When I asked Mark Westguard how he got into the web, he didn’t start with a business plan or a bootstrapped success story. He started with a memory, coding as a kid, discovering the web at university, and getting excited about the early days of Netscape.
In our interview, we traced his path from launching one of the UK’s fastest-growing web agencies in the ’90s (yes, the ‘what’s a website?’ era) to his unexpected move into product development. And that path included:
Creating an RSVP tool for his own wedding that turned into a licensing deal with Condé Nast
Running an agency in New Orleans where a team member introduced him to WordPress and WordCamps
Listening to his team’s pain points and deciding to solve one: forms
“Forms felt like putting an alien on the page,” they said.
So he built WS Form, a fully responsive, developer-focused plugin that handles just about anything you can imagine on the frontend, including some pretty creative uses of AI.
Why He Didn’t Replace Support with AI
Mark is thoughtful when it comes to customer support. He sees AI as a tool to assist support, not automate it completely. Repeat questions like “Why won’t my form send email?” could be triaged with AI suggestions, but the final response is still human.
“Support has been one of the strongest points of the product. I want to keep it that way.”
And that’s a philosophy I think more product builders should pay attention to. It’s easy to chase efficiency. It’s harder to stay human at scale.
AI Inside the Product
WS Form also includes AI in smarter ways. You can:
Ask it to build a form (“Make me a mortgage calculator”)
Use OpenAI endpoints to generate images, transcribe audio, or create content
Build a form that outputs a blog post and featured image, then publishes it in WordPress
This isn’t just novelty. It’s practical automation that stays in the user’s control.
Mark’s Advice for Builders
At the end of the interview, I asked what surprised him most about moving from agency work to product work. Without hesitation: support.
The shift isn’t just about building a plugin. It’s about maintaining relationships, documentation, and real trust with users over time.
That’s what makes WS Form work. And that’s what makes Mark someone worth listening to, especially if you’re trying to build a product of your own.
💬 Question for plugin devs and indie builders:
How are you thinking about AI in your product or support flow?
Let’s keep this one going—drop your thoughts on LinkedIn.
I recently had the chance to sit down with Weston Ruter, a longtime WordPress core contributor and someone whose story reminded me why I love talking to people about the open web.
Weston’s first computer wasn’t some fancy setup, it was a Radio Shack Tandy with no drives and a cassette player. From there, he graduated to a Gateway PC (complete with the cow print box) and slowly built his skills through trial and error, Netscape Composer, and eventually diving into raw HTML when the WYSIWYG editors crashed.
Before WordPress came into his life, Weston built his own CMS. All static HTML written to the file system. Basically a static site generator before anyone was calling it that.
WordPress + Open Web = Perfect Match
His first taste of WordPress came via a one-click install from his hosting provider in the early 2000s. But what really drew him in was the project’s commitment to open standards. Weston had been geeking out on W3C specs for fun (yes, really), and WordPress felt like home.
Fast forward a few years and Weston was working at an agency where he helped bring WordPress into client work. Eventually, he started contributing directly to WordPress core, starting with Customizer enhancements that brought widgets into a visual drag-and-drop experience.
He hasn’t looked back since.
Today’s Work: Making WordPress Admin Faster
In our conversation, Weston shared what he’s working on now: improving the WordPress admin experience by making use of the browser’s back/forward cache (BFCache). The goal? Instant page loads when navigating between admin screens, especially for logged-in users. It’s the kind of deep performance work that doesn’t always get the spotlight, but makes a real difference in day-to-day use.
He’s also helping lead efforts around client-side performance metrics, speculative loading, and other clever ways to speed things up without breaking things. It’s technical stuff, but it all comes back to something simple: making the web feel fast and easy.
Why I Loved This Interview
Weston’s story is a reminder that big things often start with small curiosities. A broken web editor. A random blog post. A Perl script sold for $25. That spark of “I wonder if I can build this…” is what pulls so many of us into tech in the first place.
If you’ve ever rolled your own tool, obsessed over site speed, or just wondered how people end up contributing to major open-source projects like WordPress, this one’s for you.
Thanks again to Weston for the conversation—and to everyone out there keeping the open web alive.
Roger Williams (00:00) At what point did content management systems become the thing and did you ever roll your own?
Weston Ruter (00:05) Oh, yes, of course. uh, I called it, uh, well, I was interested in, in HTML. There’s these front link relationships where you can have like parent or in like next and previous. And, and so I made a CMS that was, like family, something
Roger Williams (00:07) you
Weston Ruter (00:28) related to the family and you would create children, pages, and then they would have siblings and it was all HTML written to the file system. I guess static site generator before it was cool.
Roger Williams (00:42) Yeah,
nice. At what point did open source software and specifically WordPress come into your world view?
Weston Ruter (00:49) I had a blog that I made about linguistics back in, I think, 2003, maybe? was through my host. There was a one-click install and it was WordPress. So I think it was, I think it was WordPress at one point, something like super old. And I didn’t do a lot of hacking on it back then, but.
Roger Williams (00:59) Okay.
Weston Ruter (01:15) That was my first exposure to WordPress. then I’ve always really loved just open standards and open web technologies.
Roger Williams (01:27) Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Weston. Hey Weston, how you doing?
Weston Ruter (01:32) Doing well.
Roger Williams (01:32) Awesome. Hey, you know, we connected because you’re a contributor for the WordPress project and, um, you know, Kinsta is helping out support your work with that. And I wanted to just chat with you and, know, obviously we want to talk about the WordPress project. That’s, that’s the most exciting stuff, but I’m really curious to like, get to know you a little bit better and learn kind of your origin story. How did you like get into computers and WordPress and stuff? Take us back a bit. Like, do you remember like your first computer memory?
Weston Ruter (02:01) Yeah, we got a Gateway PC back in I don’t know 1995 or something It came in the cow box the spots and It was just before Windows 95 came out. So we got Windows 3.1 1 1 for work groups, right? and So I that was my first computer
Roger Williams (02:10) Yeah.
Yep. ⁓
Yes, yeah.
Weston Ruter (02:29) Actually, we had a Radio Shack Tandy before that.
Roger Williams (02:32) Yeah.
One drive or two drives?
Weston Ruter (02:35) It had no drives, it had the cassette player that you played the programs into it via. So I remember, I think it was called Star Quest and it was a game that was 2D black and white game with the monitor, you know, molded into the keyboard. That was my video games I had as a kid. And then we had a Pong game too that my mom had.
Roger Williams (02:38) ⁓ okay.
yeah.
Sure, sure.
Weston Ruter (03:00) We were,
my mom, my parents were not all on board with the video games for our household.
Roger Williams (03:06) in a similar boat so with the gateway 95 I mean the internet was right there so it like a ol prodigy how were you getting online right
Weston Ruter (03:14) we had Juno, our email service to dial up to get the emails. And eventually we got GTE. They had, they had a like five megabyte, free website hosting service. So that was my first, I guess, attempt at getting a webpage made. but I had to.
Roger Williams (03:16) Okay. Yep. Yeah.
⁓
Okay.
Weston Ruter (03:36) learn or add to use HTML at that time to be able to do that. And I didn’t know HTML. So I kind of, that was kind of a dead end. then, then I was using Netscape at the time, of course, and Netscape 4 had a composer, application that came with it, that you could do whizzy wig, webpage building. And so that’s how I started learning how to.
Roger Williams (03:46) Yep.
Okay.
Weston Ruter (03:57) how to make web pages and then, but it was kind of buggy. So, and because I was using these heavily table-based layouts, as you did back then, was the nesting was so complicated that it would crash Netscape Composer. So that was what forced me then to dive into the HTML source so that I could make the change I needed to manually because,
Roger Williams (04:05) Yes.
Weston Ruter (04:18) it would crash otherwise if I tried to do it with the user interface.
Roger Williams (04:21) Yeah, it was always fascinating how much those WYSIWYG’s just fell apart as soon as you started just trying to make some slight changes to them. Alright, so then fast forwarding a bit, did you go to university for computer science or anything like that?
Weston Ruter (04:33) Yep. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and also minors in linguistics and Spanish. I, I was wanting to study like computational linguistics and I was interested in that intersection, but I did, I found some crossovers, but I still appreciated that experience. I, I use, I still speak Spanish and love learning languages, learning.
Roger Williams (04:35) Okay.
Weston Ruter (04:55) American Sign Language right now as well.
Roger Williams (04:58) Okay, all right, all right.
When you’re in your comp sci, I took one semester of comp sci and the thing that kind of drove me a little crazy in there was nothing was about the web or the internet. was all just, we were doing like 3D graphics and stuff like that. Was that kind of your similar experience or did your program kind of delve into the internet a little bit?
Weston Ruter (05:20) No, it was mostly C++ and just like operating systems and more lower level things. So most of what I’ve learned or what I learned from the web on the web about the web was from getting like my first computer book was Pearl for Dummies. that from getting that from Barnes and Noble and reading it cover to cover and
Roger Williams (05:35) Okay.
Weston Ruter (05:39) I just ate it up and then yeah from there on it was a lot of the dummies books.
Roger Williams (05:44) Sure,
sure. So the old CGI bin directory and building stuff. At what point did content management systems become the thing and did you ever roll your own?
Weston Ruter (05:54) Oh, yes, of course. uh, I called it, uh, well, I was interested in, in HTML. There’s these front link relationships where you can have like parent or in like next and previous. And, and so I made a CMS that was, I think it was, can’t even remember the name. think it was like family, um, something
Roger Williams (05:56) you
Weston Ruter (06:20) related to the family and you would create children, pages, and then they would have siblings and it was all HTML written to the file system. I guess static site generator before it was cool.
Roger Williams (06:34) Yeah,
nice, nice. At what point did open source software and specifically WordPress come into your world view?
Weston Ruter (06:42) I had a blog that I made about linguistics back in, I think, 2003, maybe? was through my host. There was a one-click install and it was WordPress. So I think it was, I think it was WordPress at one point, something like super old. And I didn’t do a lot of hacking on it back then, but.
Roger Williams (06:52) Okay.
Weston Ruter (07:08) That was my first exposure to WordPress. then I’ve always really loved just open standards and open web technologies.
all the W3C specs, I would like read them and like just study all the different aspects of them. And because WordPress was like had web standards as a, as a priority and like, you know, those XHTML valid, buttons and all that, the emphasis on adherence to
Roger Williams (07:37) Sure.
Weston Ruter (07:42) The web standards I think was attractive to me about WordPress, but then I…
Yeah, I started to use it in other projects and I like to do things online and open and not close. So actually there was one closed source project I had back in 1999 called Router Search, which was a Perl program for doing like a site search. I modeled it after Yahoo at the time.
Roger Williams (08:15) Okay.
Weston Ruter (08:15) with all
the search operators before Google was, I guess, on my radar so much. But I sold copies of the licenses for like 25 bucks and I think I made 200 bucks from that. For me at the time that was like living large. But yeah, ever since then everything has been open source. I haven’t sold any software that I remember.
Roger Williams (08:27) Nice.
Absolutely.
Weston Ruter (08:37) But yeah, so WordPress, open source, web technology, open web technology, open web standards, it’s all like perfectly aligned with my interests and started using WordPress at a agency I was working at in 2007 and kind of got them on board with using WordPress for building out their sites for clients.
Roger Williams (09:01) Okay.
Weston Ruter (09:02) That was kind of the launch pad for me to then go fully in on using WordPress for client projects.
Roger Williams (09:09) Okay, okay. At what point did you start contributing to WordPress?
Weston Ruter (09:13) Well, let’s see.
I read a blog post about this that dives into the history and now I think it was 2000-
Nine is my first core props But I started contributing heavily because
At the time I was at XWP and we had a client who we wanted to use the customizer for so that they could have this live preview experience to be able to see the changes that they’re making before they go live. And there were features that were lacking which, which were needed for them. And so I started to
The biggest feature I started working on was the, in the beginning was adding widgets into the customizer. And so instead of, so it was basically like block builder 1.0 in WordPress, where you could have visual drag and drop of blocks, but in the customizer and not using blocks, but using widgets and having the live preview experience there. so we use that for clients to help them build out.
Roger Williams (09:53) Okay.
Weston Ruter (10:12) their landing pages and index pages and things like that.
Roger Williams (10:16) Very cool and from then and then that was it. As soon as you started contributing you were hooked and you haven’t looked back.
Weston Ruter (10:22) Yeah, the work that I did on the adding widgets to the customizer got me heavily involved in the customizer component. then because of that work, I was given commit access to WordPress core back in 2015. And so I’ve been, and then I was a co-lead of the 4.9 release and
Roger Williams (10:40) Okay.
Weston Ruter (10:50) I’ve just been consistently involved in every major release since 3.2, I think, or 3.5. I can’t remember. My blog posted a little.
Roger Williams (10:58) Wow, awesome. Absolutely,
absolutely. So besides the customizer, are there any projects that are now baked in that really stand out to you that you were really proud to be a part of?
Weston Ruter (11:11) Well, the past couple of years, I’ve been heavily involved in the core performance team. And in that team, we have a plugin called Performance Lab, which is like a…
collection of performance feature plugins that are incubating for eventual merge into core potentially pending feedback from the community. And in that project, there’s one called, there’s a plugin called optimization detective, which uses
is a framework for collecting client side metrics for how a page is actually laid out to be able to then apply optimizations more accurately than what WordPress can do on its own. Because say if you have a page that’s laid out and you have an image which is the
what’s called the largest contentful paint. WordPress is gonna guess what that image is gonna be, but it doesn’t know if it’s actually in the viewport or not in the initial viewport. And so you could be that the first image in the post is actually way outside the viewport because there may be paragraphs of text or maybe it’s visible on mobile but not desktop or…
Or vice versa. so this project will, will let visitors to the site contribute those metrics for how the page is laid out to then be able to then better optimize those pages for future visitors so that the actual important elements get prioritized and how they get loaded. if there’s like a, if there’s like a embed that, you know, well,
change its height when it loads, like a tweet or something from Blue Sky or WordPress post embeds, it’ll measure the height that those embeds have after they’ve resized and then reserve the space for that so that when they do load, they don’t cause that layout shift. so a lot of optimizations are possible when you have those client-side metrics that WordPress doesn’t have.
Roger Williams (12:55) Okay.
Weston Ruter (13:02) by default because it’s a server-side, PHP-based environment.
Roger Williams (13:06) Okay, okay, so that’s using all JavaScript and client side operations.
Weston Ruter (13:10) Yeah, well, it’s using, it’s using the, it’s using a web vitals library, from the Google Chrome team, as well as, I mean, that’s an abstraction on top of this underlying performance observer on the web platform. And so it uses that to collect those metrics about the, measurements about where elements are on the page.
which are in the viewport, which aren’t on the viewport. And then with that data saved to the database, then all of those optimizations can be done server-side with PHP, so there’s no JavaScript involved at the actual serve time.
Roger Williams (13:43) Oh, okay.
Excellent. Excellent. All right. So very cool. Very above my pay grade here. I’m swimming in trying to figure out the words here. But sounds really cool. So, you know, today we’re at 6.82 I think is coming out like today or really soon.
Weston Ruter (13:59) Just yeah.
Roger Williams (14:01) just came out. Six nine is on the horizon. We’re kind of getting roadmaps in a little early to start speculating too much on that. But it sounds like you’ve got a project that you’re hoping to get in there. Can you tell us more about that?
Weston Ruter (14:14) Yeah, there’s one of the new features in 6.8 was this thing called speculative loading, which allows you to navigate more quickly when you to other pages on the site by if you hover over the link, the browser will start to or actually by default in WordPress, the it’s the conservative eagerness so that as soon as you click, as soon as you mouse down or touch
Roger Williams (14:19) Yeah.
Weston Ruter (14:35) down on the link, it’ll then start making the request for the page before you release the mouse click or release the finger. But you can have it do more aggressive pre-rendering of those pages so that the navigations appear to be instant because the browser has loaded the page that you are going to already in the background. So it’s
basically the same as like switching tabs in the browser. Well there’s another much older ability related to that and it’s called the back forward cache or BF cache and if you navigate around a random WordPress site you’ll notice and you’re not logged in that navigating I mean most of the time unless there are certain
scenarios where this BF cache is blocked from working. But if the BF cache is working, if you navigate from page A, B, C, D, E, and then you hit the back button, then those back button navigations will be instant. The previous page will show up instantly. And then if you go forward, the next page will show up instantly. And that’s the BF cache. But if there is a unload event hit listener or
the page uses WebSockets or the page is served with this no-store cache control response header, then the browser won’t put it in the BFcache, and so then the browser will basically have to rebuild the page from scratch. Whereas when it’s in BFcache, the entire snapshot of the page
All the JavaScript, all the DOM, everything is stored there in memory so that it’s immediately there, available to you to go back to. But if, yeah, bfcache is not available, then you’ll notice that there’s, it feels sluggish to then go back and forward. And that’s the experience you get now in the WordPress admin because all pages are served in, when you’re logged in, all pages are served with this no store.
directive for the cache control header. And that was done in part to prevent those pages from being cached by like a proxy, like varnish or something. But also for privacy, because if you are working on something super sensitive and then you log out, well, if the pages you were working on aren’t bfcached, then you could just hit the back button to go back.
