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Welcome, one and all, to another Wednesday: the day that marks the halfway point — almost — to the weekend.

Here in our Cambridge HQ, the days are slowly starting to get shorter. So as we hold onto to these summer days and nights — and know that, perhaps, you are, too — we’ll try to unriddle this week’s tech news in double-time.

It’s our Wednesday tech news roundup, and we’re breaking it down.

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need

1. A Busy Week for Facebook

Facebook’s name has been in the news quite a bit over the past few days, from controversial interviews from its CEO, to new controversies around its content moderation practices.

Facebook in China

Facebook — particularly its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg — has made no secret of its wishes to have a presence in China. And while the site and most of its related apps are still prohibited there, the company created a Chinese subsidiary, Facebook Technology (Hang Zhou) Ltd., earlier in July.

A spokesperson for Facebook said the company’s presence in China will be an “innovation hub” in Zhejiang, where “efforts would be focused on training and workshops that help these developers and entrepreneurs to innovate and grow.” Gerrit De Vynck of Bloomberg has more. Read full story >>

Zuckerberg Speaks — Then Backpedals

Last week, Zuckerberg sat down with Kara Swisher for an interview on Recode Decode. And while 90 minutes wasn’t enough to cover everything, Swisher did ask about topics ranging from the spread of disinformation on the platform to content moderation policies (e.g., why some Pages still haven’t been removed).

After the interview was made public, Zuckerberg went on to say that some of his comments about those who “get things wrong, even multiple times” — such as the “set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened” — were misinterpreted as being made in defense of that very set of people. Read full interview >>

Speaking of Content Moderation

During last week’s Congressional testimony on the “filtering practices” of social media networks, Facebook VP of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert seemed to struggle to define what the platform constitutes as “fake news” — and address questions on how content is moderated on the site. 

While Bickert did allude to the company’s fact-checking practices and the “threshold” used to determine how Pages and Groups are penalized, answers to certain questions on why certain “repeat offender” publishers were still allowed to post on the network led mostly to more confusion.

That was followed by a Channel 4 undercover report that content moderators are sometimes instructed to take a “hands-off” approach to “flagged and reported content like graphic violence, hate speech, and racist and other bigoted rhetoric from far-right groups.”

Since then, however, Motherboard obtained leaked internal documents on when to ban Pages or Groups for content in violation of Facebook’s community standards, like hate speech. The problem: There is no unified view of what constitutes hate speech. Read full story >>

What Facebook Says It’s Working On

Meanwhile, Facebook says it will continue its efforts to stop the spread of misinformation on its site and its many portfolio apps — including WhatsApp, where the company says it will limit the ability to forward messages in hopes of spreading such false news as that which prompted serious violence in India and Myanmar. Read full story >>

Similar policies and practices are coming to the core Facebook platform itself, where The New York Times reports the company will start removing what product manager Tessa Lyons says is a specific “type of misinformation that is shared in certain countries that can incite underlying tensions and lead to physical harm offline.” Read full story >>

2. Fines for Google

The European Union will fine Google €4.3B — roughly $5 billion — in an antitrust case that the European Commission has based on alleged abuses by the company for “Android market dominance.” These include the Google’s forced inclusion (e.g., for phone manufacturers) of its own search engine and apps like the Chrome browser into the Android operating system — which Google has 90 days to stop doing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai later released a statement defending the company’s practices around its operating system, saying that it “has expanded the choice of phones available around the world.” Read full story >>

3. Scooters Are Absent From the Streets of San Francisco

Following the passage of San Francisco city laws (effective June 4) that bars scooter companies from operating without a permit, applications from 12 companies seeking to provide these services (including Uber, Lime, and Bird) are still under review by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).

While the goal was originally to approve five companies by July, Megan Rose Dickey of TechCrunch says that this prolonged review process indicates that scooter operations may not resume before August. Read full story >>

4. Lyft Steps Up Its Background Checks

Last week, we reported that Uber is reinforcing its efforts around safety, and Axios stated that it will conduct ongoing background checks on drivers, rather than performing them on a one-time occasion.

