In this LMScast episode, Mihail Stoychev explains that NitroPack began in 2013 with a focus on optimizing websites for the OpenCart platform.

Mihail Stoychev is the co-founder of NitroPack, a company focused on website optimization. The spark was a request from a big e-commerce business that was losing customers owing to sluggish website performance. Recognizing the necessity, they created an early plugin for image optimization and simple caching, resulting in a considerable increase in site loading speed.

The term “NitroPack” was inspired by the notion of speed in the “Fast and Furious” films, in which hitting a button reveals hidden power. NitroPack expanded over time to include over 35 optimization algorithms in a single service. They switched to WordPress, the largest platform, with the goal of making website optimization easier and more accessible.

NitroPack is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that allows you to control optimizations with a single button push after installation. They stress simplicity and usability for non-technical people, with the goal of removing complexity from the optimization process.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Michel from Nitro Pack. That’s it. Nitro Pack. I love McHale’s mission to make the internet faster. We’re going to get into what NitroPack is, how to speed up your website and a little bit of McHale’s story, which is awesome.

But first welcome to the show, Mihail.

Mihail Stoychev: Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m, excited to chat with you today. Everybody wants a fast website. Everybody there’s so many, there’s a lot of different web hosts in the WordPress community and also different setups and plugins and different types of websites.

But this episode is about for people building learning management system websites, they all want a fast website. Let’s start at just a super high level. How, Mikhail, do you make the internet faster?

Mihail Stoychev: Thanks. That’s a great question to start with, Chris. Actually if I have to think as to how did we start NitroPack?

So first of all, we started NitroPack back in 2013 for another great open source platform that was Going after e commerce merchants back in the days. It’s called open cart. I think they’re still running well, so we started nitro pack in 2013 that was two years after we created our first plug in for open cart and We had a pretty big merchant from the Middle East and they were absolutely horrified and terrified by how many customers are actually churning and dropping because their website was not performing well enough.

So they came to us and said, Hey guys we have this huge problem. Is there a solution that you can figure out for us? So back in the day, so we were junior entrepreneurs it was your number two of our journey. So we started digging around and of course we will answer. Yes, of course.

We’re experts into this. So we figured out a way that we can actually optimize images, which was one of the. challenges. And back in the days, we didn’t have the amazing formats that we have today, which compress a lot of data. And back in the days, the internet was nowhere as good as what we are seeing as the norm today.

So what we did is we created this initial version of our plugin. And since we really created a 50% improving their site loading speed it was back in the times where fast and furious were just going very hard and those super nice racy cars, they will have a special hidden power that exerts you press like a red button and then you go.

And that was called nitro. So they were using nitrogen. And since initially what we developed back then was a collection of different features. We decided to call it nitro as in fast and then pack. Okay. So we started with image optimization and some basic caching. And today we have over 35 three, five different techniques that we bundled together and that we serve as nitro pack and our Initial thoughts when we decided to go after WordPress and deliver this to WordPress was open car is not big enough to have a massive impact.

We were helping tens of thousands of merchants, but we were like, it will be logical to go after the biggest. So the biggest the biggest markets back in the days I think it’s still today is WordPress. So the market share is just over 40 percent of the internet, which is crazy. Shout out to Matt and everyone else who worked on this absolutely stunning project.

And we made nitro pack. In a completely different way. So we decided that NitroPack should be a software as a service and that all the optimizations should be controlled by a single button. Remember the reference I did with the speed up. So what we did is essentially you install the plugin, you enable it, you press a button, which is selecting your mode, like the shift of the car.

You go into drive and then you can choose port. Comfort or economy. So once you install nitro pack, you select your mode, then press a button and you’re off to a good start. So on the back, we will do all types of settings, which we believe are good enough and stable enough for your website.

