phone number, and company name (not compulsory) before then entering your desired username and password.

Next, you select how you wish to manage your tasks. I really suggest using Trello it makes life MUCH EASIER to track the progress of your design requests.

The process is very straightforward. The last step is selecting either a Credit Card or PayPal as a payment method, but you won't be charged for the first 7-days.

I selected PayPal to make life easier, and so I was sent to PayPal to agree to the subscription service (remember the first 7 days are free but you will be charged $389.00 USD for each month afterward ).

You're then sent an email with a video of the next steps and access to your Trello board.

A quick mention here about Kapa99 and their onboarding sequence. I still rate the process of providing one-to-one video calls during the onboarding process as one of the best that I have tried so far.

This is something that maybe Kimp.io would like to give a try.

How Kimp.io Works in Practice

Requesting your designs is really simple.

Similar to Kapa99, Kimp.io uses Trello, a project management tool, to manage the process of managing your design requests until the finalized version.

According to a basic guideline for the type of creativity, you're requesting you submit your design brief to a Trello board in the “Requests” card. Your Kimp.io team member will check over the request and clarify if anything is missing.

This board then gets moved to the “In Progress” card so that the designers can get to work.

Once the creative is ready it's moved again to the “In Review” card so you can take a look and either request a revision or mark it as completed.

The great thing with Trello is the ability to see all the activities that took place for the design request.

You can see the screenshot of my Trello workspace below.

Managing design requests using Trello is super easy and you can tell at a glance the progress of your design requests.

I got my first design request back in 21 hours, which was pretty quick and a little faster than some of the previous services I tested out.

Speed is good, but ultimately it comes down to the quality of the graphic designs. Does this beg the question was my first design any good?

Just how good are the Kimp.io graphic designs?

Having unlimited graphic designs at your fingertips is all well and good, but the key question is how good are the actual designs?

I have to admit my expectations weren’t particularly high. This was nothing against Kimp.io but I know from previous experience with similar services that quality can vary significantly.

When I got the first designs through though I was really impressed.

I have added a couple of the designs below, pretty good, eh?

I did request minor revisions that took a few hours to make.

Explaining exactly what you want in a design can sometimes be a challenge and so you need to keep this in mind when requesting work.

Similar to working with one designer by your side, over time the Kimp.io team will develop an understanding of how you prefer designs to look.

For example, the team was really keen to have my logo on the designs a bit too big for my liking. A few design requests and feedback and now they are spot on.

Knowing Your Unlimited graphic design needs

Before jumping into an outsourced unlimited graphic design service there are some considerations you need to think of.

It’s worth keeping in mind that whilst you can submit 2-3 designs per day how quickly these are done depends on the complexity of the task.

My expectations for these types of unlimited design services are to receive 1 good design per day, two if the jobs are fairly small, or maybe revisions.

Also, the service is not 24/7 but 24/5, so like you these guys want to have a break at the weekend too!

How does Kimp.io compare to other unlimited design services?

I have tried several other services (Design Pickle, Pebbled.io, and Kapa99 – check out my unlimited graphic design services review) last year when I compared them side by side.

I picked Design Pickle as the overall winner and used them for several months after the trial until my graphic design requirements mean't it wasn't cost-effective to continue.

Who uses Kimp.io?

I was impressed with the brands that have used Kimp.io, names that you would have definitely have heard of; Hostgator, 1and1, MarketHealth and Russell Brunson (for those affiliates out there).

Check out their portfolio of work and you can see why. They produce a variety of solid graphic design work from Facebook posts, logos, website assets, book cover designs, prints designs for flyers and t-shirts, illustrations, and some pretty cool packaging designs.

The packaging designs were interesting as I will likely get Kimp.io to work on the next version of my supplement label.

When I originally needed this design I reached out to freelancers on Upwork, whilst I was happy with the result it did end up costing me $550 altogether (you can check out the process I followed for branding and logo design).

It’s clear that they can handle pretty much any graphic design work you can through at them.

My only reservation is for anyone looking for complete websites being built or for landing pages. This is probably not the service for you if you’re looking to build a website from scratch.

That said, Kimp.io can certainly design the website assets you need for a website.

Kimp.io: Bottom Line

I am really glad that the Kimp.io team reached out to me, I was so impressed with the service that I have decided to keep using them. They will be primarily supporting the creative design work I need for my supplement brand.

If you have been on the fence as to whether to try out an unlimited graphic design service like Kimp.io, I recommended first understanding your graphical needs and then giving them a go.

With the 7-day free trial, they currently offer it's a no-brainer, you can test if the service works for you without costing you a cent. And within a few days, you will know if this service is a good fit for you.

For me, I knew that it was worth signing up after receiving the first design. I will be using Kimp.io over the next few months under their unlimited graphic design subscription service.

When shopping online it's hard to ignore those smooth sliding pop-ups typically in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.

Social proof pop-ups are a popular way for store owners to show visitors how popular their store is, and importantly that they have customers!

There is little denying they are convincing. The evidence is in the numbers and they show that used correctly Social Proof notifications they can increase conversion rates – by 15% according to TrustPulse.

Sometime ago I decided to go with WooCommerce for my e-commerce store. It's one of the most adaptable platforms around. So I researched which social proof plugins would work best for my WooCommerce site.

With so many options to choose from, I decided to test 5 social proof plugins (TrustPulse, WP Real-Time Social-Proof, WooCommerce Notification Premium, WooBought Pro and FOMO) to see which ones worked best for my store and could do for yours too.

Social Proof Plugins I Tested

Most of the plugs have a freemium version available, which is a great way to test out how well this works for your site.

In reality, you only get to find out how well it works by purchasing the full versions and testing it out in a live environment. So, I went ahead and bought a single site license to all five Social Proof plugins.

All in, I spent in total around $250 testing out 5 different social proof plugins.

Installing and testing these plugins wasn’t fun. You just have to ask my wife this week from the frustrating noises I was making from my home office!

Although the idea behind how social proof plugins work is simple, I found they were are anything but similar in how they actually work in real life.

I first signed up for TrustPulse because I was shown a persuasive cross-selling email from OptinMonster. It was only after experiencing issues with their integration (and support), that I decided to research some alternatives, more on that below.

TrustPulse (OptinMonster company)

First became aware of TrustPulse when I was cross-sold shortly after signing up for OptinMonster.

It just goes to show how effective those cross-sells are, especially for SaaS products!

I was pleased with how OptinMonster was working and so thought I would try TrustPulse and so purchased the 10,000 sessions package at $79 per annum (you get 20% off being an OptinMonster customer).

There is a cheaper “Basic” package at just $39 per site, but the number of allowed sessions per month is only 2,500, and so only really works for small sites.

TrustPulse differs from most of the social proof plugins as its not actually a plugin, but it’s a hosted service. So, once you have added a single line of Javascript code to the footer of your site you need to create a campaign in TrustPulse.

To capture order details, you need to specify the page to get the data from, including the order confirmation page. This worked initially for my site and then stopped working, I am not sure why.