Now, it appears that one the company’s chief rivals, Lyft, is following in its footsteps, and exploring how to strengthen its background checks after revelations that a driver with a serial violent criminal record managed to bypass the system. The news comes among revelations of a St. Louis Uber driver publishing videos of passengers online — who had no idea they were being filmed. Carolyn Said of the San Francisco Chronicle has more. Read full story >>

5. Presenting: the Data Transfer Project

Late last week, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter announced a joint effort on the Data Transfer Project: a new “standards initiative” that’s meant to make it easier for users to move their personal data between platforms. 

The ability for users to seamlessly take their personal data from, for instance, Facebook — which calls the project a “commit[ment] to building a common way for people to transfer data into and out of online services”– has been scrutinized by many, including those who point out that the company owns most of the companies its own CEO identifies as competitors. Russell Brandom of The Verge has more. Read full story >>

6. 47% of Social Media Users Report Seeing More Spam in Their Feeds

Even as networks fight the spread of spam and misinformation, our research shows that nearly half of social media users report seeing more of it. The findings raise the question: While social networks have made no secret of their efforts to fight the spread of spam on their sites, how have these efforts been paying off — and are users noticing them? Read full story >>

That’s all for today. Until next week, feel free to weigh in on Twitter to ask us your tech news questions, or to let us know what kind of events and topics you’d like us to cover.

You walk into a store in search of new sunglasses.

As you enter, your smartphone pings, and you open it to find a map, showing you where the sunglasses you looked at online are on display in-store. You walk over to them, try them on, and put them in your bag. A robot rolls up to you and intercepts, asking if you need help finding anything else. The robot takes you to a jeans display, as you’ve requested, and finds your size.

When you’re done shopping, you leave the store immediately. Your items are scanned by sensors as you leave and added up — the final price is then deduced from your mobile payment app. Since you’ve shopped there recently, you receive an automatic discount.

The shelf where you picked up the jeans, meanwhile, takes note of the purchase and sends that information to a back-end inventory system, so the retail store’s manager knows to re-stock.

Sound a little too much like Smart House? Maybe, but this experience is closer than you think, thanks to the rise of IoT, or Internet of Things, which creates a network between internet-connected physical devices. In the next few years, physical devices capable of being connected to the internet will continue to rise — in fact, by 2020, it’s estimated there will be over 30 billion IoT devices.

The scenario above is explained from a customer’s perspective, but it’s important to take note of just how deeply IoT can affect retail store owners and employees. McKinsey estimates that the potential economic impact of IoT in retail environments will range from $410 billion to $1.2 trillion per year by 2025.

IoT can reduce inventory error, optimize your supply chain management, and decrease labor costs. Ultimately, IoT can help your traditional brick-and-mortar shop compete with today’s online-first shopping world, by exponentially improving customer experience and decreasing unnecessary expenses.

There are numerous IoT-related benefits to the retail industry, but here, we’ll hone in on the seven most important ways we think IoT will change retail in 2018.

IoT Applications in Retail

1. Automated Checkout

You’ve probably seen how long lines deter your customers from purchasing products. And, as a manager, it can feel unprofitable to pay multiple employees to work during busier shopping times. With IoT, you can set up a system to read tags on each item when a customer leaves the store. A checkout system would then tally the items up and automatically deduce that cost from the customers’ mobile payment app.

Creating an automated checkout system using IoT devices would make your customers happier and more willing to enter your store, especially if they are on a time crunch. It can also save you a ton of money — McKinsey estimates automated checkout can reduce cashier staff requirements by up to 75%, resulting in savings of $150 billion to $380 billion a year in 2025.

Image courtesy of The Guardian

2. Personalized Discounts

If you have frequently returning customers, I bet you’d like to reward them for their loyalty. With IoT, you can set up sensors around the store that send loyalty discounts to certain customers when they stand near products with their smartphones, if those customers sign up for a loyalty program in advance.