And we, the reason why we took this approach is that we believe that most of the folks want the complexity out of their life. And while they’re very tech savvy guys who want to go and tinker with the settings, the majority of the people who want to. You know run their own blog or go into a different type of a Entrepreneurship journey won’t as little of technical challenges as possible So we got inspired by this You know as minimalistic as possible as easy to use as possible.

And I think this is something that we’re keeping Today, as our cradle on how we’re building things and how we want people to perceive our our solution.

Chris Badgett: That’s

Mihail Stoychev: awesome.

Chris Badgett: I just keep getting this image of nitro pack is like the Vin Diesel fast and furious. He just has to press one button and then it’s off to the races.

Yeah

Mihail Stoychev: Making it a little bit making it a little bit simpler than it is really. And the, tech team probe wouldn’t, like this as they put so much effort into developing it, but listen, the user has to be able to press buttons and see value. And this is what we’re up to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. 2013. That’s actually when Lifter LMS started and here we are You know, many years later over a decade or whatever, and it’s amazing when you stay married to 1 problem, like speed up the website for us is teach online. And it’s amazing what you can accomplish over all those years and all those learnings.

And. So congratulations on that, and I know you and it’s cool to come from outside. So you mentioned coming from the open car community and then seeing the opportunity in WordPress. And I know you’ve done some stuff with Shopify as well, and you get to take all that learning and just.

Continuously improve the product and the user experience, making the complex simple, which is like a great path to be on.

Mihail Stoychev: Yes. First of all I, now it’s a pure coincidence, though. I’m so happy. We started our, businesses around the same time. And I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the beautiful things about being able to develop for different platforms.

Is that you’re able to see the good and shiny things about them and the not so good and shiny things about them. And then at the end of the day, share with the community. So whatever we learned in open card was very beneficial for us to start on Shopify and whatever mistakes and things we headed in open card, we found less and less on Shopify.

And now we’re in the opposite situation. So we’re seeing a lot of things which are way better in WordPress than in Shopify. And it’s so empowering to be able to share the good stuff that we took out of Shopify as a platform and see which ones are applicable for the WordPress community.

And I think just like when you go and visit different cities and different countries, you enrich your culture. In the same way we enrich our technical knowledge and our platform knowledge and we can get all the jewels put them into work and hopefully be able to create a good product that’s users will be able to enjoy and if they enjoy, they’ll go and they’ll recommend it to some of their friends.

And if they don’t enjoy it they can go to some of the other alternative solutions. Like I said before, our mission is to make the Internet faster. So the more people can plunge and see what the difference is from a performance website versus a non performance website, not only from user experience standpoint, But at the same time of churn rates, at the same time of SEO ranking, as long as they have are using something we’re happy.

Our mission is complete. Whether they go to us we would love for them to come to us, but it’s it’s a free it’s a free market. And there are other great solutions that I want to give a shout out and respect to. As long as you’re doing something performing a performance base for your website, as long as you’re looking into Core Web Vitals, as long as you score good on page speed for mobile, if the majority of your user base is coming on mobile, or, Vice versa.

If they come from desktop, then I think you’re off to a good start.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. One of the things about WordPress is the community aspect, like you mentioned. And I think we’re in agreement here that part of being a member of the WordPress community is about contribution. And you have a free NitroPack plan and a free NitroPack plugin.

Can you tell us, which I think is great, and I’m a big fan of the freemium model. How does how do people get into it and get started and just tell us more about what’s, available for free?

Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So you go to wordpress. org or directly to nitropac. io or nitropac. com. You go and you hit pricing, or if you go to the org, you just have to download the plugin.

You quickly create an account and you’re off to a flying start. We’ll ask you, which plan would you like to take? Of course, freeze the default one. Be our guest to try before you buy. And when I’m talking about the free plan, this doesn’t mean that it’s a free trial. It’s a forever. It’s a proper forever free plan.

So as long as you don’t reach the quota, which is number of page views or CDN. Then you’re off to a flying start. You can use it forever. We have customers using us for what is it? Four years now since we launched in 2019 for WordPress and we don’t want to bother them with upgrading if it’s Suiting the size of their business.

