Author: Chris Carr

Websites speed contributes to your rankings and a faster site can convert more visitors into leads.

In the spirit of our Carrot core value of consistent improvement and innovation, we’re excited to share some improvements we have been making to all Carrot member sites!

We continue to take your website’s performance very seriously and invest in optimization.

Here’s a bit of what is new lately…

Optimized Web Fonts, No Compromises

What’s new?

• Fewer Downloads
• Less Javascript
• Fewer Domain Lookups
• Improved Readability

Carrot sites have beautiful custom fonts available to help differentiate your site and look great. Previously served from Google Fonts, we’ve now simplified the font loading process and moved font files to the Carrot CDN (Content Deliver Network) – reducing lookups, and optimizing delivery.

We’ve also audited all Carrot site themes and improved font weight selection to ensure your sites have great readability across more devices and rely on fewer different weights to load

🎉 Result: An average of about 2 points increase in PageSpeed score, but more importantly, a visible speed improvement in your browser for when the site looks loaded.

Bonus: If speed is your only goal… there is now an option to forgo web fonts all together and just use the default browser fonts.

Embed YouTube Videos w/ No Slow Down!

What’s new?

• Better looking YouTube Embeds
• Faster page loads with YouTube Videos
• No performance hits for adding multiple videos

Video is a great interactive way build credibility. Whether it is an informational video on your home page, or a series of testimonial videos. Unfortunately… loading up a YouTube video can take a lot of resources, and performance (especially on mobile devices) is worse the more videos you add to a webpage.

We’ve solved this issue by implementing deferred loading of video embeds!

Now, rather than loading all YouTube embed assets, scripts, etc. for every video on your page immediately, your Carrot site automatically shows a preview placeholder for videos until the visitor clicks the play button.

Once the play button is hit, the YouTube embed is loaded and starts playing!

🎉 Result: We have seen dramatic load time reduction, for a page with single video this can improve PageSpeed scores by 15+ points (out of 100). Adding multiple videos, this can show an improvement of multiple seconds on your page load and as much as 25 PageSpeed score points!

More Responsive Billing Feedback

We also want to take a moment to share some more behind the scenes updates – we’re hard at work improving the visibility of your billing status for your Carrot membership.

You will now get real-time updates in your account about the status of your credit card expiration or missed payments.

We are also rolling out new systems to ensure that billing related communication comes your way more reliable, should there ever be a problem with your card.

You’ll now also be prompted immediately upon sign-in if your billing has lapsed past the 10-14 days when your account will go temporarily inactive. That way you will have the quickest path to keeping your account current and your Carrot sites live!

How to activate these new updates?

You don’t! We’re already on it for you – that’s the beauty of Carrot 😄

Nothing to install, nothing to update 😎 We’re on it!

Let us know what you think!

Check out your own sites, and reach out to Carrot support if you have any questions – we love hearing from you!

The 2017 year was a great year of growth for Carrot! We talked more about that in our year-in-review post, but wanted to take a closer look at some of the technical growth that has come from our development team this year to continue to support the thousands of Carrot websites out there, and be ready for thousands more!

We’ve released and talked about many other features like automatic image compression that give our member’s site a performance edge, but here’s a behind the scenes look at what makes Carrot special and sets us apart from even the most sophisticated hosting service you might get from a “typical” web host.

Not your momma’s shared hosting

A huge benefit from Carrot’s growth has been the ability to create a full-time development team. Jason joined us full time this year and has tackled head-on the virtual nuts and bolts of serving Carrot websites to your customers.

It has always been important to us that Carrot websites be fast and reliable, and that can’t change as we grow – things should get even faster and more reliable!

Asset CDN

App Cluster

Next, we took that same idea and applied it to the initial load of your website – spread that job of serving carrot sites out to a cluster of servers.

This is like moving from that single checkout mom-and-pop store, to multiple checkout lines at the grocery store.

Auto-Scaling

Finally, we implemented a system to control the size of our application cluster, so no matter how many visitors (or bots) are hitting your site at any time, we can keep up with the demand and scale up/down our number of servers accordingly.

Like when they open up more cash registers at checkout!

Top of the scoreboard – Pagespeed

Now that we knew Carrot sites were always highly available to visitors, we let Austin take a look at the way your Carrot sites load in your web browser.

What we found is that while Carrot sites performed better than our competitors in tests like Google’s Pagespeed test, we found more room to improve.

Member Site Optimizations: Allowing customization with optimization

Tests like Google Pagespeed are designed to show you how close you are to ideal conditions – this is very hard to get perfect while allowing for customizations!

These perfect numbers are typically achieved by web developers who can control the whole build process of their website – not a user-editable/customizable website platform.

For example, some of Google’s own websites score in the red:

And often times the things that Google’s Pagespeed test are warning about are when members are using Google’s own products like Adwords. So! There is no sense shooting for a perfect score… but the closer we could get, we knew we would be giving our members and their customers the best experience possible.

Latest Update

This latest release includes:

• Asynchronous font loading (so we can keep our beautiful custom fonts without the penalty)
• A new custom build process to reduce the use of separate JS & CSS files
• Further mobile optimizations to make sure we are serving optimal image sizes in more places on mobile devices
• A custom jQuery implementation to allow for the use of custom jQuery Javascript on your site without any delay in page load speed

The results

For our base sites, this netted an average Mobile Pagespeed scores increase of 26 points, up to 88/100.

And their average Desktop Pagespeed score increase of 15 points, up to 91.5/100.

These scores are fun to look at, but does this translate to more leads? Yeah, probably! We will need to continue to measure over the long term… but it is commonly accepted that a faster website has less risk of visitors on slow connections becoming frustrated and leaving without a conversion, and if Google starts factoring these sores into their ranking algorithm – we’re ready!

What’s Next?

We’re always looking at what’s next and will continue to monitor and improve our systems and service to keep things fast and modern. We’re finishing out our 2018 product roadmap right now and can’t wait to share even more improvements and new features in the future!

InvestorCarrot makes it super simple to set up real estate investor websites! So much so that the number one reaction after new members create their site is: That was easy, but what do I do now?

We want to see every one of our customers be successful with Carrot, so we talked to our most successful customers, cataloged what we have done in the past, and developed a FREE step-by-step guide to getting the most out of Carrot to help you grow your business.

Introducing the Carrot Guide

Videos, tutorials, and resources that guide you through the 3 Carrot “Lead Farming” phases that our most successful members follow.

Are You Already An InvestorCarrot Member? Check out the new guide!
We would love to hear from you with your feedback and success stories!

Combine the guide with our LIVE Weekly Carrot Coaching Calls for Content Pro plans and above… and you’ve got the single best training resource and support team in the industry to help you generate more leads online to help you grow your real estate investing business.

View The Guide ›

Help Site Updates

While we were at it, we took the opportunity to update the entire Carrot Help Site!

You will notice a greatly improved left side navigation that can drill down to specific topics quickly and from any page on the help site. A new home page with instant and intelligent search of all the help site content. And, better tutorial categories and organization to make it easier to browse to the articles and videos you need.

Head over to the help site to check it out! We are committed to continual improvement of the help site, so expect to see new and updated tutorials all the time!

Not An InvestorCarrot Member Yet?

You can get full access to the same Carrot Guide complimentary as a part of your membership when you jump aboard the most effective and fastest growing real estate investing online lead generation platform.

Just take a demo and see our Plans.