Building a Website Speed Optimization Agency With Brendan Tully
We’ve interviewed one of our long time users, Brendan Tully from WP Speed Fix who’s on a mission to fix slow WordPress & WooCommerce websites. Read on to find out how he decided to focus on this niche, and how he’s expanding his business.
Speed optimization as a service for web hosting clients
Before Brendan’s agency started offering speed optimization services, some of their clients reached out with questions about their websites. Maintaining those, his agency soon realized that it would be best to move the websites to their own hosting. This would eliminate any issues creeping up from the hosting provider.
After the move to Brendan’s own hosting, his agency started optimizing his client’s website for speed too. They soon realized that speed optimization could be offered as a standalone service. After a few blog posts on the topic of website speed optimization, it started taking off, which lead to the spin-off brand WP Speed Fix.
Website reliability vs website speed
While most services focus on speed, what is also important is the reliability of a website. As Brendan mentions in our interview, a slower website is better than one that isn’t available at all.
From an online marketing perspective, Brendan considers a website’s reliability to be in the top three most important things to look out for. To ensure that, he recommends getting uptime monitoring from services such as UptimeRobot in place.
Getting inspired from other SPP users
Brendan loves checking out how other users are using Service Provider Pro, especially their checkout flow. He describes SPP as a blank canvas that allows you to use it in many different ways. The limit is in most cases your own imagination.
If you’re interested in seeing a few creative ways of using SPP, we highly recommend to check out our developer focused tutorials here.
Document your Zap setups for future reference
Ever set up a Zap with 14 steps only to have it break at some point? Brendan found himself in that scenario and had trouble finding the exact issue, so he now documents how each Zap works so troubleshooting takes less time later.
The easiest way to do stay on top of them is to add a note right inside the Zap in question.
Adjusting prices for productized services
According to Brendan, the productization of services and its prices are not always set in stone. When they launched their website speed optimization service, it was cheaper than it is today. However, the amount of work that goes into the optimization has changed from a few hours of work to sometimes days of developer time.
On top of that, clients reaching out are not only interested in a fast website, they’re also interested in SEO services, which is something not previously being offered by the spin-off brand WP Speed Fix. As Brendan positions it: “We’ve actually come full circle.”
How consulting became a part of the job
Years ago, most of Brendan’s clients would visit his website and purchase a service. Now he estimates that around 90% of the visitors first inquire about the services before buying them.
To some this might seam like the opposite of a productized service, others will realize that it’s simply the natural evolution of this particular niche. As previously mentioned, website speed optimization has changed over the past few years.
If you want to find out more about Brendan’s WordPress speed optimization business, head over to wpspeedfix.com. If you want to keep an eye on his developer focused activity, follow @brendantully00 on Twitter.