Additionally, you can use IoT to track items a customer has been looking at online, and send that customer a personalized discount when she’s in-store. Imagine if your customer perused your purses online, and then, in-store, received a discount on her favorite purse? Rather than offering general discounts on a wide variety of products, you can tailor each discount using IoT to maximize your conversion rates.

Ultimately, finding ways to incorporate IoT devices into your day-to-day business requires creativity and foresight, but the benefits of IoT in retail — as outlined above — can help your business discover innovative solutions to attract more valuable and loyal long-term customers.

3. Beacons

Beacons, first introduced by Apple in 2013, are small Bluetooth devices that send alerts to smartphones based on location proximity. In the retail industry, this means customers can receive discounts, special events, or other reminders when they’re near a shop and have previously downloaded the store’s app.

Macy’s has been using beacons nationwide since 2014. After opening the Macy’s app in-store, shoppers are alerted to promotions and discounts. The app also recognizes which area of the store you’re in — so if you’ve entered the makeup section, the app will remind you of the makeup brands you liked online.

Along with helping customers in-store, beacons also send alerts to passersby. This can be used to effectively advertise promotions or in-store events. Swirl Networks Inc. found over 70% of shoppers say beacon-triggered content and offers increased their likelihood to purchase in-store.

Besides Macy’s, stores including Urban Outfitters, CVS, Lord & Taylor, and Timberland already use beacon technology.

Image courtesy of Beaconstac

4. Smart Shelves

A lot of your employees’ time and energy is focused on keeping track of items to ensure they’re never out-of-stock, and checking that items aren’t misplaced on various shelves. You can use Smart Shelves to automate both of those tasks, while simultaneously detecting potential theft.

Smart shelves are fitted with weight sensors and use RFID tags and readers to scan the products on both display and stock shelves. Smart Shelves inform you when items are running low or when items are incorrectly placed on a shelf, which makes your inventory process cost-effective and more precise. Additionally, each RFID tag is connected to a reader, so Smart Shelves are able to detect in-store theft — saving you money on security personnel and cameras.

Image courtesy of
 Crowdstartr

5. In-store Layout Optimization

You might be surprised to find your retail space isn’t optimized for your customers’ behavior — maybe your least popular products are in the front, or your customers’ would prefer more space around the couches in the back. By employing aisle-analytics software with infrared sensors, you can use IoT technology to improve your retail layout.

Perhaps you find most of your customers spend the majority of their time checking out your TV’s — but those TV’s are placed in the back of the store, behind rarely-touched DVD players. This information arms you with important customer behavior knowledge, so you can place items they care about most, like TV’s, in the front of your store.

6. Robot Employees

While it’s a little frightening to trust a robot to be your customer service representative, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to cut down on menial tasks burdening your workforce.

OSHbot, Lowe’s newest robot employee, helps customers find specific products and provides information on promotions and inventory — plus, he’s (she’s?) bilingual and can answer both English and Spanish questions.

Other retail stores, such as Target, use robots to roam the store and take note of misplaced items, or products running out of stock. By taking over simple inventory tasks, Target’s robot frees up Target’s human employees to focus on providing top-notch customer assistance.

Image courtesy of
STLToday.com

7. Optimizing Supply Chain Management

While retail stores can already track products without the help of IoT, that tracking information is pretty limited. With RFID and GPS sensors, you can use IoT to obtain more precise data, like the temperature at which an item is being stored, or how long it spent in transit. You can use that data to improve the quality of transportation moving forward — and, better yet, you can also act in real-time if a product is being kept at temperatures too low or too high, avoiding a substantial loss.