Roger Williams (16:27) Okay.
Weston Ruter (16:40) and see what those are, what was on the page, even though you wouldn’t be able to make changes because you had been logged out. So for those reasons, the new store directive was added, but there are alternative ways to preserve the privacy by this page show event listener and other mechanisms that I’m working on.
Roger Williams (16:58) Yeah.
Weston Ruter (16:59) but, and then there’s this, no, private directive for the cash control response header, which is what actually is intended for preventing those pages from being cached in by proxies. So that’s already there in WordPress. And so what, what I’m working on is, is there’s a track ticket and then I have a plugin that’s pending for the.org directory. It’s called no cash BF cache.
and it will allow you to when you’re in the login screen there’s with a checkbox that says the checkbox that says remember me along with that there’s this new little sparkle button and it will say if you click on that it opens this popover that says now new feature if you remember me it’ll also enable bfcache and so when you have
Roger Williams (17:28) Yeah.
Weston Ruter (17:41) then logged in, it will then omit that no store directive from the response header and then also include JavaScript on the pages to make sure that after you’ve logged out that those pages in bfcache get evicted so that the privacy is preserved.
Roger Williams (17:57) Okay, alright, so you’re going to single-handedly improve the speed of WP-admin.
Weston Ruter (18:03) Well, that is the hope that, I mean, in my own use of the WordPress admin, was feeling it was painful for me to navigate around. So I wanted to improve it for myself. And so, and actually a couple of years ago, was, I think it was WordPress 6.5. There was a track ticket for the use of unload event.
Roger Williams (18:14) Sure.
Weston Ruter (18:24) listeners in WordPress admin, which are another reason why BFcache is blocked. And so I was thinking, I was excited because I got that committed and I was saying, okay, now we’re going to have BFcache. But then I didn’t realize that at the same time or shortly before this other commit came in that added no store. So all that works, I removed, unload was invalidated by the no store. So it’s revisiting that.
Roger Williams (18:44) you
Weston Ruter (18:50) that ticket from 6.5 and hopefully will allow for a much faster navigation experience in admin. And also on the front end too, because if you’re logged in, this no store directive is sent to every request while you’re logged in. let’s say if you have a WooCommerce store where you’re logged in as a customer or BB Press or Buddy Press or membership sites, anything like that.
you’ll be able to benefit from this BF cache to speed up navigations.
Roger Williams (19:18) Very cool. I’m looking forward to this happening because I too would like to see things sped up a little bit in the admin. As far as working on this goes, if other contributors are interested in working on it with you, what does that look like in this instance?
Weston Ruter (19:32) There’s a track ticket that is on the WordPress core track. And then I have a repo on GitHub that is open and available for anybody to contribute to.
Roger Williams (19:41) Excellent. All right. All right. We’ll grab a link for that and throw it into the notes here. The time has flown by I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I’d be remiss to not get at least some of your excuse me. Get some of your thoughts and insights on the hype of the day AI. Are you a vibe coder? Do you utilize these tools when you’re working?
Weston Ruter (20:00) I don’t vibe code. I haven’t tried it, but I do use some of the auto completion features in PHP storm. I have, I use, actually I enabled a Gemini code assist for GitHub, which I’ve been really happy with because it basically adds a AI coder viewer to your, all your projects. And actually I learned about it from Adam Silverstein.
Roger Williams (20:13) Okay.
Weston Ruter (20:23) because he had a code for his. And so whenever I open a pull request and Gemini code assist will give me a summary of the changes in the pull request and then it will give me inline code review comments about areas of concern or, and then it’s caught things that I missed. So really useful.
Roger Williams (20:42) Okay, so almost like a grammar leaf for coding.
Weston Ruter (20:45) Yeah, I don’t use Grammarly, but yeah.
Roger Williams (20:46) Okay, all right.
Am I am the ultimate of laziness so I use all of these tools although I don’t code But if I did I would definitely use them all too So that that’s great. I Appreciate the insight on you know using AI, but you know maybe being a little bit skeptical of it Maybe not you know both feet jumping into the deep end. Is that pretty accurate?
Weston Ruter (21:08) Well, I mean, I will use Gemini, I have Gemini subscription, like Gemini Pro, whatever it’s called. So I will use it to brainstorm ideas and get code reviews even like in the Gemini web app. But in terms of the IDE, I’ve still been exploring the best like, I use PHP Storm, I’m trying to figure out the best.
Plug in and there’s various options, like all competing, Gemini, chat GBT, and then JetBrains is own plug-in. So I’m still like waiting to see who’s gonna win me over.
Roger Williams (21:41) Okay, okay, all
right, all right. So you’re being wooed, I love it. This has been great, Weston. I really do appreciate your time and giving us some insights into like your history and how you approached computers and the WordPress project. If people wanna get in touch with you, ask you questions or pick your brain and whatnot, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Weston Ruter (21:59) Probably blue sky or I mean I’m on blue sky Twitter LinkedIn You can send me a contact form message on my my blog. So yeah, it was very very nice
Roger Williams (22:11) Excellent, excellent. All right, well, we’ll have links for all of that in the notes for people to reach out and ask you all types of questions. Really great talking to you. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Have a great day. What’s that? WordCamp US, we’re, six weeks out. So I’ll see you there and I’ll hopefully see everybody else there as well. All right. All right, Weston, have a great day,
When Brad Williams talks about building websites, he doesn’t start with plugins or page speed. He starts with a Commodore 64 and a number-guessing game he wrote when he was eight.
That moment, typing BASIC code from a book into a machine his family bought off a cousin ,ignited a career that would take him from Marine Corps programmer to co-founder of WebDevStudios. Along the way, he taught himself HTML on PageMill, got made fun of for using Macs in the ’90s, and learned that formal schooling wasn’t where he’d thrive.
So he joined the Marines. They trained him in Visual Basic, taught him to think in arrays and conditionals, and gave him a security clearance to work on military intranet systems he still can’t show in a portfolio. It was structured, intense, and formative.
After leaving the military, Brad entered the web professionally, and eventually stumbled across WordPress while at a conference in 2006. That moment shifted everything. He became a tinkerer, a plugin hacker, and then a WordPress agency founder. By 2010, he and his team went all in on WordPress.
Now, Brad’s latest project, ThemeSwitcher Pro, is another bridge. It’s designed for people stuck in the Classic Editor, helping content teams migrate one page at a time to block-based editing, no dev time required, no redesign budget needed.
It’s a clever plugin. But more than that, it’s a continuation of Brad’s whole philosophy: solve real problems with practical tools, and make the modern web a little more accessible for everyone.
I met Rob Harr at the Agency Builders Conference in Florida. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone—but he impressed the hell out of me.
He spoke about agency operations with this calm clarity, like someone who’d seen behind the curtain, broken the machine down to parts, and built it back up better. His message was simple, almost annoyingly so:
“Most people already know what the right thing to do is. They just don’t do it consistently.”
That stuck with me. Because I’ve seen it too. Whether you’re running paid ads, launching client sites, or just trying to follow up on leads—you already know the playbook. But ideas aren’t the problem. Execution is. More specifically: consistent execution.
Rob calls it the accidental agency owner problem. You start as a designer or a developer. You’re great at your craft. Suddenly, you have clients. Then a team. Then payroll. But no one taught you how to run a business. You’re still thinking like a technician, not an operator.
That’s where Rob shines. He helps agencies zoom out. Build systems. Break goals into repeatable actions. Treat their agency like the product.
We also talked about AI, enterprise work, and Rob’s origin story as a second-generation software engineer. He got his start writing code at 12. Landed at LexisNexis. Survived the banking meltdown. And eventually co-founded Sparkbox, where he still works today. He also runs an ops consultancy called Upwell.
You can watch the full interview below. But if you take away nothing else, take this:
“Goals are good. Systems are how you reach them. And consistency is everything.”
I recently sat down with Aaron Jorbin, core committer, bow tie enthusiast, and all-around WordPress sage, for a live bug scrub walkthrough. Spoiler: I survived.
Before we get into it, a quick confession. Despite working in tech for decades, I’ve never consistently contributed directly to WordPress. Sure, I’ve filed a bug or two, but the inner workings of Trac always felt a bit… intimidating. Like trying to do yoga in a crowded elevator.
The good news is that open source isn’t just for the people who write code in their sleep. It’s for all of us. And thanks to a bit of mentorship from Aaron, I finally dipped a toe (okay, maybe a foot) into the waters of contribution, and didn’t drown.
So, What’s a Bug Scrub?
A bug scrub is basically a group effort to triage open tickets in WordPress. You don’t need to be a developer to participate. In our session, we focused on UI copy, little things like button labels or notification text that impact user experience.
Aaron and I reviewed a few tickets:
One where a dropdown said “Not Set” instead of “Default” (spoiler: it’s already been fixed in recent releases).
Another about unclear email notification wording.
And a third where failed plugin updates just awkwardly… hang.
Tag issues with workflow keywords like close or needs-patch
Not break anything (success!)
The Power of Mentorship
Aaron’s guidance wasn’t just helpful, it was permission-giving. There’s something powerful about a seasoned contributor saying, “You don’t have to be perfect. Just be helpful.” That ethos, of collaboration, experimentation, and learning in the open, is what keeps WordPress strong.
In open source, progress happens in increments. You don’t need to write a patch. Sometimes just leaving a clarifying comment or verifying behavior in the latest release moves a ticket forward.
As Aaron put it:
“Each of the ones we looked at today, moving it forward meant something different.”
Advice for the Curious
If you’re like me, interested but unsure where to start, here are a few tips:
Use the Playground to test things quickly without setting up a full environment.
If you’re unsure whether a ticket should be closed, use the close keyword instead of marking it resolved. Let experienced folks review.
Be kind, curious, and open to learning.
Also: don’t underestimate how helpful it is just to verify whether an issue still exists in the latest version. That alone makes a difference.
You Can Do This (Yes, Even You)
I’m pushing 50, I mix up keyboard shortcuts daily, and I still managed to contribute in under an hour. So yeah, you can totally do this.
The WordPress project runs on volunteers. You don’t need a permission slip. You just need to show up with good intent, a bit of time, and a willingness to learn.
If you’re curious where help is needed right now, Aaron recommends checking out:
Kevin Leary is one of those rare developers who’s just as comfortable diving into analytics and design as he is refactoring code. I caught up with Kevin for a fast-moving conversation that covered AI, web development, and how a career that started with graphic design and assembly code led him to running his own successful consultancy.
On Learning to Learn
Kevin studied both computer science and graphic design at Champlain College and got his start working for agencies in the Boston area. What stood out to me was his mindset: he wasn’t afraid to pivot or jump across disciplines. In fact, that curiosity helped him go independent.
“I like to jump from design to dev to analytics. At first I thought that wasn’t a good thing, but I realized that’s what drives me.”
That ability to synthesize across disciplines is what makes Kevin’s work so effective today—he’s not just building sites, he’s helping clients improve performance and user experience in measurable ways.
How Kevin Thinks About AI
We had a great moment in the interview where Kevin described how he approaches conversations about AI with clients:
“I talk to clients about AI almost the same way I talk about any technology. First, what do you want to do? What are your goals? Then we figure out if AI helps with that.”
It’s refreshing to hear that kind of clarity. Kevin uses AI daily in his own coding workflow but is careful not to overhype it. He points out that without a deep knowledge of the codebase, AI-generated code can actually slow you down. That honesty is something a lot of developers (and clients) can relate to.
WordPress, Spam, and Smart Use Cases
One AI use case Kevin mentioned was especially clever: he used OpenAI’s API to score contact form submissions for spam instead of relying on captchas or Cloudflare Turnstile. By scoring messages and reviewing their accuracy before putting the filter in place, he created a custom, client-friendly solution to a very real problem.
Hosting That Doesn’t Waste Your Time
We also talked a bit about Kinsta, and Kevin didn’t hold back:
“I always say this to everybody: the amount of time you’ll save by spending an extra $200–300 a year is so astronomically higher than the amount of time it’ll take if you go with the cheaper option.”
He’s been a fan since 2016 and still recommends Kinsta today because, as he puts it, it just works. We’ll take it!
Who Kevin Works With
If you’re running a custom-built WordPress site that originated with an agency and now needs ongoing performance, analytics, and UX improvements—Kevin’s your guy. He’s happiest working with companies who already value good design and want to keep improving.
Full Transcript
Kevin Leary (00:00)
I talk to clients about AI almost the same way I talk about any technology. First, what do you want to do? What are your goals? And then once you determine what we’re setting out to do, maybe AI is good to do it. But the red flag for me is if someone comes in and says, we have to use AI because that’s what’s going on. Everyone else is doing it because there are a lot of cases where it doesn’t really make sense. But for me, I’d say I use it day to day just because I think that is where
coding is going. So you kind of have to learn how to work with it. You definitely can improve your workflow, but it’s also a little bit eye opening to see that you still really do need a deep knowledge of the code base that you’re working in. Because sometimes one or two things are off, and if you can’t find that, it may end up taking more time than if you had just written something yourself.
Roger Williams (00:38)
Okay.
Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. Today I’m joined with a new friend, Kevin. Hey Kevin, how are you?
Kevin Leary (00:52)
Good, how are you Roger?
Roger Williams (00:53)
You know, I’m doing really well. It’s the middle of the week. Things are cruising along. So I’m pretty happy with stuff. I’m excited to be on this call with you and learn more about you from looking at your website. You you’ve got a huge variety of technologies that you’re involved in. So, you know, to like get us started here, can you kind of tell us how you got into the web and big data and AI stuff?
Kevin Leary (01:16)
Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, I’ve always been a programmer, more or less. I went to school for graphic design and computer science, did a little bit of work during college at an agency. And then I worked at a couple of agencies in the Boston area. They were very good, very great. I liked working there, but I found that like, I like to jump around from role to role too much for an agency. And at first I thought, well, maybe this isn’t good. Maybe I should just focus on development. But then I realized that’s kind of what
drives me almost, like the ability to jump from design to dev to analytics. And that’s where I sort of decided to go off on my own and pursue all of those things. So I’d say to answer how I got into WordPress, way, way back, I just was poking around with CMSes. And I saw it, and I was hooked, basically. I could just see that it’s very interesting to see how the themes are set up, to dissect them, things like that. And then with
Roger Williams (02:02)
Okay.
Kevin Leary (02:09)
BigQuery and data warehousing stuff. I got into that by way of originally working with Segment, which I believe now they’re owned by Twilio. But it was before the new GA had the event-based stuff. It was just an approach that made sense to me to be able to track a business event when this happens, another one when this happens, another one when this happens. So I set that up, connected it to BigQuery way, way back. I think it was like 2014.
maybe, 2012, 2013. And that was really valuable. And so that kind of steered me towards using analytics to help measure how effective that design and dev work was. I think that, is that a good explanation? I that covers it.
Roger Williams (02:52)
Yeah, no,
no, so I want to go back and dig into things here a little bit. So you said you’ve always been a programmer. Did you go to college or school for any computer science or anything?
Kevin Leary (03:01)
I did, I went to Champlain College in Brentwood, Tidumon.
Roger Williams (03:05)
Okay, and you studied comp sci and got all into assembly code and everything?
Kevin Leary (03:10)
Yeah, was kind of it was like a hybrid, almost self created program where it was half graphic design and then it was half computer science.
Roger Williams (03:17)
Okay, very cool. Anything from that experience that you still kind of pull from today?
Kevin Leary (03:23)
I mean, to be honest, maybe not at college, but one thing I learned then was like to really know how to do things well, you’ve learned on your own. I do a lot of reading, any new topic I’ll dive in and try to understand it first before I work with it, which is sometimes hard because often you have to dive right into it. But yeah, learning to learn, guess you would say, which is a little bit cheesy, but it’s really ultimately what, what I came out with.