When it worked, it did look really good. If it stops working though, you’re going to out of luck because their support sucks BIG TIME.

It was an incredibly frustrating experience trying to get any support from TrustPulse despite on their website saying they have “expert support from real people”.

I very rarely managed to get ANY response from the “real people” to the point that in the end I switched if off and canceled it.

I won’t be using TrustPulse EVER again. A really rubbish experience that wasted a lot of my time.

UPDATE: Support did eventually get in touch with me and offered to refund my purchase, so good on them.

WP Real-Time Social-Proof

The annual license for WP Real-time Social proof costs $77, which considering its for unlimited sites is really good value.

You can configure the social proof plugin to show live sales, realtime visitors, sales milestones, and custom call to actions.

In fact, you configure to show one or more (or all) of the notification if you so. You can also set up your preference for the order of the proofs.

I was impressed with the ability to configure each of these notifications!

There is reasonable support available and they do actually get back to you well within 24 hours, so I was really happy with their response times.

They were keen to resolve any issues I had too.

What I didn't like about their social proof notification is the fact the alert only ever showed “GUEST” and not the customer's first name. I did reach out to support about this and they said this is the only option at the moment if the customer doesn't have an account in WordPress.

This is strange as all the other plugins manage to achieve pulling out the first name from the order itself, without having them as a WordPress user.

I also noticed for one of my notifications on mobile there was a large amount of white space below it, which took up a lot of space. This only seemed to happen for one particular notification, the rest were showing fine.

WooBought Pro

WooBought Pro is developed by StudioWombat who offers a few WordPress plugins.

It's a quick and easy plugin that is really cheap. Single site license costs just $29 per annum, 3 sites $49, and for unlimited sites cost $109.

Out of the box I wasn't much of a fan as it looked a little on the cheap and untidy side. The notification shows the product thumbnail, but for me, this was always truncated and so looked really sloppy.

Here is a screenshot of how this looked on my site.

For just $29 though, it's a cost-effective way to show recent orders on your site.

WooCommerce Notification Premium

I stumbled across this plugin on the EnvatoMarket place on CodeCanyon and was super cheap at just $30 for the regular single site license.

You can buy an extended license that means you can use it on unlimited websites for $175.

Just like WooBought Pro, this is easy to set up and configure but I found that the product image was also truncated. (see the picture below).

Considering the options available it makes more sense to go with WP Social Proofs if you're looking for a plugin that's wallet-friendly.

FOMO – Best Overall

FOMO, or as the acronym refers to “Fear of Missing Out”, is a monthly or annual subscription Social Proof plugin and so is one of the most expensive options tested here.

If you have a successful store, and you're not on a tight (and I mean super tight) budget, then FOMO Social Proof is an ideal option. (Subscribing to their annual plan gives you a 30% saving.)

Setting up FOMO is straight forward as they have both a WordPress Plugin and option to use their API to connect directly. Where possible I prefer to avoid adding more WordPress Plugins if I can help it!

Super easy with lots of configuration options available, which means you can use this for pretty much anything you want.

You can see from the partial screenshot below how good FOMO social proof notifications look.

Debugging is really easy too, for those technically inclined. You can use the FOMO Inspector that brings up your site with all the options selected, so you can go through them one by one.

This is the first time I have seen this feature, it’s super cool.

If you’re keen to avoid adding to the list of WordPress plugins (like I am), then you can set this up without it. Or if you need help and want an even easier integration then there is a FOMO WordPress Plugin too.

The API pulls in WooCommerce orders every hour and you can see how this looks in the “events” section of FOMO. This allows you to remove them if you wish.

FOMO is a professional-looking service with functionality to match and far outmatches TrustPulse and the other cheaper plugins.

The only reason FOMO didn't achieve a perfect 10/10 score is because of the price.

Considerations when buying Social Proof Plugins

Although many of these plugins will be fine for most general use if you're not as particular as I am. In case you want a plugin that has a particular feature, I have put together this quick little round-up.

Which is the Best WooCommerce Social Proof Plugin?

Most work reasonably well out of the box by simply activating the WordPress plugin and toggling a checkbox to enable.

Any SaaS tool is only going to be as good as the support behind it. This is where TrustPulse failed big time, otherwise, they would have been the product/service that I would have selected.

To get started without spending any money for a plugin then the best cheap social proof plugin is WP Social Proof. I do prefer the options you get for the paid version and it’s not a lot of money, especially considering the unlimited license you get.

If cost is not so much a factor and you want a lot more configuration options and have multiple sites in one place, then FOMO is the best all-round social proof plugin.

I have set up many, and I mean many, WordPress sites now. I tried to count how many but it’s impossible to remember how many now.

Over the years I have gotten into a little system for how I set up fresh installs of WordPress. From my go to WordPress plugins and their settings, to even the web hosting platform I use.

Apart from the Life Hacker Guy blog, I have recently decided to use WordPress when developing my E-commerce website for my Super Greens supplement brand. Having a really robust, secure and fast WordPress install is important for not only a well functionality site that’s easy to manage but it has to deliver a great experience for visitors.

Here is my guide to doing a fresh install of WordPress, let’s start with who I choose for buying domain names and web hosting.

Registering Domain Name

I have used a number of domain name registrars over the years and have found Namecheap to be the easiest to use. The costs are fairly similar with the popular domain registrars although I find Namecheap a little cheaper the first year.

I have written about buying a domain name in my post here.

Once you have purchased your domain you can manage this within the Namecheap control panel.

You can use their DNS services or change the nameservers to point to your web hosting company or even other third party services.

WordPress Web Hosting

My go to webhosting company is SiteGround and have used them for the last 4 years as they have superb support.

Their prices for the first year (or two if you go for this option) are really competitive from $3.95 per month for their one-site starter package to $11.95 for the GoGeek unlimited sites with their Geeky/Premium features.

Many of the budget hosting companies like GoDaddy and 1and1 can be a lot cheaper but I find they tend to overload accounts with many sites and the support is not too responsive.

Installing WordPress

With most hosting packages you have cPanel as standard, which makes setting up all aspects of your website very straight forward.

You can auto-install WordPress using a one-click install from cPanel.

I am a bit old school in that I like to manually set up WordPress so that I get a “clean” install without any additional plugins the hosting company may wish to also install.

To do this you can head over to the WordPress.org website and simply download the latest version of WordPress. At the time of writing this post the current version is 5.2.2.

Once downloaded I use FTP to upload the WordPress files to my hosting space.

This can take a few minutes depending on your internet connection, and so you can head over to cPanel again to create the MySQL database and user that will be required for WordPress to work.

Setting up MySQL Database and User

This may sound daunting but it's actually fairly straight forward to do and made so much easier thanks to cPanel.

In the “databases” section select the MySQL database icon:

Once you have clicked on the icon you arrive at the setting up MySQL database and user screen, it should look like this:

Choose a name for the your database with no spaces just alphanumerical characters.