If they’re happy with the performance, then we don’t want to sell ice to the Eskimo. So we want to go after the customers that we believe we really can make a difference. And of course, with more page views with a different mission critical businesses that they might have, for instance, they can be a big publisher or they can be a big publisher.

software as a service company, or they can be like someone on the verticals a specific WordPress website, which is very, competitive in the industry that they’re running. Let’s say plumbing, for instance, I’m just, or someone going for puppy food. So if they really need this extra boost and extra difference, then we would always recommend them to go with one of the paid plans.

Yes. And all of those come with a 14 day free trial and a money back guarantee. During those 14 days, they can see the difference. We can promise them that there will be a difference. And to take a step back, what we actually offer is a base layer. So over those past couple of years, we were able to select I would say the most necessary features for you to be successful with the business.

And we’re giving those out for free. Again, part of our pricing strategy is being able to differentiate based on page views and based on CDN. So we’re starting with, I would say, a myriad of different features that you’ll be able to enjoy for free, like different caching mechanism, minifications. And I would say one of the main differences of NitroPack when it comes to all of our competitors around is that whatever version you choose, you always get a free CDN and you always get.

A free tool that optimizes your images. So there are plenty of ways that different companies market this. I would say that more often than not, those would be two services you have to buy on top. But with us, since it’s a pack and since it’s a nitro pack, you get everything in the in, in one single foot.

In one basket. So at the end of the day again, our mission is to be able to provide you with a good base layer and a good base there for us means a good grade of CDN and really powerful image and gift and video facades, optimization features. And we believe that this is going to be able to not only boost your score, but increase your chances of essentially passing Core Web Vitals and putting your business at a much higher SEO position that initially you came with.

I don’t know if this answers your question, but this is like my, answer to what it comes with as as default features.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Awesome. Those of you out there listening and watching, go try out nitro pack, try out the free plugin, sign up for a free plan. And that’s an incredible amount of value you’re providing for free.

I’m a big fan of supporting the startup when their business starts to get more page views or traffic and they’re ready to then it’s time to perhaps upgrade to a plan, but while you’re validating and you just want a fast website and you’re, just speeding things up and getting started.

It’s that’s a great contribution you’re making there. You mentioned earlier, like that speed helps reduce churn. But there’s a lot of, I think it’s important for people to know why does speed matter? Could you unpack that a little bit? What do you get when your website is much faster, particularly as a business owner or somebody teaching online?

Mihail Stoychev: Yeah, sure. Just going back to our initial story We, as everyone else in the industry, just decided that if you’re able to bring and show something fast, then the user will be more likely to make a decision of whether they like it or not. Whatever website you had, just being able to make it load as fast as possible and all of the content to be available would essentially be a deciding point of whether the user will stay and consume and the amount of pages that are they going to open subsequently or not.

Afterwards, Google were like, all right it’s great that your site loads fast. It’s great that you have a high score on this. synthetic lab test which is not how the real users are actually experiencing your website. So they came up with a concept called Core Web Vitals, which is once the website is loaded, how your users are interacting with the websites.

And then they will break it down into did the content load fast enough? Did any of the content move or flicker? Is everything on the page the way that it should be? And is there anything else that’s preventing the website from loading as good and as efficient as possible so the user can have as good and positive experience as possible?

So we would measure the amount of pages that they would see once they, Are on the website. And of course, the way that Google measures this is via their chrome browser. So all of the chromium browsers are essentially reporting data back to them as to how users are experiencing their website and Google have a strong conviction that if you pass Core Web Vitals, you’re more likely to retain this user and to take them through the funnel, whatever it can be.

Sign on flow or buying this purchase or reading this next article or calling via contact page, whatever. So the way that we can compare today how solution A is ranking against solution B is there is this thing called Google Data Studio where they take all of the folks That we have sufficient Core Web Vitals data for.