Roger Williams (03:47)
No, absolutely. I think a lot of times people go to higher education and they have like a direct goal in mind. And maybe sometimes they get disenchanted because it is really about learning how to learn. At least that was my experience as well. As you were starting to work with agencies, what kind of work were you on? Were these like enterprise level sites, small medium sized businesses?
Kevin Leary (04:00)
Sorry.
I’d say medium, not too much enterprise right away, but medium to large businesses at some of them. There were some design sites that I did from scratch with a brand that was like, I’d say smaller, more or less. And then my dev skills were a little bit stronger. that was where I was put. That’s where I did well. ⁓ But yeah, at the time it was like Symphony apps. There was really no WordPress at the agency.
Roger Williams (04:28)
Thanks a lot.
Kevin Leary (04:34)
It was like jQuery was new, not to point out how old I am, guess, but yeah, that was the case. Actually, the first agency job I had, I remember I went in and I was like, gosh, I got this thing jQuery. And I remember the developer there was like, no, I’m using Scriptaculous. It’s way better. And anytime I mention that, people are like, what’s Scriptaculous? Nobody knows what it is.
Roger Williams (04:34)
Okay.
There’s a giveaway.
you
⁓
Exactly, All right, very cool. then fast forwarding, it sounds like you’ve got some squirrel syndrome, which I suffer from as well. I like to go after the shiny new things and try all the things. As you started your own business, how did you start finding clients initially and have you niched down as it were?
Kevin Leary (05:14)
Yeah, too. I guess in terms of the squirrely scenario, too, it’s more, I guess, that I find that if you want, let’s say you’re trying to increase leads on a site. You can do it with design, but it’s only a piece of it. You can do it with analytics, but it’s only a piece of it. If you know how to code, you can look in and see maybe people on an Android phone are having issues with this. It’s sort of all dove into all of it to gear it towards like,
making those things better and when you can do all of them, great. But it’s all encompassed in that too. It’s not necessarily some of the things are not new. They’re just in that space. But yeah, sorry, what was the other part of the question? Second one?
Roger Williams (05:52)
Well, so then
as you figured out that you wanted to go out on your own, what were some of the first steps to get that really started and cemented?
Kevin Leary (05:57)
yeah.
So initially, did it outside of sort of pulled back my hours at agencies and worked a lot of night and weekend hours to build it up because it would be very hard to do a hard switch to it. But initially, a lot of it was SEO. So it’s pretty good at it. Could rank pretty well locally for things like Boston WordPress Developer and other stuff like that. And then the real, probably the larger clients that
have been great to work with in their more long term. A lot of those came from that original agency work 10 years down the road. Like they just reach out and they’re like, you know, we worked together on this. I don’t know if you remember, if you’re available and that that’s probably the best source of work referrals to be honest. Yeah.
Roger Williams (06:40)
Okay, absolutely.
Yeah, when people have worked with you and have an idea of what you can do and how you operate, that’s always a big bonus. Fast forward to today. I’d be remiss not to bring up AI. It’s everybody’s favorite subject. I take it at this point, you’re well over the hurdle of should we be using AI? Where are you?
Kevin Leary (06:53)
Yeah.
Roger Williams (07:01)
focusing your efforts and how do you talk to clients about AI?
Kevin Leary (07:05)
I talk to clients about AI almost the same way I talk about any technology. First, what do you want to do? What are your goals? And then once you determine what we’re setting out to do, maybe AI is good to do it. But the red flag for me is if someone comes in and says, we have to use AI because that’s what’s going on. Everyone else is doing it because there are a lot of cases where it doesn’t really make sense. But for me, I’d say I use it day to day just because I think that is where
coding is going. So you kind of have to learn how to work with it. You definitely can improve your workflow, but it’s also a little bit eye opening to see that you still really do need a deep knowledge of the code base that you’re working in. Because sometimes one or two things are off, and if you can’t find that, it may end up taking more time than if you had just written something yourself. ⁓
Roger Williams (07:44)
Okay.
That makes sense.
Absolutely. I run into the same thing where I’ll get it to write something and it just doesn’t feel right. And I’m talking about text, not not code even. And I’ll just end up using it as like a blueprint instead of what I’m actually going to end up with. So that that’s really cool. When it comes to like WordPress and AI. Are you seeing any solutions yet that are
Kevin Leary (08:08)
Yeah.
Roger Williams (08:17)
that are either client facing or customer facing that you’re implementing.
Kevin Leary (08:20)
Yeah, there’s one that I wrote about recently that’s kind of interesting. I won’t mention who because it’d be best to do that. But spam with gravity forms is a big problem. Anyone who has a form on any WordPress site, it’s rampant. It’s almost impossible to block it. But because it’s a low-volume site, there’s not too many submissions going into this contact form. We used OpenAI APIs to basically just say, hey, here’s the message. Does it look like spam to you?
give it a score of 1 to 100. And then based on that, what we did initially was it just put the score at the top so the internal team could review it and see, like, is this effective? We found it once. It was really good. So now we replaced, what is it, Cloudflare turnstile with this AI approach. It works well so far. I guess the thing is, like, you know, it works well until the AI bots figure out how to beat the AI spam filters.
Roger Williams (09:13)
you
Kevin Leary (09:13)
And then I
guess you’re in this big loop, right, where they just go back and forth. But for now, yeah, it does work pretty well. Also, lot of content creation, too. This is pretty common.
Roger Williams (09:20)
Excellent, excellent.
Definitely. As you’re implementing WordPress sites, I’d be remiss to not bring up and mention Kinsta for hosting. Is there anything specific about working with Kinsta that you really appreciate?
Kevin Leary (09:34)
Yeah, definitely. First, I’ll say it. I have no incentive to say this, right? But I really like Kinsta I started using it way back. I don’t know when it was founded. I could be wrong about this, but I think it was 2016 or 17 for a site that’s still online today. It’s proto.life. And they don’t publish articles anymore, but it was great, to be honest. At that time, a lot of people, was WP Engine was the only default. And there’s still both.
Roger Williams (09:47)
Okay, yeah.
Kevin Leary (10:03)
great, but Kinsta’s been, since then, very fast. Site hasn’t really went down the server in any way. And anytime there’s an issue, it’s easy to get a response from it. I would say the big thing I tell people, it’s actually what I recommend, to be totally honest, on Reddit. If somebody’s wondering about a host, it is who I recommend. A lot of the feedback you get is, could get a site for $5 or $10 elsewhere.
Roger Williams (10:21)
Excellent.
Kevin Leary (10:26)
I always say this to everybody, the amount of time you will save by just spending an extra $200, $300 a year is so astronomically higher than the amount of time it will take if you go with the cheaper option that it’s just, for me, it’s a no-brainer, to be honest. And that sounds very promotional, but it is not. It’s totally 100 % honest.
Roger Williams (10:44)
Ha
No, and I appreciate that you were not primed in any way. But I’m with you on that, managed aspect of having somebody there who’s watching the servers and if there is an issue, resolving it, having backups that actually work, it’s priceless. And then having support that can actually answer your questions and get things figured out for you. Kevin, I like to keep these short and sweet. This has been…
Really an enlightening conversation. I appreciate your time. If people want to get in touch with you, if they want to hire you, what are the best ways for them to reach out?
Kevin Leary (11:16)
Yeah, definitely. So kevinleary.net is the best place to go. You can submit the form there. And it doesn’t have AI spam blocking yet, but it might soon. And also just hello at kevinleary.net is another email that you can write a chat on.
Roger Williams (11:31)
Excellent. And as far as like ideal customers, who do you enjoy working with the most?
Kevin Leary (11:37)
I would say my sweet spot, so you mentioned the niche before, I didn’t really mention it, but to be honest, I inherit a lot of custom built agency sites. So maybe somebody pays a lot for a brand and they get the brand online, but then they want to maintain that and grow leads, try to get more business coming through, try to make it more effective at achieving those goals. That’s probably my sweet spot, I think, because I can set up analytics.
help with the design of certain flows, develop it out, build it, see it grow, and then iterate on it.
Roger Williams (12:10)
Excellent, excellent. All right, well, Kevin, I appreciate your time. I hope that at some point I can have you back and we can talk more about some SEO and some AI and all the fun stuff. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. All right, Kevin, we’ll talk to you soon.
Kevin Leary (12:18)
Yeah, I’d to. Yeah, I’d love to. Thanks again for reaching out, too. It’s been great.
There are a lot of interviews where you leave the conversation feeling energized but overwhelmed. Talking with Nat Miletic was the opposite: clear, grounded, insightful. The kind of conversation that immediately makes you want to open your own website and start fixing things.
I invited Nat on for a Kinsta Talk because he’s been doing SEO and WordPress development since 2007. His agency, Clio Websites, is trusted by dozens of businesses and agencies, and what stood out to me right away was how fluently Nat can translate the technical side of SEO into practical steps.
Here are my biggest takeaways from our conversation, plus a full replay if you want to dig in.
1. Your Website Needs a Refresh Every 3 Years
There’s no fixed rule, but three years is a good benchmark. You don’t always need a total rebuild, but Nat recommends refreshing the design, UX, and performance around that timeline. Especially now, where user expectations and tech stacks evolve quickly.
2. AI Has Impacted SEO More Than Web Dev
Nat made a great point I hadn’t heard before: while everyone is talking about AI replacing developers, the real disruption is happening in SEO. Content creation, auditing, and strategic planning are increasingly being supported (or rushed) by AI tools. That means the fundamentals matter more than ever.
3. EEAT is Old News, But Now It Helps with LLMs Too
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—EEAT—has been around for a while, especially in YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) niches like health and finance. But now it’s also becoming useful for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Getting listed in authoritative directories, showcasing credentials, and creating high-quality author profiles can help improve your chances of showing up in AI-generated answers.
4. Your Online Presence is Bigger Than SEO
Modern SEO isn’t just about your website. Nat emphasized that LLMs and Google’s AI Overviews are pulling from Reddit, Quora, directory listings, and social profiles. You don’t have to be everywhere—but you do need to be where your customers are. And if you hate social media, forcing it won’t help. Pick channels that fit your communication style.
5. The Most Common Mistake? Weak Foundations
Agencies often spend time on backlinks or content without first ensuring a strong foundation. Nat looks at:
Website structure
Page speed
Internal linking
If the structure isn’t sound, everything else is harder. This reminded me of my early days in SEO, watching clients throw money at link building for sites that barely worked.
6. PageSpeed Scores Aren’t Everything
Google PageSpeed Insights is helpful, but Nat cautions against chasing 100%. Delaying JavaScript can make a site look fast to Google while still loading poorly for real users. Instead, use the tool as a guide and test real experiences.
Also: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the big metric to watch. And yes, plugins like WP Rocket help. So do built-in tools like Kinsta’s image optimization powered by Cloudflare Polish.
7. Internal Linking is an Art
Header and footer links don’t count for much. What matters is contextually relevant links high up in your content, pointing to the most important pages. Nat calls this a medium-difficulty SEO task that pays big dividends when done right.
8. Backlinks Still Matter, Even in 2025
Even in the era of AI overviews, backlinks from high-authority sites can boost your rankings. Nat warns against spammy link tactics and instead recommends building relationships. He’s seen underwhelming websites rank simply because they had a strong backlink profile.
9. The Stack Matters
When asked how he builds WordPress sites today, Nat didn’t hesitate: Elementor Pro and the Hello theme. But he made an even better point: there are lots of good tools. What matters is picking one, learning it deeply, and building lightweight, performance-first sites. Just don’t load up a junk theme with 40 plugins.
10. Kinsta Gets a Shoutout
Nat had kind words about Kinsta’s hosting, especially for agencies. He’s moved client sites to us and seen immediate performance improvements, even when the specs on paper looked the same. His reasoning? Kinsta is optimized for WordPress. That, plus our responsive support, has made us his go-to.
If you’re trying to make sense of SEO in 2025, this interview is worth your time. And if you’re running an agency or managing client sites, Nat’s advice will save you hours of trial and error.
Let me know what stood out to you, and how often you refresh your website. Comment below or find me on LinkedIn.
Nat Miletic (00:00) the in terms of like the age of the website, I don’t think there’s like a set rule for sure, but usually around the three year timeframe is like where you should maybe be thinking about changing it to refresh it a bit. You don’t have to like rebuild the whole website, but looking at maybe just refreshing it a bit from a look and feel perspective and user experience perspective. Usually we’ve seen around like the three year timeframe be realistic.
Roger Williams (00:27) So the next question that Andre’s got is hrefs versus semrush.
feel like I know where you’re gonna go with this, but I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts on those two tools.
Nat Miletic (00:37) Yeah, I’ve used both and I don’t really have a preference, honestly. Like I haven’t used SEMrush in a while. I started with SEMrush, went over to Ahrefs and then I was thinking about going back to SEMrush. yeah, exactly. No, was something else. was like Ahrefs.
Roger Williams (00:49) Because of the discount, they got a new discount going this month.
Nat Miletic (00:57) I prefer the Ahrefs interface to be honest with you just because it’s a little bit faster, you know, to kind of like navigate through pages and different options and stuff. But they’re both great tools. Like, yeah, just, I think there was a limit on like number of projects you can have in SEMrush. So they got to be like way more expensive, you can only add like certain number of websites. On Ahrefs, you can add as many websites as you want, but then it’s like credit based.
Roger Williams (01:02) Okay.
my name is Roger. I’m with Kinsta. I’m joined
with Nat from Clio websites. Hey Nat, how are ya?
Nat Miletic (01:27) Hey, I’m doing great, how about you?
Roger Williams (01:30) I’m doing really well. really excited in the in the pre show you and I were kind of talking about some of the new AI and SEO stuff and just how things are once again evolving in the SEO landscape. And I’m really excited about today’s webinar with you where we can talk about some of these in some more detail and hopefully give people some actionable insights. I’ve got an entire outline sitting over here.
next to me, which we’ve kind of used to prepare ourselves for the show, title of its SEO in 2025, Strategy, Speed and Staying Ahead. So this is really good stuff. Nat, I’ve got you on because you are an SEO expert. I’d love, before we start diving into things too far here,
for you to kind of give an introduction of yourself and why people should be tuning in and listening to you.
Nat Miletic (02:27) Yeah, thanks Roger. So my name is Nat Miletic. I have a company called Clio websites. We’ve been around for a while since 2007. So our primary service offering is around, know, concentrate around WordPress, web development, and SEO. So I’ve been doing this for a while. There’s a team of eight behind Clio and we do all kinds of exciting.
web development and SEO projects.
Roger Williams (03:00) Excellent. Excellent. All right. I feel like that is a great introduction here. For myself, if people aren’t familiar, my name is Roger Williams. I work for Kinsta in a partnership and community management role. I’ve been in hosting for over 20 years at this point, which is a crazy number to say out loud, but there it is. And I am just really excited because I can bring people, experts like Nat here to help share their expertise.
information that probably a lot of the time only their clients are getting to really hear about. mean, that you’re pretty prolific on social media, but still there’s almost only so much time in the day to share all of this. So I really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to kind of dive into your knowledge here and, and really explore this topic.
What would be really helpful is maybe start with talking about some of the strategic shifts in SEO that you’re seeing, that the industry is seeing and talking about. And like the last 12 months, like the changes that people should really be focusing on and being aware of.
Nat Miletic (04:03) Yeah, mean, it’s very, you know, interesting, exciting and kind of like scary at the same time. And, you know, interestingly enough, there’s a lot of talk about like AI replacing, you know, developers and stuff. And, you know, lots of companies are saying that they can do kind of more with less these days. But I’m seeing actually the biggest shift
Roger Williams (04:10) you
Nat Miletic (04:27) happen in the SEO space with AI. Not so much the web development space. SEO has impacted quite a bit, especially in the content creation and SEO auditing and strategy arena where AI is really good at that. We’ll jump into that a little bit more. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in detail, but definitely a huge
impact on SEO as a service and just different like aspects of SEO in result of some of the work that these AI tools can do.
Roger Williams (04:58) Excellent. Yeah, I’ve been having some really great conversations around AI and the developer side of things lately. And it sounds like with their the the change is going to be you know, the actual coding part of development is getting abstracted away a little bit. You can use these tools at least to help you with some syntax errors and some of like the bug troubleshooting that used to take ages. Now you can click a button on the SEO side.
you know, I can speak from a content creation perspective. I’ve been really struggling with these tools and and how to use them and how to use them effectively. I think that is really the essential word that we need to be using practical, pragmatic effectiveness because I can hit a button now and I can crank out endless reams of content. Right? I mean, I can I can create
30 blog posts in one click of a button, one prompt, but is it actually gonna be engaging? Is it going to convert? Is it gonna show up in the results for the search engines? I’m excited to kind of explore these topics with you. There’s one new acronym that has been popping up under the radar. It’s this EEAT.