Once set up you will need to create a user to access the database.

Make a note of the password as you will need to add this information to a WordPress configuration file later.

Associate this new user to the newly created database.

Lastly, you will need to add permissions to this user so that it can access the database.

Setting up the WP_Config File

In older versions of WordPress you needed to manually edit the wp-config.php file found in the root of the installation. Recent versions are able to do this automatically upon running the installation script.

In either case you will need the information setup above when creating the database and new user.

An excellent guide on doing this can be found on the How to Install WordPress site itself.

Instead of repeating this excellent guide I recommend checking this out.

Basic WordPress Settings

Out of the box WordPress has you mostly covered in terms of set-up but there are few modifications I make for every WordPress website I launch. I will quickly cover these here in each of the sections in the “Settings” tab.

General Settings

Ensure site title is entered in correctly and that the WordPress Address URL and Site URL is correct. If you have already set up the SSL certificate, then you need to ensure this is changed to be https.

Discussion

A couple of options that I toggle on and off here.

Firstly, I always want to be able to moderate a comment before it appears, so I toggle on the:

“Comment must be manually approved”

Next, I ALWAYS remove the option to “Show Avatars” this really slows down the site load speed.

Permalink Settings

You can change the custom URL structure of your WordPress site in this section. I ALWAYS select the “post name” option, so the title of you post is used for the URL.

Must Have WordPress Plugins

One of the benefits of WordPress is the huge library of plugins you have access too, many of which are completely free versions. For some of the more advanced features you may need to upgrade to the PRO paid for versions, but mostly you can get away with the free versions.

With so many plugins available I wanted to highlight the “must have” plugins I use on every WordPress install I set up.

Acunetix WP Security

This plugin is great for two reasons, firstly it can help to remove information displayed on the website front-end (or in the source code) that may reveal install information (such as the WordPress version, php and database error reporting). Secondly, for adding in default index files into folders to prevent information being disclosure to visitors they shouldn’t see.

Acunetix WP Security can also rename the WordPress database table name prefix from the standard “wp_”. This is ALWAYS recommended to make it a little harder for hackers to know your database schema.

One I have ran through the checks I usually disable the plugin and only periodically enable to ensure security is fine.

https://www.acunetix.com/websitesecurity/wordpress-security-plugin/

Autoptimize

As I highlight a few times here, website speed is a big factor for visitor satisfaction and also Google as a search engine ranking factor. So, anything we can do to speed up the load time is a plus.

Autoptimize is a plugin that optimizes CSS, JS, Images and Google Fonts using a couple of nice tricks. One is combining similar files together into one file, thus reducing the number of HTTP requests. These files can then be cached to load even faster.

Another cool feature is to combine, and load Google fonts asynchronously and so reduce wait time for them to load one at a time.

One tiny word of warning though, messing around with the combining JS files into one file can sometimes have unwanted effects. So, it’s best to check site functionality after checking this feature.

All In One SEO Pack

All in One SEO is as the name suggests a plugin that helps to ensure your on-page SEO is setup correctly.

With this plugin enabled you can edit SEO settings on a per post and page basis along with the more advanced SEO settings for the site itself.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

I previously used Yoast SEO but one of their updates last year caused a real issue with it and the fallout put me off using them going forward.

Yoast SEO is still a very popular plugin though, you can check out the pros and cons of both these plugins here.

There is a PRO version available that costs from $68 per single site to $118 for a business license for 10 sites.

Classic Editor

If you prefer the previous classic version of editing posts in the WordPress back-end then you will be glad to be using the “Classic Editor”.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)

To easily sync your Google Analytics account to your WordPress site you can use this plugin.

Really easy to setup you simply paste your GA site ID into XXX.

You can see the Google Analytics stats in your WordPress Back-end and also a bunch of other tracking stats too, such as events, AMP and eCommerce tracking.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-dashboard-for-wp/

Lazy Load by WP Rocket

Speed is critical these days when viewing any website especially now that over 50% devices used are mobile. Having a well-optimised and fast loading WordPress site can be challenging, but there are some plugins that can help, and this is one of them.

Loading images in one go can slow the loading speed of your website. Lazy Load only starts to load the image when it's visible to the user and so reduces the initial number of HTTP requests.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/rocket-lazy-load/

Redirection

One of most popular redirect plugins for WordPress and used when you need to do 301 redirects on your site.

You may wish to change the permalink of a post or page but don’t wish to cause any 404 errors. Using “redirection” means you can easily set up the 301 redirect in the most efficient way without any coding or messing about with the .htaccess file.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Social Warfare

This is my social sharing plugin of choice as it doesn’t reduce the page load speed like many of the other similar plugins.

In most cases you can simply use their free version, but I find the PRO features give me greater flexibility and it’s not expensive at all, just $29 for a single license (I use the 10-site license as I manage a few sites).

Social Warfare official site

WP-Optimize

This plugin is great for cleaning up and optimizing your WordPress database. A few clicks and you can remove any transient orphan data that’s not needed – including all the old revisions of posts.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/

There is also a PRO version that you can buy from the official website – https://getwpo.com/

UpdraftPlus

Ensuring you have up-to-date backups is essential if you have a WordPress site. You will never realise the importance until your website goes down and you try to recover it.

Hopefully this never happens to you, it has to me on a few occasions – it’s not good!

At the best it’s a few hours of technical backward and forward getting your site up and online again, at worse it’s gone.

Using a WordPress backup plugin like UpdraftPlus can automatic daily, weekly or monthly backups or your WordPress database and files.

I set daily backups for the database and have these emailed and stored in Dropbox and regularly backup the files, each month. This schedule works well in my opinion as you have the most up-to-date version of the database to hand should you need it.

Official Updraft Plus site

The Bottom Line

Well done for reaching the bottom of this post, I am glad you stayed with it!

It’s easy to see why WordPress is THE favorite content management software to use. Setting up a website using WordPress is can be incredibly quick and after a little playing with the backend it’s incredibly adaptable.

Let me know if there are any tips and tricks you use when setting up WordPress websites – I would be keen to discover more.

The setup above I find works for 90% of the WordPress websites I set up for either my own use or clients in the past. I hope you found this post useful and helps setting up your next WordPress websites quicker and easier!

With the growth of the digital nomad and solopreneur lifestyles, crowdsourced graphic design has exploded and provides a solution for getting creative content as and when you need it.

If you’re like me and you struggle with graphic design, and you can tweak a bit in Photoshop, but are a long way from being a designer, having some sort of design capability will be needed.

Especially as more features are released in each version of Photoshop it’s simply impossible to stay on top unless you’re a dedicated graphic designer and this is your tool of the trade.

Therefore, what are your options if you need regular design work done and you don’t have enough work to hire a full-time designer?

You have a few options.

• Use your network to find a designer and develop a long-term relationship
• Find a design studio to work with
• Use an outsource/freelancer portal

The cheapest choice on the face of it is use a freelance site, such as Upwork, Freelancer or PeoplePerHour, other options include the numerous design competition sites 99Designs and DesignCrowd, which I used for developing my supplement logo.