According to a TATA Consultancy Survey and Business Insider, manufacturers utilizing IoT solutions in 2014 saw an average 28.5% increase in revenues between 2013 and 2014. If you’ve got a long line of suppliers, truck drivers, and vendors handling your products, it’s imperative for you to accurately keep track of how your product is handled and where it’s located in the supply chain. This information helps you ensure your process is running as efficiently as possible, and can helpyou get your product into your customers’ hands faster.

You need people who you can email, and you need them quickly. Oh, and if you could get them pretty cheap, that’d be great, too.

That’s the mindset many marketers find themselves in when they’re on the phone with a list-purchasing company: We need new people to email to support our sales team. Acting on that moment of desperation, however, can cause them more harm than good.

Yes, thousands of contacts are a credit card swipe away, but your email marketing program — a critical part of a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy — can seriously suffer. Curious why buying email lists is a legitimate email marketer’s kiss of death? Read on.

Plus, we’ll give you a list of squeaky-clean and effective ways to build your email marketing list without simply buying one.

Methods of Acquiring an Email List

Before we get into the pitfalls of buying email addresses, let’s review three ways marketers are currently able to acquire their email lists:

1. Buy an email list.

You work with a list provider to find and purchase a list of names and email addresses based on demographic and/or psychographic information. For example, you might purchase a list of 50,000 names and email addresses of people who live in Minnesota and don’t have children. There are several sustainable ways to use email marketing to grow your business. This isn’t one of them.

2. Rent an email list.

Also working with a list provider, you identify a segment of people to email — but you never actually own the list. As such, you can’t see the email addresses of the people you’re emailing, so you must work with the provider to send out your email.

3. Own an opt-in email list.

Someone voluntarily gives you their email address either online or in person so you can send them emails. They may pick certain types of email content they wish to receive, like specifically requesting email alerts when new blog posts are published. Opt-in email addresses are the result of earning the interest and trust of your contacts because they think you have something valuable to say.

When it comes to rented or purchased lists, you may come across vendors or marketers who say, “This email list is totally opt-in!” This means the people on the list opted in to an email communication from someone at some point in time — the list provider, for example.

What “opt-in” lists don’t mean, however, is that email recipients opted in to receive email communications from your business. This is a critical distinction, and the next section of this post will go into more detail on why this type of “opt-in email list” (should be read with air quotes) is not a good idea for your email marketing program.

1. You’ll violate the rules of consent under GDPR.

Most email marketers around the world are legally required to allow recipients to opt out of emails they no longer want to receive. Contacts must be able to do this directly in the email message. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a European data privacy act that went into effect in May 2018, doubles down on the opt-in side of this relationship. And purchased email lists are simply not compliant.

The GDPR has revamped numerous aspects of a digital marketer’s use of customer data throughout Europe — on a website, in social media, and via email. You don’t even have to work in Europe to fall under the act’s jurisdiction; if your recipients live in Europe, they’re protected by the GDPR.

With the GDPR now governing all email correspondence across Europe, adding an opt-out option to your email template no longer cuts it. Under this act, you must have explicit consent from your contacts to send them emails. Explicit, in this case, means the checkbox a person must click to opt in to an email subscription isn’t pre-checked when they see it on your website. And when you buy your email lists, the people on it haven’t been given this option — making you non-compliant with GDPR before you send your first email.

Want some non-legal reasons to avoid the purchased email list? We’ve got those as well, below.

2. Reputable email marketing services don’t let you send emails to lists you’ve bought.

If you’re using email marketing software now or plan to in the future, you’ll find that reputable companies will insist that you use opt-in email lists. You might be saying, “I’ll just use a non-reputable email marketing vendor.”

Alas, ESPs on shared IP addresses that don’t require customers to use opt-in email lists typically suffer poor deliverability. Why? One customer’s ill-gotten email address list can poison the deliverability of the other customers on that shared IP address. You’re going to want to hitch your wagon to the light side of the email marketing force if you want your emails to actually get into inboxes.