And this is still new to me to the point where I still don’t remember exactly what it all stands for is can you walk us through why we need to be eating more and how it applies to our search results?
Nat Miletic (06:23) Yeah, for
sure. mean, so the EEAT acronym has been around for a while, actually. have talked about that in the past, especially in fields that require authority, such as health and finance. What do they call those? Your money, your life is the kind of acronym that people use for or that Google uses even for like…
Roger Williams (06:29) Okay.
hahahaha ⁓
Nat Miletic (06:49) certain websites that deal with either financial or health information. And it’s very important to have the authority in those when you’re creating content for those types of sites. And so what people did for EEAT is basically create some mechanism to show that the website is authoritative by creating good quality author profiles, showing author credentials and stuff like that.
Roger Williams (06:54) Okay.
Nat Miletic (07:14) linking out to their credentials, sort of proofs. For a time, I think probably two or three years ago, it’s like everybody was talking about it. And there’s still a lot of contention whether or not that still kind of works as a strategy when it comes to those types of websites. Interestingly enough, the SEO
Roger Williams (07:25) Okay.
Nat Miletic (07:40) from like an AI perspective and getting listed on like chat bots and LLMs and stuff now we’re finding that this is actually useful from that perspective as well So, you know kind of like getting listed on different directories, know as an author as a website or whatever Well, will kind of increase your authority from kind of like the SEO the traditional sort of like search engine SEO perspective But also now we’re finding with LLMs that it’s actually helping with that as well so
Roger Williams (08:08) Okay.
Nat Miletic (08:09) So the concept itself is not new with AI. It’s been around for a while. It’s just, it was kind of like repurposed, I think, a little bit, you know, as a result of LLMs. Because now what we’re finding, what we’re hearing from clients is, I want to get listed on, you know, chat GPT instead of like, I want to be listed on Google or whatever. Right. So it’s just kind of a little bit different.
Roger Williams (08:30) Absolutely. So it’s the new vanity search, right? Like I remember when I had clients, I would get a message at least once a day of, hey, when I search for X, I’m not coming up. And now I’m assuming you’re getting, when I’m prompting X, I’m not showing up. And so now you’ve got to figure out, you you got to balance, right? This vanity search, the new vanity AI search.
with things that are actually going to be effective. So that’s really fascinating to hear that something that’s been around for a while is being reprioritized because of these new technologies. ⁓
Nat Miletic (09:07) It
stands for, I couldn’t remember exactly what all the acronyms stand for, but if somebody’s watching, it’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So it’s a mouthful, for sure.
Roger Williams (09:20) Absolutely.
You know, I think this is really interesting because I was just having a discussion yesterday about Google’s AI overview and this person had done some research about how the overviews are working, specifically how users are interacting with these overviews. And then, know, whether they’re using the information directly from there or if they’re doing more.
research afterwards. And for him, a big component that’s now being thrown into the mix is this idea of trust, which you know, is the T in that acronym. And he was pointing out, you know, you’ve now you’re going even beyond like directories and credential sites, and you’re going to things like mentions on Reddit and Quora. And so as a business really thinking about
you know, your entire online activity is now being included as SEO, sounds. so you need to, know, backlinks are still important, but it’s not the only thing you need to be really working on. How are you guiding clients in these discussions?
Nat Miletic (10:27) Yeah, it’s a great question. And unfortunately, it’s like, it’s one of those things where we’re going back to like, you need to be everywhere, right? So that’s the discussion we’re having with clients right now is like, you have to be on, you know, you have to be on the directory sites, you have to be on, you know, like social media, you have to have a social media profile, like the more the better, you know, that kind of stuff.
which is kind of unfortunate because you can imagine for like a small business, right? It’s very challenging. And even for bigger businesses, you know, having a presence on all these social platforms is, I’m sure you can appreciate, it’s a lot of work, right? So it’s kind of difficult, very time consuming. And so you have to sort of pick, you know, where your ideal client is coming from.
and prioritizing some of those sort of like areas of either search engines or LLM or maybe even direct like social media sort of profiles and actually promoting a little bit more on social media directly.
Roger Williams (11:29) Excellent. And I think, you maybe that’s where it’s kind of meeting the client where they’re at, right? If they’re comfortable doing social media, then yeah, let’s pursue social media. But if they’re not comfortable with that and forcing them to be, I mean, it just, the transparency comes through so quickly when you’re not really enthusiastic on Twitter or on Reddit.
people can see right through you if you’re just doing sales pitches. So working with the client, sounds like, and figuring out where they want to spend their time and their effort is really important there.
Nat Miletic (12:04) Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Roger Williams (12:06) All right, so let’s talk a little bit more about from an agency perspective. So for the agency people that are watching, you know, how, what are some takeaways they can be taking, you know, using from this conversation? And I think a great place to start is common mistakes. Where are you seeing agencies either making a mistake or maybe spending too much time focusing on the wrong things?
Nat Miletic (12:29) Yeah, I think for agencies specifically, there are a few sort of like pieces of low hanging fruit that they could focus on. One of the things that we often find is just from like a web development perspective that the structure of the website isn’t optimized for SEO and for these LLMs as well.
That’s the most common one we would see and also like speed website speed it’s you know fairly easy these days to get you know decent web performance metrics as well and Internal linking as well as another big one. Those are kind of like the domain three I would say like looking at the overall structure of the website that that’s really the main area that we focus on where you know, we call it kind of like
the foundation, right? So if you build a website on a good foundation with a good structure, it’s clear for users which path to follow. It’s clear for these bots and crawlers, how the website is structured. That also kind of helps with resolving some of the technical issues that we might have on the website as well. And just kind of like setting up a good foundation, that’s
That’s what we see as the biggest usually issue when we’re working with new clients is, know, unfortunately sometimes it’s like, well, you you’re better off starting from scratch, you know, and just kind of rebuilding it properly and then investing more resources into SEO. You know, because if you do it the other way around, it’s kind of difficult to, you know, see those results as quickly as people might want to see them.
And so that’s kind of the most common. then, know, page speed and those kinds of things usually, you know, can be remedied easier when you’re creating a new website and doing it correctly than, you know, trying to fix performance issues on a site that maybe isn’t optimized ideally, right? So that’s kind of the, that’s the usually almost every project that we get involved in that for a website that we didn’t, you know, create for the client initially sadly is like,
similar approach, you know, so.
Roger Williams (14:39) No, absolutely. And I feel like we’re in a time machine because I remember 2009, these were the same discussions I was having with clients. Or, I I worked at an agency at one point where we were procuring backlinks for their client websites. And I would just look at the client’s website and be like, hey, it doesn’t matter how many backlinks we get to this site.
It’s not, A, it’s not gonna convert because a person can’t use this site, but B, the crawlers can’t even look at anything that’s going on on here. you know, the basics and the fundamentals, it’s amazing how much we have to keep repeating this broken record. Even in 2025, you know, I see people wanting to use other options besides WordPress and…
they are there because it’s easy to use, right? They can sign up, they can click a few buttons and they have a website, but that they’re totally disregarding all of the SEO aspects of these tools, just lacking everything that WordPress gives you pretty much out of the box. So that’s really great. And I love, know, your your segue straight into performance and site speed. This, this kind of leads us into our next segment where we want to talk about
what is really important for people to be looking at when it comes to website performance? And you know, one of the issues with WordPress is it can be really easy to ruin the performance of your website. Plugins are super easy to install. You can get a page builder that you can build as many accordions as you can fit into your mouse click or whatever. I mean, you can really overbuild things and degrade the performance.
And of course, I would be remiss without bringing up hosting. Since Kinsta is a managed host for WordPress. Well, you know, one of the things that we try and focus on, of course, is speed and performance. And so that’s, you know, the servers themselves were using Google Cloud. We’re using really performant operations and setups with Linux containers. Everything’s behind Cloudflare. And so, you know, I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts about what
What are the measuring sticks that either site owners or agencies should be using these days to really see, hey, is this site performing? And then what specific areas of the site should I be working on to make it more performant?
Nat Miletic (16:56) Yeah, so some of the tools that people use usually for measuring this type of stuff is the Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free tool that anybody can use to test the speed of their website. The PageSpeed Insights is a good tool because it integrates with some of the Google tool sets and how they evaluate the speed and health of a website.
If people have heard this term of core web vitals, that’s kind of like the measurement that Google uses whether or not your website is speedy and efficient. Core web vitals are really important because they show up in your Google Search Console and that’s how Google evaluates whether or not people are experiencing good user experience.
Roger Williams (17:30) See ⁓
Nat Miletic (17:40) performance or user experience, right, on the website. So that’s kind of like the starting point, I would say, in terms of performance. however, I would just caution people. have seen sort of, you know, people that are a little bit more SEO savvy, even agencies, you know, that do this type of work. You know, they’re always trying to aim for like 100 % on mobile or, you know, 99%, like the, you know, the faster, the better kind of thing.
I would say don’t trust those scores or chase those blindly either, just because sometimes you have to take some trade-offs when you’re dealing with performance in order to improve the user experience, for example. without getting into a lot of detail, but one of the prime examples of that is delaying all the JavaScript on your website, right? Where on Google,
you know, PageSpeed Insights looks great. You’re getting 100%. But when somebody goes to the website and they don’t click on anything, they might get a blank screen or they may get a website that’s not fully loaded. So when they click on something or they move their mouse, then all of a sudden these interactions start to happen on the website. From a core Web Vitals perspective, you’re doing great. But from a user perspective, you’re not doing so great because they might have some issues.
navigating your website or taking an action that you want to take. So sometimes you have to, you know, to balance those things. So I would only caution people don’t follow it blindly to be like, need 99 % or 100 % on mobile. You know, that’s not sometimes not as important as user experience of like interacting with the site and using it. But obviously, you know, the faster the better, especially if you’re, you know, if you have an e commerce business where people are making purchases and
You know using you know using the website for that, you know a purpose. It’s very important to be fast and to avoid those cart abandonment issues and even just you know, even if it’s a service business for people to be able to contact you quickly and fill out a form and kind of be in and out right and that’s where I think Kinsta is really good. We you know for a lot of our clients where like performance and reliability
is an important factor. We’re just like, yeah, just sign up for Kinsta and you don’t have to worry about that.
Roger Williams (19:55) I love it. love it. Thank you so much for the plug there. We’ve got a quick question in and I love it. Endry is in the comments asking how can we optimize LCP, especially images and I’m missing out on the acronym here. LCP. Are you picking up what that is? Okay.
Nat Miletic (20:13) Yeah,
so there’s a few different sort of areas on PageSpeed Insights where it kind of like, there’s a few areas where you, how Google PageSpeed Insights measures the performance of the website. LCP is one of those metrics. And so I forget what it stands for actually. ⁓ Largest Contentful Paint, yeah.
Roger Williams (20:33) contentful pain okay
Nat Miletic (20:36) And they measure it. think it’s if you’re doing like 2.5 seconds or less you’re considered good if you’re doing higher than that you’re doing kind of medium or poor or whatever and And then if you’re over four seconds, they’ll give you like a red symbol meaning you need to address that LCP can be a problem for a number of different reasons. It could be like large images. It could be sometimes something like a large font file
it’s very hard to say it’s one thing because it could be a number of things. For example, what we found recently, and I don’t know if this question is referring to that, is there was some, there was actually an issue with PageSpeed Insights where it was identifying an LCP as an issue for a large majority of sites due to an algorithm change or something that they did where we were finding that it was just like very difficult to get around that error.
What can help with that is, for example, if you’re using WordPress, WP Rocket and some of those plugins can delay things. They can lazy load images, for example. They can do certain things to alleviate the LCP issue, but LCP can be exasperated by, you know, scripts. It could be exasperated by large images. So it’s kind of hard to say it’s one thing. It’s usually a combination of things and
PageSpeed Insights will give you recommendations based on that particular score to be like, this is actually what’s causing it. And then you can work to address that. The bug that I was talking about is referring to something that for LCP specifically, it was like, you know, this particular section is causing an issue. So it doesn’t really give you an answer. Like, is it an image? Is it a font? So you kind of have to do some guesswork and troubleshoot it. so, you know, without going into a lot of details,
PageSpeed Insight is great at giving you those recommendations that you can, you you have to work through sometimes one by one to address them, you know, without doing like a quick fix like WP Remote, or sorry, WP Rocket, just like enabling all the settings and then hoping for the best. Sometimes you have to go one by one and it’s quite the process.
Roger Williams (22:46) Okay, excellent. I hope, I hope, Andrew, we kind of addressed your concern there. But, you know, one thing I’ll jump in and mention is at Kinsta in the MyKinsta dashboard, when you’re in a specific individual site, if you go to the caching tab on the left, there’s an option for image compression. And so we’re using Cloudflare’s polish tool to do image compression for you on the fly. And if you’re not hosted at Kinsta, there’s
many plugins you can use for this. You can also do this locally on your computer. But I think, again, one of the nice advantages at Kinsta is we’ve got this tool built in. There’s the option for lossless or lossy compression. You can choose how you want that to be done. And we just handle that for you on the fly. So, you know, I think another thing that a lot of people maybe miss the boat on here is resizing their images properly.
I know this is something I used to make the mistake of was, you know, maybe I had a photo from my iPhone, which is a massive image to put onto a web page when I only need something that’s like 480 pixels wide or even smaller sometimes. And so making sure you’re resizing those images properly so that it’s just loading it only what you need and nothing more really can make a huge difference.
When as we’re kind of moving forward here, we’re kind of approaching our time, when you’re talking about actionable SEO wins, where let’s maybe get like a kind of like beginner, intermediate and advanced kind of suggestions here if you don’t mind. So I’m kind of brand new to SEO.
Where should I get started? Like what are the first real things I should be focused on? It sounds like On-Page SEO is probably the best place to start. Other than like completely rebuilding my website, you know, what are some things I could do this week to really kind of help things out?
Nat Miletic (24:40) Yeah, that’s a great question. what I like to recommend to people is sign up for like a free SEO tool. Just do like an SEO audit. Ahrefs is a great tool. You can like sign up for a free account where, you know, you can do a free audit basically on a website. And it’ll give you a bunch of like actionable tips that you can apply to your website in order to improve the performance.
We also have a tool that we developed called seotest.me and it’s good for testing individual pages. if you need a, like let’s say you put in your URL homepage and you want to get some quick tips on like what to improve or any issues, you can use that tool for free and like crawl a specific page of a website. Ahrefs is great if you want to do a crawl of the entire site. So it’s a little bit more comprehensive.
and it’ll do an entire crawl of the website. It’ll give you kind of like a score and it’ll give you recommendations on what you can fix. So that’s a great like beginner strategy because not only will you get an audit of your website, you’ll also get some tips specific to like, here’s an issue, here’s how to fix it, right? So they’ll kind of even teach you. SEO is vast, right? So it’s like such a huge area where some people
you know, specialize in just like technical SEO, other people specialize in, you know, like backlink acquisition, there’s like so many areas, right? So there’s, it’s a little bit overwhelming. So that’s where I would start, because that’ll teach you a lot when it comes to like technical SEO. Yeah, in term, do you want me to go to like medium and advanced too?
Roger Williams (26:11) Excellent. Excellent.
Yeah, yeah,
where would you go? So I’ve got the audit, I’ve kind of fixed some of the low hanging fruit. Where should I start going to next in terms of building out my SEO strategy?
Nat Miletic (26:26) So the next thing you can do without rebuilding a website as well is looking at some of that internal linking within your website. So optimizing sort of the user experience and how, what pages you’re linking to within your website. So for example, know, important pages that you want to drive traffic to, you want to link as many internal hyperlinks to that page from your website. that means like,
On the homepage, let’s say you have a service page for web design. You want to link from the homepage to that web design page. And also all the other pages should be linked to that specific page. That’s like an example of internal linking. Again, internal linking is a little bit more of a medium sort of strategy, medium difficulty. You have to learn a lot more about how to apply that. There’s that, and then there’s also the structure.
content creation. So you need to learn a little bit more about if I’m, you know, for example, trying to promote this particular service, I need a lot of supporting content for that particular service on how to, you know, boost that page from from an SEO perspective. So that’s kind of like a more of a medium strategy, setting up a good structure on your existing site, creating some content that supports the services or pages that you want to promote.
Roger Williams (27:41) Excellent, excellent. Before
we before we go into the advanced as a like kind of a bookmark here. How do like navigation links work into this both in the header in the footer? Do those count as internal linking? Or is that kind of degraded because it’s header and footer stuff?