But wait, there is another design solution for getting creative content that will fit the needs of many solopreneurs – and this is a recent trend in the business of design – you can now find design services offering “unlimited graphic designs” for a flat monthly fee.

Monthly Unlimited Graphic Design Services

I’ve made a list of some of the more popular unlimited design companies that are dedicated to providing crowd sourced graphic design.

The services vary between companies depending on the number of active tasks, turnaround time, type of work available.

One thing in common amongst all these services is the fact you appear to have an “unlimited number of tasks” each month for a fixed priced subscription.

Many of the companies offer a free trial and so I decided to take them up on their offer and selected three from the list above to see just how good they were.

I chose; DesignPickle, Pebelled.io and Kapa99. All had a 14- or 15-day trial, which meant I could give them a go without incurring any costs.

To make this fair I decided I would give them the same design task so I could compare and contrast not only have their service but how good were their creative skills were.

The task I gave all three companies, was to create a featured blog post for my Supplement Blueprint page.

Comparing DesignPickle, Kapa99 and Pebbled

Before I started any of the trials their websites were important in creating my first impression of the service and company.

Before settling on these three services I checked out 8 similar companies in all. A few immediately put me off by the design choices of their website, such as Undullify’s use of backgrounds and Unicorngo with what I thought had a poor choice of layout and fonts. If they can’t get the look right for their business how can they get it right for me?

I chose DesignPickle, Kapa99 and Pebbled because they looked like the best of the bunch.

I did have high hopes for each service and it was my intention of picking one of these unlimited monthly graphic design services for my blog and supplement business going forward. Regardless of my review, that is if any of them proved to be reliable.

I chose the “Supplement Blueprint” featured image for the first creative design because I produced this and I thought it would be a good test. You can see each of the designs below and decide on if I made the right choice.

The competition is on.

Here is the summary of the outcome in the five sections looking at; the on-boarding process, submitting design requests, speed of delivery, quality of design work and how the work is stored.

On-boarding Process

The on-boarding process with Kapa99 really stood out as you get to speak directly with them and they take you through setting up with them. They set up a Trello board for you and briefly show you how to use it so that you can submit design requests and get revisions.

The process is very slick with Kapa99 and you can’t not fail to be impressed by this!!

In contrast, Pebbled was really poor, you get very little information apart from an introductory message on Slack that provides a PDF document for you to submit designs. Which leaves me feeling that Pebble hasn’t been thought out very well, and certainly hasn’t had much input from anyone that has spent time working in an agency and understands the personal nature of this process. Communication in any process like this very important. Regardless of price everyone wants to feel they are needed.

DesignPickle really gave me the personal touch that was lacking from Pebbled, as soon you sign up you are introduced to your designer, who immediately strikes up a rapport with you, asking about your interests.

Submitting Design Requests

With Kapa99 submitting design requests was really easy, the Trello board they set up for you makes everything simple. Although this was my first-time using Trello, it was pain free and I like the interface especially how easy it was to work with.

DesignPickles’ application, Jar, is really straight forward too and a real bonus is the integration with Unsplash and Getty Images (if you have paid for the additional monthly fee of $25). Otherwise you can upload your own assets you want for the design, or if illustrating ideas, you quite like.

With Pebbled you send design requests within a word document that you then upload into Slack. I didn’t like this process as it just took longer and seemed more cumbersome to do.

On balance I preferred the use of Trello by Kapa99 as visually it was great to see design tasks moving from board to board. DesignPickle’s Jar app was intuitive though and was really straight forward to use.

Speed of Delivery

The hands down winner for speed of delivery of design work goes to DesignPickle. I received my creatives back within 24 hours!

Pebbles and Kapa99’s delivery were nearer to a 40-44 hour turnaround. To be fair their service does say that turnaround is between 24-48 hours, and so they were always within this timeframe. It’s the contrast between the services that makes DesignPickle stand out, the completed a design in the time it took for me to get a response from Pebbled.

Quality of Creative Work

I had high hopes for these unlimited outsourced graphic design services as I have read a few reviews on other sites that gave glowing reports.

When I received the first designs back from DesignPickle I was immediately impressed. They had nailed it! They got the style I was after and provided a few good variations on this.

In contrast, I was shocked at the work I first received from Pebbled as it would have taken even me only 5-10 minutes for me to put this together in Photoshop.

Unfortunately, Kapa99 didn’t fare to be better in his regard. The graphical elements of the featured image bore no resemblance to the brief and just used generic icons around the font.

I requested revisions for both Pebbled and Kapa99 and although slightly better they still weren’t good enough for me to use. I some ways I was more disappointed with Kapa99 as they had started so well, dropped the ball in the design process. But at the end of the day the most important part of this is the quality of the designs, and they just didn’t quite make it.

If Pebbled had produced a better design I may have been able put up with the poor communication. But as it stands DesignPickle were the standout winner.

Managing and Storage of Design Work

Once the design work was completed each service stored them in different places for me to access them.

Pebbled use dropbox to upload their work and can be either sync’d to your own dropbox account, if you have one, or you can download the files to your computer.

Kapa99 store the files within the Trello board and can download from there.

And lastly, DesignPickle uses a different service called box.com to store and manage the creatives. Another really cool thing Design Pickle do is to provide ALL the associated source files, these could be fonts and stock images used. You also have the designs in the file formats requested when first setting up the design task.

DesignPickle were the ONLY company that provided the source files for the graphic work – again you got to be impressed with these guys!

Starting my Pebbled.io Trial

Pebbled appealed to me because on all but the starter “core” package they offer front and back-end web development services too, which could be useful if I want to get some quick web work completed.

They have three prices starting from a very budget conscious $79 per month to a very reasonable $499 per month. I was interested in the “plus” plan at $249 per month, mostly as you can have two tasks running per month.

When comparing prices with other monthly design services, Pebbled is on the cheaper side, especially when contrasting to Penji who charge $698 for the same package features.

On-Boarding Process

I received an email “welcoming me to the team” and gave me links to getting Slack setup. The communication from that point on would be via the slack channel.

My First Pebbled Creative Design Task

After signing up you are sent an invitation to join a slack group containing instructions for submitting my first design task.

Although all communication is advised to be via the slack channel, they do highlight that its purpose is not for “live chat”.

I completed the simple questionnaire (10 questions only) and dropped this back into the slack channel at 4:14pm my time. Then I waited, and then waited, and hmm waited some more.

There was no notification even the next day and so wasn’t really sure if this was fine, or if they had even started work on yet!. I eventually did hear back after 22 hours after submitting the task.

Their advertised turnaround is 2-3 business days and so I guess they take the first day to look at the task and then allocate their incoming tasks according to their resources.

The designs I describe as being just okay, they didn’t really have any wow factor. And all the concepts had a watermark embedded with “Pebbled – 15 days free” on them. Which was interesting as the other companies I tried out didn’t do this and so you can’t really say this is a Free service, but more a free preview.