3. Good email address lists aren’t for sale.

Unless your company is in the middle of a merger or acquisition, you’re not going to come across a high-quality email list you can purchase. If it’s for sale, it means the email addresses on it have already been deemed non-responsive or unqualified for marketing outreach.

While bought email addresses might’ve at once time had value, they’ve likely been spammed to the ends of the earth — otherwise they’d still be in the desiring hands of the company selling them. Think about it, would you sell or share the email addresses of those who have voluntarily opted in to receive email from you?

4. People on a purchased or rented list don’t actually know you.

I referenced this earlier, but it’s worth going into some more detail on this subject. Rented and purchased lists are sometimes scraped from other websites, which, I think we can all agree, is a dirty way to acquire email marketing contacts.

But let’s say the email addresses you’re looking to purchase were not taken from another site but rather earned legitimately. Email list purchase and rental companies might tout that those lists are “opt-in.” Sounds great, right?

Not really. Email addresses that belong to an “opt in” list have opted to receive emails from, say, the list-purchasing company — not your company. Even if the opt-in process includes language like, “Opt in to receive information from us, or offers from other companies we think you might enjoy,” the fact is the recipient doesn’t recall having a prior relationship with you, specifically. This makes it highly likely for the recipients to mark you as “spam” when you arrive in their inboxes. Hey, if they don’t recognize you or remember opting in to communications from you … can you blame them?

This takes us to our next point.

5. You’ll harm your email deliverability and IP reputation.

Did you know there are organizations dedicated to combating email spam? Thank goodness, right? They set up a little thing called a honeypot, which is a planted email address that, when harvested and emailed, identifies the sender as a spammer. Similarly, things called spam traps can be created to identify spammy activity; they’re set up when an email address yields a hard bounce because it’s old or no longer valid, but still receives consistent traffic. Fishy, eh?

As a result, the email address turns into a spam trap that stops returning the hard bounce notice, and instead accepts the message and reports the sender as a spammer.

If you purchase a list, you have no way of confirming how often those email addresses have been emailed, whether the email addresses on that list have been scrubbed for hard bounces to prevent identifying you as a spammer, or from where those email addresses originated.

Are you really willing to risk not only your email deliverability, but also the reputation of your IP address and your company? Even if you find the light after purchasing or renting email lists and decide to only email those who have opted in with your company, it’ll take you months (or maybe years) to get your Sender Score up and rebuild the reputation of your IP.

6. You can come across as annoying.

How do you like it when you get an email in your inbox from a company you’ve never heard of? I bet that’s not the kind of company you want to buy from or work for.

If someone didn’t ask to hear from you yet, it doesn’t mean they won’t want to hear from you later. It’s your job to prove to them — through helpful content and valuable offers — that they should stay up to date with your company via email. If you force your email content on anyone too early, even if you know in your bones they’re a great fit for your products or services, you risk preemptively losing their trust and their future business.

7. Your email service provider can penalize you.

Buying email lists doesn’t just damage your deliverability and brand reputation — it can also put your email account at risk. Email clients like Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook don’t want to be associated with accounts that recipients repeatedly flag as spam. Email service providers like AWeber go as far as immediately close your account if it suspects you’re sending unwanted content.

How to Grow an Opt-In Email List for Free

Now that you’ve learned about a few ways to acquire email lists, let’s explore how you can acquire them through the third method stated earlier in this article — the opt-in method.

Generating your own list of email contacts who have opted in to receive content from you isn’t just comply with legal regulation and protect your brand reputation. It presents you with opportunities to grow this list through genuine relationships with new customers. We’ve already written a post of clever ways to go about doing this, which you can check out here. But below are the basic best practices that have a very big bang for their buck when it comes to consistently growing an email list.

1. Create gated assets so there’s a reason for people to give you their email address.

Webinars, ebooks, templates, etc. — these are all good long-form, premium content assets that people may find valuable enough to give over their email address. The more gated assets you have to put behind landing pages, the better — a wider variety of content will make it easier for you to attract a wider swath of people.