Nat Miletic (27:57) Yeah, great question. Again, they are deemed as not as important as actual internal links on a page. So a lot of people make that mistake where they’re like, I’m interlinking a lot because this page is in my menu, right? So it’s linked everywhere. And while technically that’s true, those are usually wrapped around like a header, footer, tag. So Google devaluates them a little bit. So the value of a link is usually like,
you know, for your most authoritative page, usually your homepage, if you’re linking to a specific page, the higher up on the page as possible, that’s like a high value link, you know, pointing to the page you want to rank. So there’s a lot of different, like, nuances when it comes to interlinking. That’s why I said it’s kind of like a intermediate type difficulty problem, right, that people need to research a little bit more. And that’s one of the things like common misconception where people say, well, you know, I have it in my footer.
Roger Williams (28:45) Yeah, yeah.
Nat Miletic (28:52) or header so it’s like a valuable one because I’m linking to it everywhere but actually it’s not as important as like having it on an actual page.
Roger Williams (29:01) Excellent, excellent. All right, so let’s go big boy time, big gal time, advanced SEO techniques. What are you looking at?
Nat Miletic (29:10) Yeah, like I think still if you’re trying to rank on Google specifically and other search engines, backlink acquisition is still like, you know, the one that will set you kind of like above your competitors. The higher the authority of your site, the better. That’s still the most difficult I would say in order to, you know, acquire those links. What you want to do is
have authoritative sites linking back to your site. So not just any site creating like a bunch of you know, spammy links on thousands of different sites, but you know, getting good authoritative links pointing back to your site. And that’s the most difficult part, I would say. You either have to pay somebody to do that, or you need to spend a lot of time like promoting yourself, you know, doing, you know, being on social media, you know, creating relationships with different.
companies in order to get a link created back to your site and those kinds of things. So it’s very time consuming and it’s very difficult for somebody who’s just starting out to do and to know what type of link is valuable and where it should point to, right? It’s another sort of aspect. So it’s still the most difficult. I’ve seen some, you know, very slow and crappy looking sites that rank very well because they have a very good link profile, you know, that
you know, might get devalued a little bit with the AI overviews on Google. What I’m finding now and what I’m reading is that a lot of people are not going past that AI overview, right? So even if you are, you know, getting that snippet in the AI overview, your people are not clicking at the links. They’re not scrolling down. They just get their answer. They’re done, right? So they just kind of, just kind of crawl away, right? So.
Roger Williams (30:49) Absolutely. Are there any tools that you’re using? I know that back in the day, was like Moz was really good for looking at domain authority. Is that still, like what are the tools now that you’re using to kind of help give you an idea of what might be a good page versus not?
Nat Miletic (31:05) Yeah, so we use Ahrefs. There’s a few others out there. All the SEO tools kind of have their own sort of ranking or authority score. Keep in mind that Google probably has their own. So all of these tools can give you a really good indication on where you’re at.
It doesn’t mean that if you have 99 on Ahrefs that all of a sudden you’re the most authoritative site on the internet because Google probably looks at it slightly differently. But they’re good metric. They’re a good metric to determine if you’re moving in the right direction, if you are authoritative based on other websites in your niche or your industry. So it’s still good kind of measuring stick. But again, take it with a grain of salt because it can also be easily manipulated as well.
Roger Williams (31:52) Okay, all right. And I think all of this kind of hearkens back, I remember way back in the day, 15, maybe 20 years ago now.
there was an SEO specialist and a blogger and they kind of did a competition of who could outrank each other or something for a certain keyword. And the SEO person was, you know, put this huge back linking and, and, know, some of the dark arts of SEO into action. And the blogger just reached out to his network and said, Hey everybody, put a back link to me with this keyword is the anchor text. And, he, and he blew the doors off the SEO person. And so,
I think, you know, and especially with SEO now being more AI driven with these AI overviews and chat GPT results is having your network and having content that actually speaks to people and and gets them to respond to it is still the winning combination. You can you know, you can manufacture as much as you want. But if you can actually connect with people and get them to be
A, your customers, right? Like that’s the goal, but also your fans and your champions. That’s going to help a ton here. Nat, I’ve really appreciated this. We’re kind of at time a little bit here. I wanted to spend a little bit of time kind of going over some questions here. Endry is just blowing up the question area. Thank you so much for your questions, Endry.
One thing that he asked specifically is, do you recommend Rank Math AI content for blogs?
Nat Miletic (33:21) Rank math AI content for blogs. I haven’t used rank maths AI much ⁓ To comment I’m not sure what you know engine they’re using in the in the background I I would you know caution against using like just AI content blindly for any type of content creation it’s great for like, you know creating content overviews and
Roger Williams (33:28) Okay.
Nat Miletic (33:47) you know, getting ideas and stuff, but I wouldn’t use any of those AI generated sort of blog posts blindly where I’m just copying and pasting and posting it on my website. We use AI for some content creation, but we also, you know, have that like human touch where we go through it, modify it, make sure it makes sense and so forth. So I haven’t used the RankMath one specifically, but all of them are basically using the same engine. So you can use like, you know, chat GPT or
any of the other LLMs in order to create content these days. just be cautious of making sure it still makes sense and you’re still touching it up and making it not as obvious to humans that you’ve generated it with AI.
Roger Williams (34:27) Sure, no, absolutely. And I’m not familiar with that tool either, but I can tell you from my use of ChatGPT is I will run into kind of a similar issue where, you know, if I just say, create me some content about SEO, it’s really going to crank out some really generic stuff that, you know, A, it’s not going to look any different from anything else. It’s not going to give people anything new or insightful to kind of go with.
And so they’re going to kind of tell that but on the flip side
you know, when I use things like if I take a transcript like such as the transcript from this interview and I load that into there and then I use it to kind of help me build an outline and maybe even build some of the content, I find a lot more success in terms of engaging content with that. you know, it’s as much as you’re putting in, you’re going to get out of these tools, I think. Great. So the next question that Andre’s got is hrefs versus semrush.
feel like I know where you’re gonna go with this, but I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts on those two tools.
Nat Miletic (35:30) Yeah, I’ve used both and I don’t really have a preference, honestly. Like I haven’t used SEMrush in a while. I started with SEMrush, went over to Ahrefs and then I was thinking about going back to SEMrush. yeah, exactly. No, was something else. was like Ahrefs.
Roger Williams (35:43) Because of the discount, they got a new discount going this month.
Nat Miletic (35:51) I prefer the Ahrefs interface to be honest with you just because it’s a little bit faster, you know, to kind of like navigate through pages and different options and stuff. But they’re both great tools. Like, yeah, just, I think there was a limit on like number of projects you can have in SEMrush. So they got to be like way more expensive, you can only add like certain number of websites. On Ahrefs, you can add as many websites as you want, but then it’s like credit based. you know, if you’re not like,
Roger Williams (35:56) Okay.
Nat Miletic (36:17) doing crawls all the time or whatever, you can add like 100 websites, right? But in SEMrush, you can only add like, you know, five or 10 or 15 or whatever, right? So it’s, that was the only reason why I preferred Ahrefs, you know, in the past, I don’t know if that’s changed. But now I’m kind of on Ahrefs and I’ve been using it for a while, but totally indifferent. They’re both great tools.
Roger Williams (36:26) Okay.
Excellent, excellent. Back in the day I used to use Screaming Frog. Is that still a tool that’s pretty useful? Where do you use that in your stack?
Nat Miletic (36:40) Yeah, totally.
Definitely. like Screaming Frog is great for technical audits. So you can put in a URL of a website and it’ll crawl the whole website and give you a indication of the technical health. Ahrefs and SEMrush do the same thing as well. Screaming Frog is just a little bit more efficient and faster at it. So if you have a huge site, Screaming Frog is gonna go through it.
very quickly and give you some good indications on what needs to be fixed.
Roger Williams (37:10) Excellent, excellent. All right, and then finally, Andrew is asking about Kinsta versus some cloud hosting. I’m not familiar with that brand, Wink Wink. ⁓ Where’s the difference? And so, you I can kind of speak to this a little bit. You know, I think, you know, when you’re looking at cloud hosting, there’s different levels.
Nat Miletic (37:19) Okay.
Roger Williams (37:30) of it and in terms of how integrated they are with the cloud host. So what I can tell you is that at Kinsta, we have a DevOps team who are all Google Cloud platform experts. And so they spend their day, you know, looking at what we’ve got currently tweaking it, making sure that it’s the most efficient.
But we’re also looking at the horizon and what Google’s got coming next. And so one of the big things we did a few years ago, Google came out with new machines. It’s called, they call them C3D machines. The prior were C2. And we made the decision to just upgrade all of our clients’ websites to those faster machines as they came out. Not all the Google data centers have these faster machines yet. But as they’re released,
we’re upgrading all of our clients’ websites and that’s at no additional charge. So that, you know, that to me speaks a lot about our focus on performance and speed. We want our clients to have the best possible experience with their websites for their clients. And so that, think that really speaks volumes to our philosophy. You know, there’s a lot of little things in there. So we use Linux containers for all of the sites
So you’ve got your own Nginx server, your own MySQL database, your own PHP, that also means you have your own instance of WP CLI. So all of those are working really efficiently. And then there’s knock on effects from that. So when we do a backup,
we’re taking a snapshot of the container. And so when we restore it, we’re just restoring the entire container. And so we’re not messing with files and databases. just the whole thing gets restored. And so our backups work really quickly. And that’s something I would encourage that you test at any hosting provider you’ve got that’s providing you with backups or God forbid you’re having to use a plugin for doing backups.
Make sure you’re testing those every once in a while. Make sure that the backup actually works and see how long it takes for it to restore so that when there is an emergency or somebody does make a mistake, you know how long it’s going to take to resolve that mistake and get the restore back in working. There’s a whole lot of things I could spend another hour talking about, all the features at Kinsta, but the last one I’ll really hit on is support.
WordPress websites are complicated. There’s a lot of different ways that you can configure them. You’re using third party software in a lot of cases. mean WordPress itself is third party, but it’s pretty stable. But you’re using plugins and a lot of times you have no idea who’s maintaining these plugins and things can go wrong. And that’s where support really becomes an absolutely essential part of your
plan, your operations, being able to reach out to Kinsta. We have an under two minute response time. Our support engineers are all WordPress experts. We only have one tier of support, so you’re getting the person you’re talking with is gonna handle you through till resolution.
And even if it’s something that’s out of our scope of support, we’re not here to develop. We’re not going to touch your code. But we will do our best to point at what we think is affecting it. So if it is something in your site, we’re going to try and help pinpoint that for you. So I can’t downplay support enough. But Nat, I’d love to hear maybe your thoughts in a couple of minutes here of what you think about Kinsta hosting.
Nat Miletic (40:49) Yeah, for sure. mean, you know, not all cloud providers are created equal for sure, like when it comes to hosting, just because even if you’re comparing, if you think you’re comparing apples to apples, for example, like, I’m just like renting a server on Google workspace through this one provider and another provider, there’s a lot more configuration that goes into it behind the scenes. And so to give you a, like a practical example, we’ve moved sites from one cloud provider
to Kinsta, for example, and saw like a crazy improvement in performance. Even though, like if you look at it from a spec perspective, I’m getting like a server with this many CPUs or whatever in memory here and there, it really like, it’s still a significant difference in terms of performance just because how the hosting is sort of tuned and configured for WordPress. So it’s something that’s kind of seems like a little bit not as intuitive.
because you would think, well, it just comes down to specs or whatever. But there’s actually a lot of different things when it comes to configuring these servers for WordPress specifically that make them run efficiently. Because like you said, Roger, it’s very complicated. There’s databases, there’s files, there’s all kinds of configuration things that need to be tuned correctly for all of this to work for busy and complex sites. So that’s one thing where I think like…
Kinsta is really good at tuning those environments for WordPress websites to make them quick and efficient. And then the other thing is support. Like, you know, some other providers have stumped them before, but with like Kinsta support, you know, even for complex issues, I’ve never been, I’ve never like stumped them where they’re like, not sure. And then I have to deal with it myself, you know, kind of thing. yeah, I’ve always had, so that’s like a huge.
Roger Williams (42:30) you
Nat Miletic (42:38) Especially for agencies, because you don’t need basic support. You usually need something a little bit beyond basic, because you’ve already tried the basic things and it didn’t work. So it’s something configuration-wise where you might need to tweak things. And that’s where the hosting provider kind of provides that extra layer of support, which is great and which is something that I really appreciate with Kinsta hosting.
Roger Williams (43:00) Beautiful. I couldn’t put it any better and the support team is going to really be happy to hear all of that. You know, with that said, it looks like we’ve gotten all of the questions answered. Thank you so much, Indri, for playing along here. Nat, I really appreciate your time and your insights. I’ve got a lot to unpack here. You know, it sounds like…
The basics are still critical. You need to have a good website. You need to make sure that it’s performant. You need to make sure your internal linking. You know, it is amazing to me how often I’ll be on the homepage of a website and I’ll be totally lost of what should I do from here. And so, you know, if you want somebody to buy something,
put that buy now button in there. And then finally backlinks backlinks will never go away. mean, it’s going to be just part of the part of the system here. All right, we do have one last question. Andries getting just inside of the line here. In your thought in your opinion that what’s the best way to build a WordPress site? Are you building from WordPress core plus Elementor Pro?
or pick a theme or a builder. Like, where’s your stack at right now? Where are you building for clients and suggesting people go?
Nat Miletic (44:13) Yeah, I mean, there’s so many different ways. That’s the great thing about WordPress. There’s so many different ways to build an awesome website. So I’m not going to say my way is the right way or the only way for sure. But we use Elementor Pro for like 99 % of our projects. We use their Hello theme. So we build everything from scratch. And we’ve had some great results with that.
Roger Williams (44:23) you
Nat Miletic (44:34) you know, there’s again, there’s different we’ve used the bricks builder as well, which is also great. And I know a lot of people are using the new full site editing as well for like, you know, from a performance perspective, and kind of keeping up with some of the latest sort of WordPress trends and stuff as well. you know, there’s, there’s a lot of different ways, there’s no right or wrong way. Actually, there is a wrong way. It’s like buying a cheap theme somewhere and just like installing like 1000 plugins.
That’s the wrong way. what I would recommend is like pick a tool that’s fast and efficient that you can learn and grow with and become an expert in a tool and use that tool for all of the different projects that you do.
Roger Williams (45:05) Ha ha.
Excellent. All right. And so a quick follow up to that then is I know that there’s always this concern when you rebuild a website of losing your SEO authority, right? Because you’ve changed how the linking structure works, whatever. How much should people be concerned about that? And then B, what’s a good cadence for refreshing the design of your website? How many years?
should somebody wait before they’re like, you know what, think I just need to rebuild the whole website.
Nat Miletic (45:52) Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen some horror stories, unfortunately, where clients have rebuilt their websites, where we were like doing SEO for them and they totally missed the boat on certain key things and kind of saw their rankings decrease, unfortunately. And unfortunately, sometimes they don’t let us know that they’re rebuilding the website. And then we find out later, like, why did your rankings drop?
because they sometimes didn’t take the right steps. So we specialize in that. We do a lot of projects where SEO is top of mind and we’re rebuilding the website for the client. And so we have a process of following certain steps to ensure that that doesn’t happen. What you want to see is that your rankings increase with the redevelopment of a site, not decrease, right? And so, you know…
Roger Williams (46:15) Yeah.
Nat Miletic (46:38) the in terms of like the age of the website, I don’t think there’s like a set rule for sure, but usually around the three year timeframe is like where you should maybe be thinking about changing it to refresh it a bit. You don’t have to like rebuild the whole website, but looking at maybe just refreshing it a bit from a look and feel perspective and user experience perspective. Usually we’ve seen around like the three year timeframe be realistic.
Roger Williams (47:06) Okay, all right, excellent. All right, well, with that said, questions are closed. Now, I really do appreciate your time, man. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. If people want to hire you, or just say hi to you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Nat Miletic (47:22) Yeah, add me on LinkedIn for sure and check out our website, cliowebsites.com.
Roger Williams (47:29) Beautiful. All right. And my name is Roger. I’m with Kinsta. If you’re interested in learning more about Kinsta, head over to our website, Kinsta.com. You can read a whole bunch there. You can click to talk to a salesperson. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me there. Feel free to reach out and ask questions, say hello, and I’d love to talk to you. So with that said, Nat, great talking to you,
Nat Miletic (47:51) Thanks Roger. Thanks for the opportunity great chatting with you as well
When Chris DuBois left the U.S. Army after seven years as an infantry officer, his next move surprised even him: he joined a marketing agency. Within nine months, he was running operations. A couple of years later, he was CEO.