I gave feedback to them that I wasn’t that impressed, and they needed some work, with a few pointers on how, After 6 hours I hadn’t heard anything from them.

22 hours later, I gave them another prod on Slack and over 24 hours later I eventually had a response saying they were working on the designs and they will be ready in 24 hours.

I have to say I think the level of communication from Pebbled was poor, for me the service lacks a communication process, keeping clients up-to-date on what is happening is essential with anything that involves design . I had the distinct feeling that I needed to be on top of them all the time, I would have thought that as this is a trial period they would have gone all out to impress me so that I would sign up beyond the 14 days!

Here are the first two designs they produced based on the brief supplied.

After receiving my next set of designs, I canceled the service – they just weren’t very good, lacklustre would be a great adjective and in my opinion and the poor communication was very frustrating.

Given that we know much of communication can be automated, things such as an email when someone has started work etc. The whole service had an unfinished feel to it and they lack understanding about how design work and client/designer relationships.

Considering one of their services is web development – It was disappointing to see their own site didn’t work, which overall begs the question how good would their web development services be for their clients?

I went back to Slack and explained I wanted to cancel on and guess what, then waited again!

I received a reply 7 hours later via Slack saying that they had received my email and “can confirm it had now been cancelled. Thanks for trying us out and all the best.”

Although it was great to have confirmation, I was surprised they weren’t interested in getting my feedback or even attempting to resolve any issues I had. Pebbled are really missing a trick here in my opinion. Maybe their problem is they have so much work on it doesn’t matter or worse still they don’t see feedback as being important to them.

In the words of a friend of mine,

You would expect that during a free trial period you would do everything you can to impress and retain a prospect, not the reverse!

Starting my Kapa99 Trial

As soon as you sign up with Kapa99, you’re offered two choices for submitting design work; either by email or by using Trello. They prefer Trello as it makes managing tasks easier and well as it keeps task related information all in one place.

I went with Kapa99’s suggestion and set up Trello.

If you’re new to Trello, they very helpfully send you a an onboarding video that outlines how to use their platform.

The on-boarding process with Kapa99 is slick and it really feels like they guide you through the setup really easily – which given my experience with Pebble was a VERY encouraging start.

Kapa99 mandate a 15-30-minute on-boarding call before the first task is started. This was a bit frustrating in that the timings for me weren’t ideal for me as I’m based in Malaysia, So my call was scheduled for 10pm in the evening. Which is understandable as you would expect on-boarding to come from their headquarters, but you would assume that should their service really take off, that they would have regional service centres.

On-boarding Call

My call had a minor technical issue but that was my problem as I had opened two conference call sessions, this caused an annoying feedback loop, listen to my voice in stereo was a bit weird!

Fabiana led the on-boarding conference call and gave me an excellent introduction to Kapa99 and took me through the process of creating and managing tasks in Trello. Their process is really good and means other members of your team can be involved or even manage for the project for you.

I really like this and it gave me a much better feeling about Kapa99 taking my previous experience with Pebble into account!

If you take the option of using Trelli instead of email all you design tasks are stored using a Trello board. This really makes everything easy to see where a particular task is along with makes managing the whole process really easily.

When you use Trello, your tasks move from the “To Do” Trello board … to the “Doing” and then to “Done list” when the final work has been completed. If you are not satisfied and need a revision, then you simply move the task to the “Revisions” Trello board and explain what you want amending.

Depending on the complexity of your revision this will be completed within a few hours or can take up to 8 hours if it is more complex.

My First Kapa99 Task

With my Trello board set up and my first task created, I looked forward to seeing the progress of my first design.

I received my first creative from the designer 18 hours after the job was setup after the on-boarding call.

First impressions of the design were that it was just okay and that the graphical parts didn’t really relate to the page it was going on, which made me think that the designer hadn’t done his homework.

I gave my feedback and asked for some revisions and moved it to the “revisions” card in Trello.

The designer asked for the blog post page the featured image would be placed on to get an idea of the context. I received a message 7 hours later showing three versions of their concept.

Whilst these were quite nice (see below) they really only used the existing image parts on the featured image I had there already (These had been designed by DesignPickle!). So, there was not much you could call creative to this, it was more a case of moving some design pieces around.

The brief was very straight forward and the fact that there was no graphic component that in anyway resembled a “supplement” meant one of two things

Either, the designer was rushing and didn't read the brief, or the brief was read and was not understood.

Both are points to be concerned about.

With a more in-depth description and illustration on what you need, then Kapa99 may be an excellent choice, it just didn’t work out that way for me.

You have to weigh up the time taken to write, incredibly in-depth briefs for what should be fairly clear, and so, with this concern I decided Kapa99 are probably not the solution for me.

Starting my DesignPickle Trial

I should say at the start, the guys at DesignPickle don’t do logos or websites, so if this is your requirement this solution is probably not for you.

I should also say that when you first sign up to DesignPickle they do take payment for the first month. So what you have is 14 days to test out the service and if it’s not for you, you can then ask for a full refund.

There are conditions on the refund and so it’s best to be aware of this at first. You need to complete two design tasks and give them a chance to get this right for you – in other words, if you don’t like the design you submit revisions until you sign it off!

There is a really great guide on their site on how they work and exactly how their service could work for me.

On-boarding Process

When signing up for an account you’re asked to customize what they call your “graphic design cloud”. This means you select the plan type, either the standard ($370) for next day or pro ($995) option for same day output, keeping in context with Pebble and Kappa99 I went with the standard plan.

Next you select the number of Design Processing Units (DPU) you require. This lets you choose a level of design output that works best for your individual needs. DPU is effectively how many resources are allocated to your account. So, I only selected one so although I can submit multiple jobs each day only one may get completed.

They also have a great upsell feature, that is an option for stock photo images from Getty for an additional $25 per month. This is ideal if you want to have real professional pictures used in your designs, all with commercial licenses included. And it worth every penny if you don’t have high quality imagery, the images you use say so much about your product, in the same way as an old and tired shop front with a broken sign tells a customer something, poor imagery gives the same impression for online as well.

Although I am looking for more flat design graphics for my blog, this will be very useful for future designs, for the reasons above, so no surprise when I say I took this option.

The last step is of course the credit card details and then go straight onto describing your first design request.

Following the design request details, you’re asked details about your company, such as size and online presence, with questions on what sort of graphic design work you’re looking for.

My First DesignPickle Task

Communication and design requests are all managed via DesignPickle’s app called Jar. This keeps all communication on the project within one place, within the Jar pickle app.

Completing a design request is very straight forward with 6-7 fields to complete and specifying the file types for the final output.

one of the features I really liked was the ability to search for stock images through Unsplash and Getty, that is if you opted for this in the sign up – I go through this option for a little more later on.

Within a few hours of submitting my first task, my designer contacted me via the requests board introducing herself with some facts about herself. This was a really nice touch and immediately helped and is a great way to build a rapport.