2. Create useful tools.

If ebooks aren’t your jam, create tools instead. I don’t recommend a one-or-the-other approach, necessarily, but if you have more development talent than writing talent, this may be a more attractive option for you. These tools can be valuable enough to some of your website visitors that they’ll trade you their email address for a free demo of the product you built. Then, for your first email, ask them what they thought of the tool. It’s the perfect icebreaker.

For example, we created Marketing Grader (formerly Website Grader, HubSpot’s first tool) — which is free to use, but prompts you to input an email address. We also took a similar approach to a more recent tool, the Blog Topic Generator.

3. Promote those gated assets on your marketing channels.

Now that you have some gated assets that can capture email addresses, spend a considerable amount of time making sure the world knows about them. You have plenty of channels at your disposal — social media, PPC, and email are common ones to turn to. But none will provide lasting returns quite like your blog. Consider this scenario:

You promote your new gated assets by blogging about subject matters related to the content assets you’ve created, and then put CTAs that lead to the asset’s landing page on every one of those blog posts.

Now let’s say, hypothetically, your blog posts get about 100 views per month, and your visitor-to-lead conversion rate on the blog is about 2%. That means you’d get two leads from a single blog post each month.

Then, let’s say you write 30 blog posts a month. That means you’d get 60 leads in a month — 2 from each blog post. Now keep doing that for a year. The work you did to blog that first month will continue to drive leads throughout the year. That means you’re actually getting 4,680 opt-in contacts a month by the end of a 12-month period because of the compounding effects of blogging — not just 720 opt-in contacts (60 leads*12 months).

4. Run creative email marketing campaigns.

Most people don’t think of email as a lead- or contact-generating channel. But because people forward helpful emails to colleagues or friends, it can actually expand your database if you simply make forwarding or sharing email content easy for recipients. Include calls-to-action in your emails that make sharing an obvious choice for recipients, particularly with your most useful assets.

If you already have a pretty large database, you also likely have some contacts that have gone quite stale. If so, I recommend running a re-engagement campaign that can help you both scrub your list and prevent the kind of spam and IP issues I addressed earlier, as well as reawaken old contacts that might have forgotten about you, but would actually be great fits for sales.

5. Include sharing buttons in your emails.

Consider adding share buttons to your email so your email recipients can forward the emails they liked most to friends and colleagues they think would like it too.

Have a few different buttons on your email template: separate social media buttons that produce pre-written social posts linking to a webpage version of your email, and an “Email to a Friend” button that transfers the email into a compose window so your contacts can instantly forward the message. Just make sure your email has an opt-in button so each new viewer can subscribe to more emails from you if they like what they see.

Need help structuring an email send like that? Check out this blog post.

The adage “patience is a virtue” doesn’t apply online. 

Even a one-second delay can drastically reduce pageviews, customer satisfaction and drop conversions. 

The speed of your site even affects your organic search rankings. Since 2010, Google has been accounting for a site speed in its algorithm. 

So what’s the biggest factor contributing to your page speed?

Size.

It takes browsers time to download the code that makes up your page. It has to download your HTML, your stylesheets, your scripts and your images. It can take a while to download all that data.

As web users expect more engaging site designs, the size of a site’s resource files will continue to grow. Each new feature requires a new script or stylesheet that weighs down your site just a little more.

How do you make sure your site is up to speed?

There are some great resources for analyzing your site’s speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Website Grader, and GTMetrix are the most popular. Both services will analyze your site and tell you where you’re falling behind.

A little warning: the results can be a bit daunting sometimes, but most fixes are relatively quick and easy. You might not fix everything the speed service recommends, but you should fix enough to make the site experience better for your visitors. 

Let’s learn how to speed things up!

While a few modern content management systems like HubSpot implement speed-enhancing options out-of-the-box, the more common systems like WordPress and Joomla require a little manual labor to get up to speed. 

Now let’s look at some essential speed solutions that every webmaster should consider. 

