By I love The Profit, along with Shark Tank it’s one of my favorite shows. Maybe it’s Marcus Lemonis’ attitude of leading from the front, maybe it’s some of the outright hilarious ways people run businesses, maybe it’s because I like seeing the underdog get a helping hand and win sometimes.
Every now and then while watching the show I’ll notice a small mistake and tweet to Marcus / the busines in hopes of helping him catch and fix it. Today’s though was a doozey.
As the episode reached it’s conclusion I decided to check the tweet stream to see if the company was joining in the conversation, a good way to get interested consumers to get at least a first look at the website. Sure enough they were in the conversation and had asked people what they thought (side note the conversation from their Twitter felt unnatural and forced, see for yourself). I checked their profile and clicked the link to see the website.
Unfortunately the site wouldn’t load on my mobile device. It could have been a down website due to lack of forward thinking by the owners or it could be a worse sign. It was a worse sign.
The url on the twitter account redirects from TheLanoCompany.com to PureCosmetics.com and at the time I tried to load it via WebpageTest.org, precisely 10 minutes after the show ended, the site loaded at 26.219 seconds. An incredibly slow speed that would make most Galapagos tortoises seem like they had rocket boosters and more reminiscent of the early internet’s dial-up days.
I sought to notify Marcus of this via Twitter (ha ha like he’ll read my tweets) and did so by replying to the tweet posted by the official Twitter account. A few minutes later Marcus tweeted out a completely different URL, PureLano.com (side note: the official twitter account was later tweeting asking users to follow a new account which had no URL in it’s bio). I tested this PureLano.com site in WebpageTest.org and it loaded in 4.09 seconds, an improvement of 22 seconds from the original site – far far better. This site also appears to leverage browser caching as the second load occurred in a blazing 0.527 seconds, the original site by comparison had a second load time of 24.065 seconds an insignificant change from the first load time.
As most SEOs and Digital Marketers know, load time can kill your business. For companies being featured in a national TV show series that load time can be far more detrimental as the traffic will spike during the premiere of the episode but likely never reach that height again, i.e. it’s the best opportunity to give a first impression to a vast number of potential new customers.
This leads to three questions
- Why was the old twitter handle tweeting out messages with the old URL in it’s bio?
- Why did the new twitter account not have a website domain in it’s bio?
- Why were the old domains NOT redirected to the new, beautiful and fast loading, website?
The answer to all three, unfortunately, appears to be poor SEO and Social Media planning. On Pure Lano’s biggest day on primetime TV they tweeted out from an account linked to an old domain that did not redirect to the new website asking users to follow a new twitter account without a bio or a website in it’s bio.
Instead they should have:
- Tweeted to the hashtag using the new twitter account, not the old one
- Made sure the old twitter account(s) (there’s apparently 2) have the new website domain in them
- Anytime you launch a new website you ALWAYS (except in super rare cases) 301 redirect the old website to the new, most times using a one-to-one redirect setup for maximum impact.
Sure Marcus probably outsources this work to an agency or a freelancer or someone he has in-house at one of his companies like Camping World. But whoever planned this out made a big fumble on a big day for the newly branded cosmetics line.
Tips to Avoid a PrimeTime TV fail:
- Know your website hosting environment and use this scale
- Shared = bad
- VPS = ok
- Dedicated = better
- Cloud or CDN = best
- If you’re using shared, VPS, or Dedicated you might be able to use CloudFlare or AWS Load Balancer to make your site load quickly all over the world.
- Run your site through WebpageTest.org and take note of the speed before you go on PrimeTime TV. Anything over 5 seconds should be big red flag.
- Run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to find ways to speed up your site
- Always leverage browser caching at the least
- If you’re running a WordPress based site use the plugins Super Cache or W3 Total Cache to improve your site speed.
- Have a graphics designer optimize your images by reducing file size without impacting quality where possible
- Optimize images for Apache using this code
Free Website Speed Test Tools
UPDATE: Forgot to add a screenshot of the new Twitter handle which shows no bio or URL. You can visit them if you like here