I received six concepts from my designer the next morning when I woke up – I have to say I was really impressed with that they speed they produced the designs in and was in stark contrast to the other services.

The turnaround time was just less than 24 hours, which is brilliant. The whole process was fluid and I felt like I was in contact.

Not only were the designs nice. but my designer did variations so I could decide on the style most suitable. I really liked the concepts and picked one for the site to try it out.

Here are the initial designs that Design Pickle produced. You can see which one I chose on my supplement blueprint page.

I wasted no time in requesting my second task, which was a featured blog post image for this site. Again, in less than 24 hours I was delivered three designs following the same design as requesting before.

I really was blown away with the service from these guys!

Not only do their designers do great work, the communication is fast.

I sent off two more design requests for them to work on as they clearly get the style I was after and so now I was able to proceed full steam ahead on getting my creative work completed.

Are Unlimited Monthly Design Services Worth It?

Before you go ahead with an unlimited plan,you need to have a clear idea of how much creative work you need doing. The last thing you want to be doing is signing up and trying to find graphic work that you think you need.

If you only have the odd design task, then a freelancer is going to be the most cost effective, andfinding a trustworthy freelancer on on Upwork might be your best bet. You could even ask if they are keen to have a monthly retainer.

I write 2-3 blog posts on this site each week and put together the featured image myself (does it show?). Ideally, I would like this to be delegated to my outsourced creative design team.

Not only will this free up much needed time to write but the images will look much better than me fudging about in Photoshop.

The Winner Is…

If like me, you have on going creative demands then an unlimited graphic design service will save you a ton of money and time.

There is no need to waste time hacking your way through Photoshop, unless you really enjoy doing so – I know I don’t!

Signing up for a monthly unlimited design packages is definitely worthwhile thinking about.

Each of the services I tested varied significantly with elements I liked in one service and others in another. I really liked using Trello with Kapa99 and was really impressed with the delivery, quality and communication of DesignPickle.

At the end of day, it’s all about the quality of the design and timely delivery though, and so I will continue to use DesignPickle, which will cost me $395 per month.

I really look forward to working with DesignPickle’s creative designers. They have already started producing some great looking blog post creatives, which I hope you guys will like too.

You can give DesignPickle a try by clicking here.

I recently completed a post about buying a domain name, setting up hosting and email, and it quickly was apparent that I didn't know enough about email setup. More importantly, how to ensure the email is set up correctly to ensure the best chances of your email actually being delivered!

After doing a little research I kept seeing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC popping up as important factors for helping to improve email deliverability. I knew little about these and have certainly never set these up.

One of best friends, David, is pretty hot on this topic, so I reached out to him to see if he could write a little article on what SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are and how to best set them up. He kindly obliged and here is his article (using a nice example with his domain www.2fluffyducks.com!).

There are a few certain and constant things on the Internet, one is SPAM.

If you want to ensure your email doesn't arrive in your recipient's junk or spam folder, you need to ensure you have SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly.

Why Email Deliverability is An Issue

In this age of instant messaging and permanent contact, we’re used to messages arriving and we’re used to everything just working, but if you don’t work with email, you probably wouldn’t know just how tricky it is to get an email from your account to someone else’s.

There are many different ways an email can get screwed up. Have a look at this link it's well worth noting this is just for the email server there are many other reasons an email may not get to its destination.

With all this in mind here’s a quick “how-to” on giving yourself the best chance of getting an email to someone’s mailbox.

We all know about spam and in some way email deliverability is all about how not to be confused with a spammer.

Before I go through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC a very quick explanation about DNS, where SPF, DMARC, and DKIM are published.

What is DNS?

Here’s a quick non-techie explanation of DNS. DNS stands for Domain Name System, but that doesn’t really tell you what it is.

In this context think of DNS as an addressing system. Very much like where I live, I have an address that also corresponds to a set of co-ordinates. Because the world needs to know where www.2fluffyducks.com is right?

In DNS you have a name www.2fluffyducks.com (The address) and an IP address a set of numbers 185.43.78.144 (The co-ordinates). The address is translated into the co-ordinates.

You should also know that there are DNS servers that keep all of this, whilst they each don’t keep all the records, they do keep information about where the addresses can be found. A bit like knowing a friend of a friend that knows how to contact someone.

You can create different types of records but for this purpose the ones you need to know about below:

A Records

A hostname for a domain. www is a hostname, so too would be mail. To explain a little more the hostname where this is concerned is the bit before 2fluffyducks.com so the bit in red is the hostname www.2fluffyducks.com or mail.2fluffyducks.com

MX Records

MX Records is the mail exchange record is where your mail is.

CNames

CNames are aliases they map a name to another name – It’s probably best I give you an example, you see them more often now with the rise of SaaS software.

Let’s say 2fluffyducks.com uses the email services of city-support.com and the mail server is mail.city-support.com but I don’t want my employees going to mail.city-support.com I could create a cname for mail.2fluffyducks.com to go to mail.city-support.com ie when you type mail.2fluffyducks.com you are actually going to mail.city-support.com.

Enough on this before you die of boredom.

TXT Records

As it says in the name. txt records are exactly that text and SPF, DMARC and DKIM are examples.

That’s a quick breakdown, but generally, just tell your hosting company what you are trying to do, and they’ll do it for you albeit at a cost.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and is an email authentication method that is designed to detect forged sender addresses in emails, this a technique often used in spamming and phishing. An SPF record is published to your DNS as a txt record and as such allows the receiving mail server to check that an email claiming to come from a specific domain comes from an authorized IP address.

Typically, your mail admin (If you have one) will create the record for you. But in this time of solopreneurs, your probable mail admin, webmaster, receptionist as well as CEO, CFO, and any other role that comes along.

So, it's important to get on and create an SPF record yourself – it really can help with your email deliverability!

Anatomy of a SPF record

Here is an example SPF record for the domain 2fluffyducks.com what can I say, it’s a real domain, as memory serves me I bought it when I was drunk and I kept the domain.


v=spf1 a mx a:mail.city-support.co.uk ip4:185.43.78.144/24 ~all
v=spf1 = the start of all spf records


• a mx = this means please accept email from any domain 2fluffyducks.com mx records
• a mail.city-support.co.uk = this is the name of the mail server I use, I use another mail server, it sends about a million a month (Which isn’t a lot) but has a great reputation. This is normal and if you used Office 365 or Google Apps then you would include them here.
• ip4:185.43.78.144/24 = this is the IP range of where to also expect email might come from.
• ~all = means softfail all email, which means it’s up to you what to do if email does not conform to all of the above.

DKIM

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail, again the name doesn’t really tell you much.

DKIM is complicated, so first off, it’s important to know that this is only beneficial if your email server supports DKIM, or whoever you send through supports DKIM. Publishing a DKIM record and not using DKIM doesn’t make sense. Especially if you use the wrong type of policy.