So if you’re a very small store, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to collect data because you don’t have any traffic. If you don’t have any traffic you might have a very fast website, but if no one has heard about you You’re are not the main pain on the map. So once you get sufficient amount of traffic on your website, what you actually do is little by little, Google starts collecting data as to how your real users are essentially experiencing your website.

And all of this data runs not only the platforms, WordPress, OpenCart, Magento, Drupal, yada yada, hosted as well. BigCommerce, Shopify, but they also rank different hosting providers. Again, we would start from hosting A to hosting Z, and then they would start and rank also speed optimization tools like ours.

The goal is to give a map, a 360 map I would say, is cool. is with Google on this mission to make the internet faster, who is performing the best. And at the end of the day, the big price you don’t get like golden you to play if you have optimized X amount of websites. But what you have done is essentially giving Google enough data.

And telling them, Hey, listen, we’re doing something right. Those folks, after they consume our solution, are experiencing the websites way faster. And as a result of this, we’re bringing ABNC to this brand. And we have a lot of data of some of our larger customers. Which shows exactly how a bit of a improvement in the load speed, a bit of a, so the LCP largest contentful paint.

So a little bit improvement onto this, a little bit improvement onto the IMP. And there are actually six metrics in the Core Web Vitals. There are three and then three more, sorry. So six in total. As long as we improve and bring improvement to those Core Web Vitals metrics and If you pass two of them, you fail, you have to pass three of them in order to fail, which means you have to perform 70 percent or better.

So we took, we take always the 75th percentile as a gauge. And luckily for us, and thanks to the hard work of the engineering team NitroPak today is at the top of this report for the good stuff and at the bottom of this report for the bad stuff. For instance, a good stuff is how many websites using NitroPack would essentially pass Core Web Vitals.

Versus competitors, how slow the page will load and how quickly the time to first bite will load essentially. So there are different types of metrics that pretty much measure this. And I can say that this is a good enough cue and Google have confirmed it that recently this became one of the good ranking factors when deciding which site will go.

Bob whenever someone is performing a search and getting the blue links out of a Google search.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, awesome. Congratulations on, that. Tell us a little bit about, let’s imagine we’re talking to somebody who’s Not super technical. They have a WordPress site and they want to get a baseline of how they’re performing now in terms of speed, what should they do?

Mihail Stoychev: So the easiest thing that they can do is go to Google page speeds and just entered their websites, get a view of how fast they’re performing, get a view of actually. Whether they pass core web vitals or not. So whenever you’re seeing a score there again, this is a lab test. Lab test means that a server somewhere is simulating a user going to your website.

It actually doesn’t mean a lot. So the real deal in our sector is how the real users, so your users are experiencing your website And not how a lab test performs So don’t fall into gauging and measuring number a versus number b because it doesn’t have Absolutely, or it has very little effect to your overall performance and there are plenty of ways that you can inflate or fake this score, so I would say Just see your Core Web Vitals metrics.

Make sure that those metrics are good. And then I would say install NitroPack, install another tool. If you want to compare us, see which one brings you a better bang for the buck and a better score. And at the end of the day, you can make your decision, which one to choose for your performance.

Optimization strategy. I just want to say that unlike other things, those are not great to mix and match. So don’t try to create a cocktail of, I’ll use a little bit of this plugin, a little bit of that plugin, There are plenty of good solutions around the market that go for very budget price.

And if you’re serious about your business, you can consider some of the paid plans. And I think that this is where you would see the most value. Especially if you’re a revenue generating business and even a 0. 1 second improvement of any of the factors can bring you way more than you imagine that you’re living on the table right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s educate folks a little bit on speed and let me see how I’m going to frame this question, but. Who’s responsible for speed? Is it like plugins? Is it WordPress, Is it web hosts? And is it speed optimization tools? Like nitro pack? I think the answer is we all are, but help people understand help people understand what WordPress is doing for speed, what web hosts are doing for speed, what plugins do for speed and what NitroPack does for speed.