“Apparently, ‘I can carry a lot of weight and shoot things’ doesn’t translate on a resume,” Chris joked in our recent chat. But what did translate was his ability to lead teams, synchronize complex moving parts, and stay calm under pressure. These skills now fuel his work helping digital agencies find their focus and scale with intention.
Chris and I met earlier this year at the Agency Builders Conference, where he gave a standout talk on what he calls the “Dynamic Agency OS”, a positioning framework built to help agencies stop spinning their wheels and start owning their niche.
The Real Cost of Not Choosing a Niche
“The biggest waste I see in agencies? Fear of niching down,” Chris says. “People think niching means saying no to revenue. But if you never say no, you never become known.”
Instead of settling on broad verticals like “manufacturing,” Chris pushes agencies to go deeper: “Are you serving textilemanufacturers? Paper? Pick a sub-industry. Then pick a job role within that: CMO, HR manager, ops director. Then focus on a real problem you can solve.”
It’s not about limiting yourself, he says. It’s about making your services magnetic to the right people.
Lessons from the Battlefield
Chris’s military background adds a rare depth to his consulting style. He’s not here to shout orders, he’s here to help agency leaders step into the commander role, orchestrating their team and tools to win battles on their own terms.
But even with his combat-hardened focus, Chris admits that agency life burned him out faster than active duty ever did. “There’s something uniquely exhausting about the digital world, the constant context-switching, the email pings, the approvals… It takes its toll.”
That realization fuels his mission today: helping other agency owners avoid burnout by building stronger systems.
Vendor Partnerships That Actually Help
Chris had kind words for vendors, too. “If a platform can make my life easier and help me stay focused on my client’s problem, that’s value. Even better if it helps me collaborate with my clients more effectively.”
That mindset is why his recent All In Agency Summit brought so many collaborators, even “competitors”, together. His goal? Grow the pie.
“We all serve agencies. We’re all part of the same market. The more attention we bring to that market, the more everyone benefits.”
Chris is building something powerful, and he’s doing it with humility, clarity, and an eye for the bigger picture. If you’re running an agency and feeling stuck, burnt out, or unsure how to grow — he’s the kind of voice worth listening to.
Roger Williams (00:00) Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Chris. Hey Chris, how are you doing?
Chris DuBois (00:05) Great, Roger. How are you?
Roger Williams (00:06) I’m doing really well. You know, we met just a couple of months ago at the Agency Builders Conference in Florida, and you gave a presentation about the Dynamic Agency OS and your approach to helping agencies, you know, kind of navigate the world and everything. And I really enjoyed the presentation. We connected. But today I want to learn more about where you came from. Like, what’s the origin story? How did you end up in digital marketing?
So, you know, kind of take us back a little bit. What got you into all of this?
Chris DuBois (00:35) Yeah, it’s a very convoluted path. When I came out of college, which with a degree in English, I decided the best way to use that was to be an infantry officer in the U S army. And so, so I did that as on active duty for seven years and moved around a handful of times got to do the fun exploration stuff. But then we, had some kids decided time to get out and actually couldn’t find a lot of job opportunities. Apparently when your resume.
Roger Williams (00:41) Yeah.
⁓ okay.
Okay.
Chris DuBois (01:03) you know, I can carry a lot of weight on my back for a long ways and shoot things, doesn’t translate to the corporate world. So, I actually started working at a marketing agency and then did that, learned how to market, nine months later became their head of ops. A couple of years later became the CEO and, ran that for a bit. And then, yeah, step down because I realized, I just wanted to take a little more control of my life, but to, help agencies kind of learn from some of the.
Roger Williams (01:09) Okay.
Chris DuBois (01:29) the harder learnings that I had to go through, but then also to help them on the lead generation side of things that I felt like I had figured out.
Roger Williams (01:38) Okay, all right, all right. So a lot to unpack here. So let’s go back a little bit. First of all, thank you for your service. That’s really awesome. When you were in the infantry, are there things that you, I mean, I’m gonna assume there’s a ton of stuff that you took from that that applies to all the work that you’re doing now, but was there like one or two things that specifically kind of help you stay focused in this crazy digital world?
Chris DuBois (01:41) Yeah.
That’s a good question. I think so when, when I was at my basic officer course, they really beat into us as one saying, and it’s that we were becoming masters of synchronizing assets in time and space. And it sounds like really, really great when you say like that. It’s like what you would put in your LinkedIn headline, right? But like in reality, here’s what it means. When you’re
Roger Williams (02:18) Yeah.
Chris DuBois (02:23) As an infantry officer, you’re never actually the guy shooting your rifle. You’re on the radio, you’re talking to people, you’re coordinating, you’re moving the pieces to support everyone else. From a leadership perspective, it’s awesome. Cause it means like, you know, where you best fit and that’s, you know, aligning all the pieces to make sure your team has what they need and they’re, they’re structured for success on the battlefield, right? You’re not only thinking, okay, I need to move these guys here. I need to move them here, but it’s also.
It’s 3D. like we have helicopters, right? We have artillery flying through the air, hopefully not hitting those helicopters. Like, and so when you’re courting all those assets and it’s all based on a very strict timeline, I felt like moving into the agency world was actually very easy to like, just look at the pieces, see what we need to do in order to make things work. But at the same time, I remember it was probably like month three or four of agency life. And I was like, man, I’m tired.
Like this might be the first time in my life I’m feeling burned out. I just realized cause of how different it was, like where you’re, you’re stressed about different things and, or maybe it just the mental fatigue of right being behind a computer and, you got all these, these assets that you need the client to approve and you’re working on the next thing you’re thinking three steps ahead, but it really like, man, I don’t even know where to go with that. Like it was probably the first time I felt burnout. And so there was also like some.
realization that agency life is hard, like coming from an infantry officer, right? There is something there.
Roger Williams (03:49) I, you know, so that, you know, that speaks of loads and I hope all the agency life people watching this, you know, take something from that, like realize that, you know, while it’s not as severe a work as the infantry is involved in, it’s still, takes, it takes a tax on you. There’s a lot of emotions involved. And, and I can attest to this, just the brain freeze, the analysis paralysis that occurs.
is wild stuff. So thanks for sharing all of that. That’s very insightful. As you’ve moved into this agency consultant’s work, and now you’re helping the agencies kind of maybe see through some burnout and really focus on their accounts, where’s your big focus when you’re coming into an agency and engaging them?
Chris DuBois (04:34) First thing I’m looking at is their positioning. Everything that we’re doing stems from how you’re positioned as a business. And so really what the dynamic agency OS is set up to do is help you with that positioning so that you can create great offers and then run your business, like do everything else. But that positioning is going to dictate literally everything, right? It’s who are we going to talk to? How do we need to set up our services to best serve these people? What problems do they have?
I mean, like every part of your business is influenced by how you’re positioned as an agency. And so that’s always where I start. It’s like, let’s make sure that we’re looking at the right audience, the right place so that we can build everything else accordingly.
Roger Williams (05:08) Okay.
What would you say is the number one thing that is holding agencies back or causing them to waste their time and money?
Chris DuBois (05:21) a fear of niching down. is, everyone approaches positioning and the ideal state is to niche down and be very well known for one thing. But in doing so, you’re saying no to a lot of other things. And there are very few agencies that have their lead generation engine, I guess, humming to the point where they can say no to other clients. And so everybody wants.
Roger Williams (05:23) Okay.
Chris DuBois (05:45) everything is coming in and that’s why you start getting these bloated service menus and you get people who are super stressed out about everything. But when in reality by niching down you actually start taking on really good, like best fit clients. They start coming to you asking for help, right? They start referring you more business and all these things. so yeah, not niching is probably the biggest frustration from my perspective and then also for those agency owners.
Roger Williams (06:11) Absolutely, so as you’re starting to work with an agency, would only give away too much of the secret sauce, but what are some things that people overlook that maybe they’re already niching and they should recognize that and start focusing that
Chris DuBois (06:26) So yeah, I’ll try to do this briefly. So I view positioning as like a multi-layer approach. So first, a lot of agencies will pick a vertical, they stop there. They’re like, I got an industry, that’s where we are. It’s like, yeah, but anyone can just do that, right? And so we gotta go deeper. Let’s pick actually a sub-industry. So if we’re talking manufacturing, we’re actually gonna get into textile manufacturing, or we’re gonna get into.
Roger Williams (06:30) Yeah, yeah.
Chris DuBois (06:51) you know, paper manufacturing, like something very specific, because when you start talking about that, like people’s ears perk up. It’s like when you say their name out loud in public, like people look over at you. very few people are going out talking to textile manufacturers, right? It’s just, once you have that, that’s your vertical positioning. Then you look at your horizontal positioning. There’s a bunch of different definitions for this. My view is it’s by job function. like CMOs, HR specialists, because those go across industry.
But when you look at a specific industry with that, they’re going to talk about things in a very specific way, right? And so it lets us really refine the search for who we’re looking for and get in front of them. We can better learn their problems, their pain points, which is the next piece we then have layer three is problem positioning, which, and this is like the ultimate, this is where we want to be. When you have your vertical, you have your horizontal, they overlap in that one piece. When you hone in on that circle, you get to look at all of the problems.
that that individual in that industry has, and then you can pick one. Pick any of those that you can make the most impact to help that client, and when you can niche on that problem, people know you are the solution.
Roger Williams (08:00) Sweet. Yeah.
Chris DuBois (08:00) That was quick.
That was a very abbreviated. I just did a 30 minute presentation on that for the summit yesterday. And it was a little more in depth.
Roger Williams (08:08) No, no, that was great. And now you’ve got a nice little sound bite. I’ll be sure to share it with you. So that’s awesome. I like the focus there. in no way, nowhere in that did you talk about building a website, social media. Those are all things, I’m assuming, come much later. But first, you’re telling the customer, hey, I know who you are. I know what your pains are. I’m here to help.
And then you can start kind of laying out the action plan of, all the different ways you’re going to go do this. I want to switch topics here, subjects just a little bit, and self-serve a little bit, right? So Kinsta is a vendor. We’re here to help and support agencies. As you work with the agencies, what are some of the ways that vendors, that you see that vendors can come in and really help the agency?
know, niche down or niche down as you know, some people are saying, I’ve heard. Where do you see the vendors playing a role for the agencies here?
Chris DuBois (09:02) So there’s a handful of ways. think on one front, it’s if you can make the agency’s life easier so they can focus on other stuff, right? That’s there are so many very, like we were just talking with the infantry, right? Like, yeah, I can talk to the sniper team while the mortar section and the guys on the ground, all of these things. But like, if I only had to focus on one thing, I could get really good at that one thing. So if I have someone helping with operations, if I have someone helping with sales, like all of these other, these, these tools and platforms,
that can make my life easier, now I can just focus on solving that problem for my ideal client. So that’s one front. There’s also the ability for platforms where I can use you with my client. It’s now something we can actually build a relationship on as well, and it gives us a little more, like if we had a Venn diagram, right, we have a little more overlap, and it makes it you stickier as a service provider.
Roger Williams (09:55) Excellent, excellent. All right, final subject, because I like to keep these interviews short and sweet. You just had your All In Agency Summit. This thing was a rock star cast of presenters. How did it go? What is your major takeaway from doing this crazy event?
Chris DuBois (10:13) first, thank you to Kinsta for supporting, sponsoring the event. was awesome. ⁓ But yeah, man, biggest takeaway. I have a strong, very strong belief that there’s no one way to do anything. so part of my philosophy with that is bring as many people in here as I can to share all of these insights with as many people as possible. And so that’s really what the summit is about. And I think
Roger Williams (10:19) Amen. Happy to help.
Chris DuBois (10:39) probably a lesson that I would love to share with everyone, which might not actually be a direct agency thing, but I think there are two ways that you can get attention for your business. And it’s either one, you go out and you do your marketing and you do all the things that would attract people to like your stall in the market. So that’s one method. You can also just attract attention to the market overall. And so that’s really what like what this event did. It’s like, yes, we’re competitors, right?
For anyone just listening, that’s air quotes, right? ⁓ We all serve agencies, but it’s like by bringing attention to all of this and showing that there’s a support network here, more people want to pay attention to it they want to get involved. And now we actually build up a community and now every stall in this market is getting more service. so.
Roger Williams (11:10) Yeah, yeah.
I love it.
In the WordPress world, we look at this as we have competitors in WordPress, hosting competitors and whatnot. But to me, I’m really focused on growing the pie, right? Let’s get more people using WordPress. Why aren’t the youth using WordPress to create websites? Why are they all on TikTok and Facebook and wasting their time and effort on platforms that…
are not giving them money. So let’s grow the pie and find a way of getting more people involved. So I really love that philosophy, man. That’s really awesome to hear about. We’re at the end of time. These things fly by. ⁓ If people want to get in touch with you, which they should, so when they want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out and interact with you?
Chris DuBois (12:00) Look at that. Yeah, it’s quick.
You can find me on LinkedIn or go to dynamicagencyos.com.
Roger Williams (12:15) Wonderful. Chris, great talking to you, man. I look forward to talking with you again soon. I’d like to do a follow-up, see how things are going and other new ideas you’ve got. Have a great day.
Chris DuBois (12:25) Yeah, you too, Thanks for having me.
Chris Hinds doesn’t just know accessibility, he knows how to sell it.
In our second Kinsta Talks session with Chris, VP of Products at Equalize Digital, we dive into how agencies can build accessibility into client projects, and their own revenue models.
Fox vs. Ostrich: Two Approaches, Two Outcomes
Chris walks us through a case study featuring a fictional small business, Hearth & Harvest Café. Two fictional agencies submit proposals for the website:
The Ostrich Agency: Fast, cheap, and focused on checking boxes. They use no-code tools, slap on an accessibility overlay, and finish the project quickly.
The Fox Agency: Strategic, long-term thinkers. They plan for accessibility from the start, build with reusable components, and test thoroughly.
Spoiler: One agency ends up with a lawsuit. The other nets a five-year ROI of over $1.2 million.
The Real Costs of Skipping Accessibility
Accessibility overlays may sound like a shortcut, but as Chris explains, they’re risky business:
They only catch ~10% of real issues
They often conflict with screen readers and user settings
They’ve been involved in lawsuits and FTC actions
They bleed revenue from agencies who could be capturing that spend themselves
“If overlays worked, they’d be selling to disabled users—not to businesses,” Chris says.
The ROI of Doing It Right
Accessibility improvements don’t just help a few people. Chris explains how they:
Increase conversions (from 0.5% to 2% in one case)
Improve session time and page depth (30–40% gains)
Boost SEO (Google measures accessibility signals too)
Create happier, more loyal users
Or as Chris puts it:
Accessibility is a performance multiplier.
Tools to Help You Start
Chris recommends starting with automated testing using tools like Accessibility Checker for WordPress. Then gradually build expertise or partner with pros for audits, remediation, and user testing.
“Every week I talk to agency leaders who want to do this better,” he says.
Roger Williams (00:00) You said that improving accessibility from terrible compliance to full compliance,
is a 10 to 20 percent increase in traffic. How much of that is traffic from people who first of all could not access the site before because they have some sort of disability and now they can access it? how much of that is search engine traffic because now the site is semantically accurate and presents well to the bots? how much of it is something else that I’m just not even aware of?
Chris Hinds (00:29) My unhelpful answer is all of the above and more.
there’s this ripple effect of considering all of these things and putting real thought and effort behind the usability of your systems for literally everyone and not just people like you that it just has this ripple effect that that really extends to 100 % of your audience, not.
20 % and certainly not 2%.
the biggest extreme. I’ve seen it like double or triple, but more average is like a 30 to 40 % jump, they’re spending more time on your content. They are consuming more and they’re going deeper into whatever the user journeys are that you’ve set up.
those metrics all directly in a feedback loop go back to SEO, right?
Roger Williams (01:13) this is an accessibility series that Chris from Equalize Digital has been very generous to give us some time and kind of go over your insights and expertise that you’ve gained over the years of doing all of this stuff. And I really enjoyed our first session. You you hit.
we’re really hitting specifically agencies on how to sell accessibility. And so the first session was great. It was a great overview for how agencies can go ahead and start like proposing these ideas. And then in this session, we’re really diving, we’re kind of deep diving further into some actual examples.
And with all that said, Chris, can you go ahead and get us started?