Before I launch into an explanation of DKIM, I have provided an example of how to create a key and what you need. At the end of my how-to I have added additional information about DKIM, it’s a bit dry but will hopefully provide you with some context if you want it.

First off, you create a DKIM Record in your DNS.

I’ll break this down and give you an example using the domain campaign-mail.co.uk using a DKIM Generator you can find here

There are several parts to you DKIM.

You have a selector (the name), the domain public key, domain private key, and your policy record.

Look at the screenshot below, you can see where you enter your domain name and the name of your selector default is as good a name as any. If you will use several then try key1, key2, etc, if you need more than one record I assume you know what you are doing and you won’t need help creating your records.

Now when you click generate, you’ll see some information.

Below is the Public Key and Private Keys you should only save them in a text file. Also note you should keep your Private Key, Safe, Secure and Private if anyone gets their hands on your Private key they can send email as you.


-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCvxiTxuEbBH7TtTXQpKq1AfYc6rYfd0aRLRF3k0PffuhL37ejY9Hp9675tYmF1oZnOSfirSNS4NSajdcAhKyRxzgfS/x7YAzZCUgG+ofNH1nErmpJiBpNmiQ6Gkr9lnL2dVkIjU3qAjhnJI1PObBTYWkwhb2lh0I4u5NPFah3SCQIDAQAB
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----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
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----


So now you have generated this information you need to publish this to your DNS. Most likely you will be using a txt record to do this.

There are many, many different systems so I am going to give you an example that is pretty generic.

Login to your hosting control panel and navigate to where you can edit your DNS. In my example, I am using internetbs.net but you will probably have a similar look. You need to create 2 records:

1. for your DKIM Public Key
2. For your Policy Record (Remember your policy record tells the world what to do if the email does not match the policy)

Your DKIM Key notice is says:

default._domainkey and to the right, you see “v=DKIM1;

your public key goes directly after


v=DKIM1; k=rsa;p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCvxiTxuEbBH7TtTXQpKq1AfYc6rYfd0aRLRF3k0PffuhL37ejY9Hp9675tYmF1oZnOSfirSNS4NSajdcAhKyRxzgfS/x7YAzZCUgG+ofNH1nErmpJiBpNmiQ6Gkr9lnL2dVkIjU3qAjhnJI1PObBTYWkwhb2lh0I4u5NPFah3SCQIDAQAB


Now create your policy record

_domainkey.campaign-mail.co.uk IN TXT “o=~”

So, what do you do now?

Well, that all depends on your email system. But with all email systems that use DKIM, you will need your private key, which you have stored safely in a .txt file.

All above is the practical use/creation of a DKIM key nowhere is an explanation.

DKIM is cryptographic authentication that is designed to detect forged sender addresses in an email (Actually it can detect any change to an email) and thus prevent spoofing. How it works is by using Public Key Private Key encryption.

The sender (The domain owner) is the only person that has the Private Key, but your Public Key is published in DNS. You can see the syntax in the examples above.

The methodology is, an email message sent from your server by you, and a string known as a HASH is encrypted using your PrivateKey and then added to the header of your email.

The receiving mail server reads the header DKIM key and runs a DNS query against your DKIM record, once it has retrieved this it then goes through a validation process whereby it creates its own HASH and this is compared for a match with the original. Then depending on your policy record the mail transport agent (MTA/MAIL Server) will either forward the mail drop or mark it.

DMARC

DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” which is a bit of a mouthful. Just like SPF, it’s another way of a mail server confirming this email is legitimate and not forged.

How does DMARC work, briefly, and in non-technical terms?

A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their messages are protected by SPF and/or DKIM and tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes – such as junk or reject the message.

DMARC removes guesswork from the receiver’s handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user’s exposure to potentially fraudulent & harmful messages. DMARC also provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and/or fail DMARC evaluation.

Outcome – Emails Received!

So, this article is a little technical in places, especially if you've not dealt with DNS in the past. Hopefully, the steps outlined above mean you can walk through them, otherwise pass them to your technical person to get them set up.

In this day and age of growing spam, it's incredibly important to do what you can to ensure your emails are delivered. Having undelivered emails is a headache at best but at worse could mean you're wasting money marketing to potential or existing customers who simply aren't getting your message!

The thing to remember about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is they are now a fundamental component to successful marketing campaigns. They increase your deliverability, every email delivered is an additional chance to get your message over or to make a sale and in this day and age, ignore them at your peril, because you can bet your competitor won’t.

We hope this helps. Please enter any comments below.

WP Speed Fix Recommendations To Improve Our WordPress Site Speed.

The Life Hacker Guy website is fairly new and although I have spent some time on the site from a technical perspective I wanted to check that it was performing as well as it should, any performance marketers out there will know that site speed is essential for page ranking.

WordPress is reported to be used in 30% of all websites worldwide and 48% of technorati’s top 100 blogs, so it’s not a surprise that I built this using WordPress.

Whilst WordPress is an amazing framework for building and managing websites it can have performance issues depending on your theme and plugins used. Some of the performance issues may be around the use of MySQL which is a great easy to use database, but it does have its own performance issues, I wonder if WordPress will ever natively support PostgreSQL, which is still free but doesn’t come with the same performance problems that MySQL has.

Anyway, I ran a few speed tests on my website using some third party tools, mainly pingdom (Preferred option) and GTMatrix, I was pleasantly surprised as I my load time was less than 2 seconds without spending too much time tweaking the setup.

A while ago, I was made aware of a service that provides WordPress speed fixes through a Facebook group I belong too, so I reached out to Brendan Tully CEO of WP Speed Fix, and asked him what he would recommend I do to improve performance of our site. You can see WP Speed Fix here.

But First, Why is Website Speed So Important?

Quite often when people are thinking about performance and websites they forget about the most important component in the chain, the visitor!! It’s important to remember, that person that has taken time out of their day to visit your website, to either read or if you have an online business, part with their hard-earned cash and buy something.

You will know just how frustrating it is waiting for a webpage to load. There’s a lot of research on this but waiting anything more than one second gets on people's nerves. This is especially true when trying to find information on your mobile phone!

Therefore, from a user experience (UX) point of view, you need a fast-loading web page to ensure visitors stay with you and hopefully read your engaging content or buy something if you are a shop. If your site is unresponsive, you’ll see that your visitor bounce rate is high, or put another way, if you run a bricks and mortar shop ion the high street, would you stop everyone before you allowed them into your shop, if you did, you would probably find your sales dropped quite considerably!

This leads nicely onto the second issue, the big G. Yes if you have a slow loading site, the Google Algorithm just don’t like it. This goes hand in hand with a high bounce rate, in most cases.

Anyone into SEO knows that Google uses many ranking factors and whilst speed alone isn’t going to get you to that magical #1 spot. If your site is loading in 3-4 seconds then you will be downranked as a result. Why go to the effort of building and paying for a website and then scrimp on one of the most important factors at the end?

Fast WordPress Hosting

Discussions on Webhosting are aplenty online, so I won't go into too much detail here. The main point is avoid cheap budget hosting that's costing a few dollars per month.