1. Optimize Images

Images are one of the most common bandwidth hogs on the web.

The first way to optimize your images is to scale them appropriately.

Many webmasters use huge images and then scale them down with CSS. What they don’t realize is that your browser still loads them at the full image size. 

For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary. 

Scale your images before you upload them to your site, so you don’t ask for more from your visitors than you should. 

Take a look at the size difference when we scaled down one of our images:

The second way to optimize your images is to compress them. 

There are several free online tools for image compression, such as tinypng.com, that can reduce your image sizes dramatically without losing quality. You can see size reductions anywhere from 25% to 80%!

2. Browser Caching

Why make visitors download the same things every time they load a page?

Enabling browser caching lets you temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your page.

How long you store the data depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings.

To set up browser caching on your server, check out the resources below or contact your hosting company:

• Apache Caching
• IIS Caching
• Nginx Caching

3. Compression

Enabling compression is like putting your website into a zip file.

Compression can dramatically reduce your page’s size and thereby increase its speed. According to varvy, compression can knock off 50 – 70% from your HTML and CSS files! That’s a ton of data your visitor won’t have to download.

Compression is a server setting, so how you implement it will depend on your webserver and its settings. Below are some resources for the most common webservers. If you don’t see yours, contact your hosting company to see what they can do.

• Apache
• IIS
• Nginx

4. Optimize Your CSS

Your CSS loads before people see your site. The longer it takes for them to download your CSS, the longer they wait.

Optimized CSS means your files will download faster, giving your visitors quicker access to your pages.

Start by asking yourself, “do I use all of my CSS?” If not, get rid of the superfluous code in your files. Every little bit of wasted data can add up until your website’s snail-pace speed scares away your visitors.

Next, you should minimize your CSS files. Extra spaces in your stylesheets increase file size. CSS minimization removes those extra spaces from your code to ensure your file is at its smallest size.

So how do you minimize your CSS files?

First, see if your CMS already minimizes your CSS or if there’s an option for it. HubSpot, for example, already minimizes your CSS by default whereas WordPress or Joomla do not.

If your CMS does not have a minimize CSS option, you can use a free online service like CSS Minifier to minimize your files. Simply paste in your CSS and hit “Compress” to see your newly minimized stylesheet.

Minimizing your resource files is a great way to knock some size off your files. Trust me—those little spaces add up quickly.

5. Keep Your Scripts Below the Fold

Javascript files can load after the rest of your page, but if you put them all before your content—as many sites do—they will load before your content does.

This means your visitors must wait until your Javascript files load before they see your page, and we know how much they like waiting.

The simplest solution is to place your external Javascript files at the bottom of your page, just before the close of your body tag. Now more of your site can load before your scripts.

Another method that allows even more control is to use the defer or async attributes when placing external .js files on your site.

Both defer and async are very useful, but make sure you understand the difference before you use them:

• Async tags load the scripts while the rest of the page loads, but this means scripts can be loaded out of order. Basically, lighter files load first. This might be fine for some scripts, but can be disastrous for others.
• The defer attribute loads your scripts after your content has finished loading. It also runs the scripts in order. Just make sure your scripts run so late without breaking your site.

All you need to do is add a simple word in your <script> tags.

For example, you can take your original script

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js”></script>

And add the little code to ensure it loads when you want it.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js” defer></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js” async></script>

The importance of your scripts will determine if they get an attribute and which attribute you tack on. More essential scripts should probably have the async attribute so they can load ASAP without holding up the rest of your content. The nonessential ones, however, should wait until the end to ensure visitors see your page faster.

But always make sure you test each script to ensure the attribute doesn’t break your site!

Conclusion

As online users demand a richer online experience, the size of our pages will continue to grow. There will be flashier Javascript, more CSS tricks and more third-party analytics to weigh down our sites.

As marketers, we can’t let this bog us down.

A little attention will go a long way—remember, just a one-second delay is all it takes to lose a lead.