Chris Hinds (01:55) Yeah, yeah, let’s get into this quickly. in this is part two of a series, like you said, Roger, but I don’t want anyone to tune out and go find part one right now. There’s plenty that you can get from this and then circle back to part one to get a little bit more of the context of what we’re going to be going into and some of the details. But we’ll be going in.
to an example of a real world small business website project that’s based on kind of an amalgamation of multiple real projects into one to kind of create this.
very realistic case study of what doing accessibility versus not doing accessibility looks like. So we’re going to be digging into two very different approaches to that same project, including budgets. And then we’re going to project out with real numbers ROI for each approach based on what we’ve seen and kind of comparing those results. In part one, just a very quick recap, we covered how treating accessibility as a single isolated touch point in a project is less efficient. We also talked through the accessibility
essential and what they cost in terms of time or money to name a few that’s like automated testing tools evaluations remediation and then multimedia accessibility dock accessibility all of those things all of that’s in part one and you can go find that later and then we talked about the cost of ignoring accessibility and the idea that that creates debt that gets repaid later in the form of lost time lost revenue increased risk and let’s let’s dive into this so very similar to people
who attended part one, have two archetypal agencies here. The first time it was tortoise and hare and they were a little bit more basic, but these agencies that I’m going to be talking about today are a little bit less one dimensional than the tortoise and the hare agency. Both are based on what I’d call very stereotypical types of real world agencies that I’ve seen that I’ve worked with. And we’re going to dig into the website project first that each agency is going to tackle.
So the client is, this is not a real, or if, if you see anything real based on this, it’s purely a coincidence because I, I used a, language model to help me generate like the profile and the facts about this business based on some inputs. but it, it’s a kind of, like I said, a mixture of, different, real world customers that we’ve seen over the years. So hearth and harvest cafe is a specialty cafe, artisanal bakery. This fictitious place is, or.
Victitious Business is located in Fremont, California, and they’re this cozy local cafe. They do sustainable sourcing. They serve, you know, individuals, families, students, professionals in their local area. They generate about $700K in annual revenue, and they have a small but dedicated team of nine employees who handle their day-to-day operations. They’re looking for a new website project.
or a new website. The reason that they are looking for a new website stems from multiple facets. So first, they want a modern mobile friendly design. The current website they have was built by like a family member or a relative of the owner as a side project when the business was way smaller and had less money. It’s since grown, they need to have an online presence that fits kind of the mold of the type of business they are now. They need an online ordering and reservation system. They don’t currently have one and might basically
they’re relying on foot traffic and people finding their number on various public listings to call and make those reservations. And they want just generally for customers to engage better with the website online. They also want to showcase catering and local partnerships in an effort to drum up bigger sales from higher value customers who maybe want to have them cater events at their offices or at local farmers markets and things like that. And then they want better performance in local search like many small businesses do for obvious reasons.
in their specific case, there’s a construction project going on in their area that has reduced foot traffic because it’s blocked a lot of parking. So they need more of an online presence to
Roger Williams (05:36) Hmm.
Chris Hinds (05:40) continue to see the same growth that they’ve been seeing. then accessibility is bit of concern. They’ve had some business colleagues and friends who maybe have been sued themselves or have gotten complaints. And there’s some regulations going on in California that have them a little bit concerned about accessibility overall. So they have directly mentioned this to these agencies in terms of technical specifications. These are going to look really similar to what we talked about at the end of the last presentation. So they want, they want a custom design. They want
four design pages and layouts, a contact form and integration with an off the shelf. That’s what that OTS is online ordering a reservation system. And then the content includes 25 web pages. have 10 PDF files, 30 pages total across those PDF files. And that’s like event catering menus and sample menus and things like that. And then they have a five minute video that they shot with a production company that showcases their local partnerships with growers. The website gets about 20,000 hits per month on average and their best guess based on
on
just customer surveys at the front of the restaurant is that maybe 0.15 % of customers like saw the website and that’s what prompted them to come in. So let’s talk about our two agencies.
So the first agency is the Ostrich Agency. So they’re all about execution.
They’re less about strategy. And what I mean by that is they’re about get it done, whatever the customer wants, get it done quickly. And they’re kind of dialed into that process versus doing a lot of deep thinking and long-term thinking about execution. They want short-term quick wins. They are business results focused and they use accessibility overlays and toolbars when accessibility comes up on projects. The kind of closing statement for the ostrich and the sales presentation is that
They say, we’re gonna get the same results as the Fox agency in less time for less money. Let us help you check this off your list so that you can get to the next priority. So you can kind of get a vibe for who this agency is. They’re trying to get things done quickly.
In terms of their approach, the ostrich agency is going to utilize popular no code page builders to generate custom layouts for the client quickly. They’re going to do those designs in browser and they’re going to account for mobile screen sizes as well. Their main criteria for that off the shelf ordering and reservation system that the customer wants is going to is that it needs to integrate easily with the ostriches existing tech stack.
This is going to keep the budget lower. So that is their primary criteria and nothing else. So whatever works best with what they’re doing is what they’re going to recommend. The page builders built in form solution is used so they’re not using any other kind of form solution. The content is migrated as is from various docs and kind of.
adapted and shoehorned into the approved layouts that were designed with placeholder content in the browser. And then the promotional video, the PDFs, all those multimedia files we mentioned in the scope, those are just getting stuck into the website as is and no additional efforts are made to make them accessible or have alternative media formats for any of them. The the checks.
that they’re going to do for accessibility beyond just putting the overlay tool on the website are primarily going to be related to color contrast and alt text of images. And they’re going to focus really on those things. And they are, like I said, going to recommend a popular accessibility toolbar to handle the rest. essentially.
that boils down to a specific budget. So the ostriches budget.
is going to be a total of $10,500 that breaks down into about $8,000 for the base design and dev. going to spend about, they charge $100 an hour, same as the Fox agency, but they’re going to spend about four hours or $400 on remediation. And that’s that, you know, the image alt text, correcting or tweaking some color contrast. And then the overlay, and this is based on real overlay pricing based on this website’s traffic is going to be about $1,500 per year.
They’re also going to put the customer in a $50 a month basic maintenance plan just to make sure the website stays up, stays secure, and some basics are being observed.
So let’s assume the ostrich agency wins. If we extrapolate that out, that’s $10,000 in year one in direct costs and then years two through five, it’s $2,100 between the maintenance plan and the overlay for a total of $18,900. And
If we look at the ROI of this and we’re going to dig into these numbers a bit more, I’m just basing this on law of averages and things I’ve seen from agencies that we’ve spoken with on like average results from their rebuilds and what they present in their case studies. So this modern redesign that the ostrich agency did does triple the conversion rate up to about point five percent on the website. It was point one five with the amateur build. And there’s a short term drop in traffic in year one. And we’ve seen this numerous times with rebuilds that don’t consider
accessibility or maybe don’t do a perfect job of considering SEO. But in years two through five, it kind of rebounds and it ends up with a modest net increase of around 5 % over that five year period as it drops and then creeps back up. The new booking and catering options along with that increased overall traffic over that five year period generate $91,000 and additional annual revenues. And unfortunately,
between using the overlay and not considering accessibility and knowing that there’s around 5,000 accessibility lawsuits per year in the US and about 20 % of those lawsuits target a website that’s using an overlay tool. This business, H &H Cafe, in year three does get slapped with an accessibility lawsuit. They have to settle that for $15,000 plus $5,000 in attorney fees. And as part of that settlement, they have to pay $21,000 to remediate their website. There’s reasons behind those numbers that we can
get into later. The project finishes three months sooner though compared to the Fox agency. So that adds twenty two thousand dollars back to their base ROI because it was done faster. The base five year ROI doing all the math and I have a spreadsheet for this that I’ve put together is three hundred and seventy four thousand dollars. So not bad like they got ROI. They got the job done quickly. But let’s talk about the Fox agency and kind of look at what that approach is. So
Roger Williams (11:44) Okay.
Chris Hinds (11:53) The Fox agency, their MO is they start with a good plan. They focus on creating long-term value rather than business goal focused. are user centric focused. So they’re focusing on the end user of the website and maximizing the end user’s utility. And they account for accessibility throughout their projects and their closing statement in this hypothetical scenario where they win is that smart planning today saves headaches tomorrow. It will take longer and cost more, but that’s what it takes to do the job right.
And so that’s what allows the Fox agency to close the deal. As far as the Fox’s approach goes, they collect content first before design and it’s reviewed to ensure that the structure and any calls to action are super clear. Then multiple options for the ordering and reservation system are carefully evaluated by the Fox’s team and the option that can be used by the broadest audience possible is ultimately selected.
for those off the shelf integrated pieces. Then after that, they design and build from a set of boilerplate components that can be modified to fit the customer’s spec and accessibility is considered at both the design and the code level. This obviously takes longer. The agency uses their standard form building solution.
which they know has accessible outputs when configured correctly and the promotional video receives captioning and transcripts unlike with the with the ostrich agency and the PDFs part of them are converted into web pages to improve their discoverability and ranking and search and then a few sample menus are still retained and they are actually remediated to make sure that the doc form of those menus can be used by everyone and in addition to the early stage tests late stage in the project and expert is brought in to validate and confirm
that the website’s meeting WCAG 2.2 AA and after launch an automated scanning and monitoring plan is put in place. This obviously increases the cost of the ongoing maintenance of the website. In terms of the Fox’s budget, the base design dev is $12,000. So it’s about, I would say 30 % to 40 % more than what the…
the ostrich agency proposed. And then on top of that, they are adding about $150 a year for a scanning solution. And this is based on our products pricing accessibility checker. They’re adding 18 hours or $1,800 because remember same hourly rate and evaluation. And this is based on what we covered in the last presentation where the average time to review for accessibility throughout a project is about one hour per design, two hours per unique page, and then a flat four hours for the header and footer.
And then the remediation time is 12 hours. That’s about 10 % on top of the base design dev budget, which again, law of averages, if your team is experienced with accessibility, that’s about how much additional time you would be spending to correct any lingering issues that get discovered. If you’re less experienced, it might be 20 or even 25 % longer.
And then multimedia accessibility, add 150 bucks, that’s just for those PDFs, the video captioning. It’s a very small cost in the context of the overall budget. Maintenance is twice as big. It’s $1,200 per year for the maintenance because it includes some manual monitoring for accessibility, checking in on things beyond just baseline updates. So the total cost is $16,500 in year one, and then the ongoing annual cost is $1,350. Now, if we contrast that back to the ostrich agency,
ostrich agency was over $2,000 per year in costs because primarily of that overlay solution, which is utilization or traffic-based pricing. And based on the traffic of this customer, they were paying about $1,500 a year just for that thing, which didn’t even ultimately do its job, which was make the website usable and prevent them from experiencing litigation.
In terms of ROI on the Fox agency side, and this is again, based on real world numbers, both on website projects that we’ve done as well as case studies of projects where we took something that was inaccessible and the only thing we fixed was accessibility and kind of the net change or the Delta and things like conversion rate and traffic just from doing accessibility only. So the Fox agency, their accessible redesign got conversions up to 2 % instead of 0.5%. Their year over
year traffic produced a near immediate net gain of 15 % post launch. Massive traffic conversion rate changes and increases ultimately generated $269,000 in additional annual revenues. And this is based on this this restaurants check averages per individual customer as well as the check average of a catering deal and a conversion rate differential between those two. So there is math behind this.
And then in year three, H &H Cafes automated accessibility scans and the monitoring that they engaged with this agency on did find issues. But this wasn’t a lawsuit, they did. did. They found issues and they proactively invested $15,000 to correct course, which was considerably less. If you remember what the figure was for the lawsuit, plus the attorney’s plus still having to go back and do what should have been done in the first place. But basically at the end of the day with these numbers.
Roger Williams (16:32) Yeah.
Chris Hinds (17:00) The base five year ROI is $1.26 million. So we can discuss some results here. We can talk about why they’re different, how we arrived at those numbers. I’m happy to answer questions.
Roger Williams (17:04) Woo.
Wow.
Yeah, let’s take a…
first of all, let’s just take a deep breath, because Chris, wow, my mind is blown. You’re like, clearly I knew you were an expert, but holy, like you really do understand the agency approach to.
building websites and doing online marketing. And I really hope that the people listening to this rewind and go back through what you were talking about there. The ostrich has its problems, it like compared to how I was running my agency.
Like this is legitimate stuff and you’re really, if you’re talking to your clients this way, you’re really gonna help unlock their brains into thinking about what their website can be doing for them. I still know so many businesses that have a Facebook page, right? And so regardless, whether they’re going ostrich or fox here, they’re definitely improving their business.
But, and I also love the names of the companies that you’ve come up with here. It’s subtle, but obviously the metaphors are strong. Kind of going back and unpacking a little. Hey.
Chris Hinds (18:12) And no shade at the ostriches. Like, I know y’all are scared. I know you’re worried.
There is a better way, and I hope you add some gradual change over time.
Roger Williams (18:22) No, 100%. And I think a big thing to think about here, right? And I know when I was starting my agency is it was just like, hey, I got a client. Yes. Yes to everything, right? Like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Give me the money and get started. And you’ve got to get started some way. And I get that urge to just take it and make promises to things that you haven’t thought through. Yeah, sure. An overlay.
But then over time, you should be thinking more like a fox and you should be seeing, you should be having these difficult conversations with the clients. And I think maybe that’s where a lot of benefit out of this conversation, Chris, is for me and for the listeners is how do you talk a customer into spending more money and taking longer?
Chris Hinds (19:07) Mm-hmm.
Roger Williams (19:09) But eventually I’m going to give you 5x the revenue and give you a lot less headaches. How do you have those conversations?
Chris Hinds (19:18) I think it requires good sales discovery in a nutshell. Like you have to, you have to get them.
to tell you and this can be something that’s as a reaction right to an objection like maybe you weren’t expecting pushback on the price and so you didn’t ask them these granular questions about and these would be the type of questions so it’d be like okay you know how much traffic is your website getting do you know what your conversion rate is if you had to guess what would it be what would you say you know if it’s a restaurant what would you say your check average is right or if it’s a product company what would you say your average cart value is all of those isolated right are innocuous
questions and unless the customer is super savvy or has had a million of these conversations, they aren’t going to know that you can work backwards to get to their revenue. Right. And that’s really the point. Right. So you just need to know a few pieces of information, which is like, what is the average purchase? How many people are seeing their offer in general? And do they know what percentage of the total people that are seeing their offer are buying?
And if you can get those three things, you can very quickly extrapolate revenue. And then if you know what levers you can pull to impact any one of those three variables, whether it’s just more people, just more conversions, increasing their check value or their average purchase value, like, or all three.
That’s how you can show ROI super easily in a sales conversation. And then from there, it’s just down to experience and confidence and knowing the actual real world impact of what you’re doing and measuring that. After every project, trying to measure it, going back and checking. That’s how I have these numbers. On average, just fixing accessibility will increase traffic 10 to 15 % over year on year.
near instantaneously from something that was really not accessible to something that’s accessible, right? If it’s like mostly accessible and you’re fixing alt text on five images, you’re probably not going to see that 15 % gain. But if you’re going from super not accessible to really accessible, you’re going to get that, right? Same with conversion rate, you know, jumping from those sub 1 % numbers, which is super common even for agency projects to one, two, sometimes even 3%.
Again, we’ve seen it happen multiple times over. And so at this point, it’s not just a anecdote. It’s a trend that we see when we are being hired to go in on these websites and correct or remediate accessibility issues. Or we partner with an agency where we just find the issues and the agency goes and fixes them. We try to go back and we’re like, hey, how did things change? Right. And sometimes we get some tidbits of information that we can add as a data point to our overall knowledge. But it’s
If you can do the numbers of accessibility, that’s great. There’s another side to this, right? Which is if you have case studies, if you have these average numbers in mind, you can kind of go with the what if question, right? So if you have an objection trying to like around, it’s too expensive or it takes too much time or whatever, pivoting that objection to it’s like, hear you and what if…
XYZ, right? If it’s the accessibility, adding the accessibility piece into the project or, or whatever it is, what if XYZ even increased your conversion rate by 0.5 % as opposed to one or two, which is what we typically see, right? So you can, you can, you can slip that in there. And by the way, I know based on what you shared with me already, that if we were to increase your conversions by 0.5 % based on this, this traffic, this ticket average,
know, this, this would, and if you can make the business case, this would probably pay for itself four times over, even if we achieve on the low end of what we see. Right. And suddenly you’ve pivoted the knee jerk, like, it’s too expensive. it’s too much time into them thinking about, but I can serve my customers better and I can make more money while serving my customers better. Because at the end of the day, it’s about people.
right, and making people’s experience better.