The reason they are cheap is that either due to poor infrastructure or there will be many (and we mean MANY) customers sharing the servers, or in some cases both. This means your site will be sharing resources and as a consequence will be very slow.

We currently use SiteGround as we find their packages reasonable and importantly they have awesome support.

How Fast Was The LifeHackerGuy Website?

So, how fast was the Life Hacker Guy website before we made the recommended WordPress performance changes?

I ran a blog post page through Pingdom firstly through a USA location and then using a UK location. My reasoning is that most of my traffic will be coming from these two locations.

Pingdom Test Result (USA Location) – Before Any Plugin Optimization

Pingdom Test Result (UK Location) – Before Any Plugin Optimization

These speeds are fairly good, to be honest.

Running the tests through Pingdom showed speeds under 2 seconds, and only went over this when checking from Australia or Japan locations.

Even so, I knew we could improve the site further without too much work, so I got in touch with WP Speed Fix and asked Brendan if he could do a quick site speed audit.

WP Speed Fix Service

What can WP Speed Fix do with your WordPress site?

Their service is very simple, they will optimize your WordPress site loading speed to be under 2 seconds, and if you opt for their fast hosting service recommendations often under 1 second.

They run a number of tests on your WordPress site and analyze any potential issues. If the changes are straightforward to fix, they will provide the suggestions directly for you to implement. Otherwise, you can choose one of two packages (Standard $179 and Business $249) for them to make the necessary changes for you.

The difference between the two packages is that the Business option includes migrating your site to a super-fast VPS hosting solution. You, of course, have to sign up for the hosting account and they do all the migration of the site for you, it’s a simple and pain-free process.

Brendan really knows his stuff and Wp Speed Fix provides an incredible amount of useable information that you can take action on. He provided the video below to outline what we could do on our site.

Brendan Performs WordPress Performance Audit

You can find out more about WP Speed Fix here.

WP Speed Fix Recommendations

It was fantastic news to hear that Brendan thought we were fairly well optimized in terms of speed.!

He did recommend some changes that we could make ourselves that could have a beneficial effect on the website's speed and as I have a technical background I could make these changes myself.

The big changes for me were looking at International speed and using webp files, a little-known image format that’s often 2-5 times smaller than JPG and PNG. You’re probably aware but it is images that can very quickly slow your page load.

Years ago when bandwidth was super expensive and we were still using modems, image optimization was a highly sought-after skill. But now because of the ease of use you get from a CMS such as WordPress and “Super Fast BroadBand” anyone can update a page quickly and easily, as a result, you will often see images that are far bigger than they should be.

Our blog doesn't use that many images, which will contribute to our faster page load, text loads really quickly! You can try it out yourself, create a page put some images in it, now open Google’s PageSpeed Insights app and put in the link to the page you have just created, do a speed test, note the result and now remove the images and run the test again.

WordPress Image Compression

There’s a great article by Brendan that takes you through WordPress Image Compression in a great article here.

Brendan recommended we use the WordPress Image Compression Plugin – ShortPixel Plugin.

Search for “ShortPixel Image Optimizer” in your WordPress “Add New” Plugin area.

You will need an API key which you get from ShortPixel, it is easy to get by simply signing up for free with them. They have a freemium business model and the first 100 images per month are free, so unless you’re a heavy user the cost is completely free.

Excessive AJAX Calls

The site uses a couple of plugins that use a lot of Ajax calls to the server that does make the site feel slow and unresponsive, especially on mobile devices. The plugins in question are Yuzo-related posts and the Author box plugin.

This brings up another very valid point, whilst many of the WordPress plugins provide increased functionality or better ease of use that can be easily added to your template. Doing this may come at an unseen performance cost to your website. Reducing plugin bloat will decrease the need for additional calls to the database, which theoretically will make your site faster.

Brendan recommends replacing these two plugins for “less Ajax heavy plugins”, which would speed the site up on mobile. A great point, but I think I will replace the Author Box plugin with a hardcoded script myself. As I am currently the only writer on the website I don’t need an additional plugin for this static information, and if this changes I will adapt the code accordingly.

Checking Plugin Speeds

Following on from Brendan’s recommendations to change a couple of plugins I wanted to check out the resources and speed of the other plugins I am using on the site.

From experience, I know that P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler is a plugin that analyses the plugin impact of your WordPress site in terms of load time (Plugin load time) and database queries (MySQL).

Installing and running the P3 plugin showed the following graph:

The P3 Plugin Performance Profiler shows the following raw data. Please note the average load time of 2.2150 seconds for the site and from the list of plugins the loading times (I have highlighted the interesting data in red):

The P3 Performance plugin highlighted some interesting results, such as those plugins that take up resources and impact on load time (marked in red).

So based on the plugin results above I decided to do the following.

These simple changes resulted in a significant performance gain when running the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler for the second time, here is the graph:

The following is the raw data from the second scan, check out the average load time of 1.1592 seconds against the initial Average Load time of 2.2150 sec that’s an improvement of 1 second!!

After just 30 minutes of work we saw an improvement of 1 second in page load speed – not too shabby eh?

I validated this using Pingdom another essential tool in your performance armory. I ran my test from two locations (USA / Washington and UK / London) and saw speeds of 754ms and 1.34 seconds respectively.

It's amazing how much of a performance tune-up is possible in such a short time – this will dramatically improve the website visitor experience.

Pingdom Test Result (USA Location) – After Plugin Optimization

Pingdom Test Result (UK Location) – After Plugin Optimization

My Tips for Improving WordPress Performance

Here are my essential best practices for ensuring your WordPress website loads fast and gives your visitors the experience they’re looking for:

1. Do not scrimp on hosting

It is tempting to use cheap hosting and Brendan discusses this issue himself. But cheap hosting will only hurt your visitors this, in turn, will hit your search engine ranking and give you spend money marketing and promoting your websites saving a couple of $ on hosting does not make any commercial sense.

You can find good hosting if you have a tight budget but you have to look around for the best deal.

2. Check image sizes

If you have an image-heavy site then all those images soon add up and will slow your site load time as well. First off, take your image optimization seriously from the start and convert your images to WebP or use a good image compression plugin.

3. Check plugin performance

Sometimes, your biggest wins can be had by checking for poor plugin performance and removing nonessential plugins or by selecting a leaner plugin that has better performance.

4. Contact WP Speed Fix

Brendan and his team are experts they know how to increase your site speed to under 1 second, sometimes just by making some simple recommendations as they did with us.

Final Words

There are always improvements to be made on a website, in terms of performance. But there is a law of diminishing returns when spending too much time is counterproductive with little to be gained.

I have made some easy WordPress performance tweaks in very little time using the observations by Brendan alongside the plugin performance tool. For the time being this is good enough, but I will be taking a further look at the site in a few months' time to see what else can be done.

Are you using any WordPress performance tricks or plugins that are worth mentioning? Please comment in the section below.