Roger Williams (23:22) For sure, for sure. So, you know, I love the Business 101 Masterclass stuff here. I think that this is stuff we need to be talking about more often, right? We take it for granted.
that we know this, I think a lot of people come into web design and they’re like, hey, I like creating things. I like to build things. And I know that was my entry point, but we really need to be making the business case for these things so that the client really understands what they’re getting. So kind of pivoting now, let’s get down to the accessibility side of things. You said that improving accessibility from terrible compliance to full compliance,
is a 10 to 20 percent increase in traffic. Break that down for me. How much of that is traffic from people who first of all could not access the site before because they have some sort of disability and now they can access it? And then how much of that is social search engine traffic because now the site is semantically accurate and presents well to the bots? And then how much of it is something else that I’m just not even aware of?
Chris Hinds (24:27) My unhelpful answer is all of the above and more. there’s two angles to this, right? So the first angle is accessibility itself exists on this spectrum.
And none of us are ever on a fixed point on this spectrum for our whole lives, right? We can have car accidents, we can break limbs, we can have a stroke. Like there’s so many things that can, not to get too existential, but that can happen to us, right? Over our lifetimes and where you are today is not necessarily where you will be in 5, 10, 25, 50 years. And it’s the same for literally every other one of the billions of us on this planet.
And so when you think about it in that context, right? And that, you know, there’s not just like even just let’s let’s take like blind and low vision, for example, there’s not just can’t see, can see there’s this entire spectrum, right? Same with color blindness. There’s multiple types and different sensitivities or extremities to that.
or particular colors that you can or can’t see. And there’s numerous others examples of this. And so what you’re really talking about is, yes, there is some percentage of your audience that will just bounce off like it’s a brick wall. Because if your website’s inaccessible to them for their particular needs, they literally can’t even start at step one.
That depends on how your website is built, like what particular web content accessibility guideline criteria you’re failing versus not failing, et cetera. But there’s some percentage of users that is going to bounce off, right? There will be another subset of users that are majorly inconvenienced, but can kind of wade through it until they hit a blocker or they have to stop. And so your website’s going to be annoying them.
probably pretty consistently. They’re going to be rolling their eyes. They’re going to have a generally negative experience to an extremely negative experience, but they’re going to get through it. And those are the people that you’re very likely to see complaints from, or they’re just never going to patronize your business again. And they’re going to tell all their friends not to either. And then there’s another subset that is maybe mildly inconvenienced to just everyday people being like, wow, everything I need is where I need it.
when I need it, how I need it. This website is brilliantly designed. I’m never confused. I’m never lost. If I’m on a mobile device, if I’m on a tablet, if I zoom in, if I zoom out, if I’m in dark mode, light mode, like it doesn’t matter. It works. Right. And that’s the rest of us, right. The other 75 % of us, we don’t, it’s,
Like the rest of that stuff, around like screen reader compatibility, keyboard compatibility, invisible probably to 75 % of the population until the point in time that they need it. But there’s this ripple effect of considering all of these things and putting real thought and effort behind the usability of your systems for literally everyone and not just people like you that it just has this ripple effect that that really extends to 100 % of your audience, not.
20 % and certainly not 2%. And so that’s the audience side. The other side of this that I want to talk about is yes, on the metrics side. So what we very frequently see when we are considering accessibility or just making accessibility improvements only is that average time on page or average session duration typically skyrockets. I’ve seen it double.
Roger Williams (27:52) Okay.
Chris Hinds (27:53) More at more, but that’s like the biggest extreme. I’ve seen it like double or triple, but more average is like a 30 to 40 % jump, which is still huge. And then like average number of like average depth that they will browse. So the number of different pages they visit average page visited, usually goes up. So they’re spending more time on your content. They are consuming more and they’re going deeper into whatever the user journeys are that you’ve set up. And, it’s.
Roger Williams (28:03) Yeah.
Chris Hinds (28:23) It’s interesting because those metrics all directly in a feedback feedback loop go back to SEO, right? And what Google measures and what others measure and the I I’m not like I’m not an SEO guy. Like I understand what all the metrics mean, what they are, how they fit into, you know, what it is an indicator of in a user experience. But I don’t know how the Google algorithm weighs all those things. But what I do know is
If all of the metrics that Google has to measure that measure how useful your website is, how much utility it has. So time on site, how many pages they look at, are they a first time or a frequent user, all of those things. If those are all going this way, your rank is going to go this way too, because Google does not measure shit for no reason. Pardon my French, but they don’t, right? Like, and even in Lighthouse, like Lighthouse has a whole accessibility tab now.
Roger Williams (29:13) No. Yeah.
Chris Hinds (29:20) Again, Google doesn’t measure stuff for no reason. So yeah, I mean, think that this is like, if we’re talking about websites and accessibility, there’s like so, so many reasons between SEO and conversions and all of these things to do it. Yeah.
Roger Williams (29:22) And they don’t, more importantly…
Yeah. Well,
and think you make a great point there is that Google doesn’t just give us these data points because they like giving us data points. And then the other thing to keep in mind is they don’t show us everything that they’re looking at. this is like the tip of the iceberg. And I think you hit it on the head there. And one of the things that I keep trying to drive home to people about accessibility is, yes, there’s this compliance issue.
There is, you need to be aware of that. Like that is real money. But that’s not why you should be doing accessibility. You should be doing accessibility because people matter and you want to, you started a business because you wanted to help people. So help people, make your site accessible and all this other stuff follows. I hadn’t even thought about the data points. I was only thinking semantic markup, nice and easy for the bots to crawl, but you’re,
Chris Hinds (30:23) Yep. Well, that’s one too.
And I didn’t even mention it, but like that, that is, that is one, that is another one. Like your, your website is inherently more understandable by machines because if a screen reader is able to understand it and a screen reader is a machine that interprets the web for, for blind individuals or low vision individuals, obviously a search engine crawler is going to be able to interpret it better too. So yeah, I mean, it’s all part of the same holistic.
Roger Williams (30:25) Ha ha ha ha.
Chris Hinds (30:49) system. And that’s really, that’s the other point that I’m kind of leading myself into that wasn’t even originally going to be a part of this conversation, but I think it, makes sense to bring this up, which is what accessibility really is to me at a fundamental level from an agency mindset. So this is not like a human to human mindset. This is an agency B2B mindset is it is a performance multiplier.
So it’s something you can slot into your holistic solution that makes literally everything in it better and bigger and do more. And it touches so much that it’s one of the highest impact ones and often one of the more overlooked ones.
Roger Williams (31:31) This is very poignant stuff. I’m loving this every time we talk I learned so much Chris We’re at 38 minutes. I want to keep these not too long, but before we go I Would be remiss in us not talking about these screen overlay add-ons and All of the news going on around them. We don’t need to name names if you google accessibility overlays, you’re gonna see some
crazy news stories, lawsuits, ⁓ I mean, and they’re not just finding the provider of the add-on, they’re finding the company’s websites that are hosting these. Can you talk a little bit about overlays and what people need, they just need to open their eyes about when they’re going into potentially using one of these?
Chris Hinds (32:02) FTC fines, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Sure. So an overlay is a tool that in the in the layers of a website is placed kind of at the very top and it inserts itself between the user and your website and and attempts through automation and JavaScript and all this stuff to basically hijack your website and and make it accessible. In reality, these tools at best can fix 10 or 15 percent of total
accessibility coverage under web content accessibility guidelines. So that’s, know, if you’re relying solely on those, that’s a 85 to 90 % gap you’re leaving yourself with. The tools, one of the reasons that they’re being sued and fined is because they promise 100 % coverage when they know damn well it couldn’t be further from the truth. And if you read their terms, and I would encourage you to go read their terms,
Roger Williams (33:08) Mm.
Chris Hinds (33:11) overly tools will say we don’t actually promise you anything. So, you know, it but with the interesting thing about it, I think from an agency perspective is is this tool is there. If if it is, if a user attempts to use it, it can interfere with their assistive technology that they already have in their OS in their browser, and it can hijack that or interfere with it. And so a lot of people who are blind, low vision or otherwise like
They have browser extensions that they install to make overlays not show up and to delete them. So it’s their tools that are built for business owners and not for the disabled because if overlays were such an amazing tool, why aren’t they selling to the disabled community? Right? Why are they selling themselves to businesses? If they’re such an amazing tool, why aren’t they a browser extension that anyone can install that can insert itself as a JavaScript layer over any website? And
everyday consumers can just pay a subscription. The answer is because they don’t work. But beyond that, the thing that I want to point out is the ostrich agency. If we go back to that scenario, where they had, and I’m going to go back in my slide so I can make sure I have the same numbers. They had a total investment of $18,900 over a five-year period.
Roger Williams (34:23) Sure.
Chris Hinds (34:32) $7,500 of that was the overlay, which is money not going to their agency. So out of that total amount, $18,900, around $7,500 of that is going to another company. That’s potential revenue for them, like 40 % of potential revenue on the project that they’ve lost. If you look at the total for the Fox agency and what they build over a five-year period, if we exclude
the audit remediation that they got hired for in year three, they still build $16,500. They kept almost 100 % of that money, except maybe the multimedia accessibility, which was 150 bucks. That’s usually a specialized service you hire out unless you’re a massive conglomerate. So they’ve given up a massive amount of potential revenue by not trying to adopt these best practices internally.
Roger Williams (35:17) Sure.
Chris Hinds (35:26) or find good partners that can fulfill like the one or two small pieces that they can’t do, like maybe hiring a company like ours to come in and do the evaluation, right? But then your team handles all the fixes, you get to bill for that. So they’re massively overlooking revenue that they could have in their pocket over that five year period.
Roger Williams (35:46) It’s great point and again, this is what I’m really hoping that we’re reaching agencies with this is to really start thinking about how to run your business better, how to help your clients run their business better. Chris, this is wonderful and you teed me up perfectly for the closing question is how does Equalize Digital fit into this workspace for an agency and how can they engage you?
Chris Hinds (36:10) So anyone that wants to reach out to me can and I’m happy to talk you through it. Our website’s equalizedigital.com. Basically where we come in and where we can help agencies is we have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that provides bulk scanning for accessibility issues and reports directly in the WordPress page and post editor. And we also have a number of different services that we offer. did I did I did I lose my connection?
you
Roger Williams (36:37) You might have blipped out on me just a second. was hoping it would come back, but start over again from the beginning.
Chris Hinds (36:43) Okay, sorry. So equalize digital. We really.
focus on partnering with agencies in two ways. So the first one is we have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker. offers bulk scanning and reporting of accessibility issues directly inside WordPress CMS in the post and page editor, as well as a litany of different features and reports for everything from multi-sites to CSV exports. The list goes on. And that tool is really purpose-built to allow agencies to measure and manage accessibility over time on that list of
of automated issues. So things that can be checked for with an automated tool, which statistically is maybe.
30 to 40 % of the guidelines. Remember overlays were like 10. So it’s way, way more coverage if you’re relying purely on automated. The next layer is we do provide automated testing or excuse me, we do provide manual testing. So that’s accessibility audits that audit up to 100 % coverage of the standards. And that’s usually across a sample of different pages. And we can partner with agencies on those and then happy to hand that off and then
your team to do the work of actually fixing the problems. A lot of agencies will actually hire us to do those tests on like their base theme or their starter template, whatever they use as their boilerplate, so that they know that they’re starting from a good standpoint and then can use automated testing tools to make up the difference and some smart checks during design and content, right, to get better, to incrementally improve. And then the final thing that we can do is we can bring in people to do user testing and think of this like a
focus group with a particular individual or group of individuals who have some form of a disability, whether that’s, you know, being blind or low vision, maybe having a cognitive issue or anything, anything else. and we have numerous different partner organizations that we work with to bring in people to build those focus groups out. If you need that qualitative feedback about your user experience. so those are, those are three big ways that we collaborate. and honestly, I spend a good chunk of my week every single week talking to
⁓
leaders and owners of agencies and trying to help them like wrap their heads and their arms around this and get control of it so that they can give themselves and their customers better results. So I’m happy to talk to anybody anytime. Email is chris at equalizedigital.com if you want to reach out.
Roger Williams (39:00) Excellent, excellent. I love the sales pitch, sort and sweet, covering all of the bases. Chris, if people are interested in learning more about accessibility, obviously, you know, don’t want to lose a whole bunch of business to people learning all this stuff, but I know you and I know you want people to learn all this stuff. What are like some of the fundamental websites and and and like standards that people have to just learn backwards and forwards?
Chris Hinds (39:25) Yeah. Well, first and foremost, mission is to eventually hopefully put ourselves out of business by having everybody know and understand this stuff and really.
know it through and through because I think by then we will probably have made enough revenue that we won’t we won’t mind to begin with. But like I really like our objective with this is to make the Internet better and to make agencies organizations of all sizes of all types and all sectors self-sufficient with this stuff so they don’t need to be stuck in like this quick fix panic.
cycle every two or three years, like they know that they just haven’t handled. there’s, there’s literally
I don’t know, 100, 150 hours of free education on the equalized digital website on the WordPress accessibility meetup webpage. We have archived presentations going back multiple years for that meetup that we run. would also recommend checking out WP accessibility day, which is a 24 hour free conference that gets put on every single year. and then there’s numerous big names that come together to both sponsor and put that event forward. and there’s tons of free education there.
And
then I don’t mind mentioning this because I know we’re about to announce it in the next week, but we are about to introduce.
formal for purchase accessibility education and courses in the next two weeks. So it’s bit of a bombshell announcement, but we are we are rolling out or getting ready to roll out a for a full learning management system on the MyEqualize digital portal. We are going to be starting with a screen reader testing for voiceover and a screen reader testing for NVDA course, which should both be released if not right when the course launches within a few weeks.
And then I am also doing a more professionally geared, with more formal educational components, selling accessibility for agencies course as well. So those will be available through our website and through our portal for purchase by mid-May, by Global Accessibility Awareness Day, GAD, which is May 16th.
Roger Williams (41:27) Very exciting news. Here we are. We’re breaking news on Kinsta Talks. You know, I’m not surprised in any way that you’re going to start offering this. In fact, I was wondering why you hadn’t already started it. So thank you for answering that question before I had to ask it.
Chris Hinds (41:29) Yeah.
If you make courses that are of a sufficient level of quality, like the kind of quality we care about, it takes forever. But anyone who buys them is gonna understand immediately why it took so long because they are so detailed, exhaustively detailed and value packed. And accessible, yeah, of course, in true equalized digital fashion, the entire course platform is…
Roger Williams (41:50) yeah.
and accessible, I’m gonna guess.
Chris Hinds (42:09) built to be accessible.
Roger Williams (42:11) Wonderful, wonderful. Chris, as always, my mind is blown, it’s melted. I need to go sit down and have a break. This has been wonderful and delightful as always. I appreciate your time and your expertise. You’ve said it before, but as a quick reminder, if people want to reach out with you and interact with you on the internet, where are some of the places that you’re doing that?
Chris Hinds (42:32) We are at equalize digital in all the places. And then I’m at Mr. Underscore Chris Heinz on X. If you want to follow me there, I do try to add value to people’s feeds with.
know, relevant accessibility news and topics and equalizeddigital.com for everything else. So thank you, Roger. Thank you very much to Kinsta as well for having me again. Also, shout out to y’all for sponsoring WordPress Accessibility Meetup and prioritizing free education on accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. Y’all are a great partner and I definitely encourage people to check out Kinsta as well.
Roger Williams (43:04) man, thank you so much for that. And with that, I bid you adieu until next time.
WordCamp Montclair might have been one of the smaller events on the WordPress calendar this year, but it packed a lot of value into a single day in New Jersey.
I flew solo for this one, setting up a simple table with Kinsta swag and a QR code giveaway for a pair of AirPods Pro. (Congrats to the winner!) While the setup was low-key, the conversations were anything but. From thoughtful discussions on AI in WordPress to tactical partner chats, this community proved once again how resilient and generous it is with ideas and experience.
One of the best parts? Running into Austin from Anchor, a current Kinsta customer. He shared how happy he is with Kinsta’s quick turnaround on product requests, especially API improvements.
There were some strong talks throughout the day, including one on building successful partnerships from WPVIP’s Jodie Fiorenza.
Unfortunately, this was the final year for WordCamp Montclair, at least for now. The organizing team is stepping back after years of incredible work. There’s chatter about WordCamp NYC returning in 2026, and I hope it happens. This region has a lot of WordPress energy, and it deserves a space to gather.
If you were there and we didn’t get a chance to connect, drop me a note. If you weren’t there, let’s catch up at a future WordCamp or one of our upcoming events. Kinsta will be there–swag and all.