You mentioned the CDN, the image optimization, and there’s literally 35 different levers you’re, pulling to speed up the website. Give us a tour across those different categories and how they impact speed in terms of plugins, WordPress, hosting, NitroPack.

Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So I would say the biggest impact that you can have.

For WordPress, in my opinion, is WordPress itself. This is why they have a performance team. And this is why they’re working really, hard in order to make WordPress faster for everyone else. We see that this is a topic in the latest conferences as well. And we couldn’t be happier for it.

Because, again, this is part of our mission. It’s part of Google’s mission. And this is pretty awesome. From there on, we obviously have the hosting providers. I think most of them provide some level of optimizations. Usually what they will do is the so called backend or server side optimizations.

And this is great. Some, hosting providers even have even have solutions and they have servers, which are, for instance, Lightspeed is a good example that you get the Lightspeed servers. Then on top of that, you can have their. their solution as well, which works good. But where we excel is we don’t touch the back end.

We don’t touch the database. We don’t play with it at all. It’s very dangerous. We don’t want to be blamed for screwing up something like that. So we would only work on the front end. And we believe that this is where we can make the biggest difference for. We believe that already the majority of the hosting providers have some form of caching.

They have some layer of optimizations going on in the back, and they serve a good purpose. So they’re a good ground. WordPress, good going great. Hosting providers, good going great. Someone going great squared. And then I would say that optimization Performance plugins like ours. What we do is we come and we actually deploy the final and most important step.

The one that really, makes the difference from good to great as the book is. So what we Really in power on is those optimizations which are safe, which pretty much speed of the front end, which actually improve the experience because the user at the end of the day is interacting with your front end.

And yes, some queries might be slow. Yes, some buttons might be loading a little bit slower might, have huge requests that go back to the server. But I think in modern, Website building. We see this less and less often. So we believe the biggest impact can be done on the front end. This was part of our DNA from the get go whenever we started the company and Up until today and for the future, I would say that we wouldn’t be interested into tinkering whatsoever with database or doing any sort of server side optimizations.

Rather than that, we would like to focus and stay on the front end and we would like to continue being the best inbreed at that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s ask about hosting because I get this question all the time, and I’m sure you do too, but we’re not hosting companies, but people ask for a recommendation, particularly concerned about speed and performance.

And different website builders have different budgets and the website maybe isn’t making any money or what we’ll never make money. It’s more content, but then some people have a robust store or LMS or whatever, and I’m not asking for to name names or anything, but how do you think about.

advising somebody on a hosting solution from like the shared hosting, the most economical stuff the, kind of mid middle of the road manage WordPress hosting. And then there’s like really expensive high end plans. Where, should somebody start if they’re genuinely concerned about speed?

Mihail Stoychev: So you, pointed it into the right direction.

Obviously, if you’re A weekend warrior or someone that tries something as a side hustle. I would say try to be as budgeted as possible. So there are always great deals on the long tail side of the costing providers. Pretty much for a few bucks a month, you can get a decent posting and that would be fine.

If you’re still trying to figure things out, there is no need to go ballistic and spend your budget on a hosting provider. Maybe some people will hate me for saying this, but in my opinion, you can make a much larger impression by making a decent website. And also let’s not forget how much money you have to spend in order to drive.

Leads to the top of the funnel. In my opinion, I would run hostings as Very good. I would say that probably 80 percent of the business of every single hosting I talk to is running WordPress. So by the time I think that the competition there is pretty fierce for anyone to be left out in a mediocrity.

So I think whenever you have a strong and and very resilient competition, you have great companies being born. I would start with shared hosting or with something cheaper than I would graduate. So make sure the hosting that you choose can actually, you can grow with it. I’m pretty sure the majority of them, you can, and then if you’re it’s important where the servers are, I would say the majority of the hosting providers now, nowadays are using cloud for all this, so they’re distributed and accessible from anywhere.

But in the end of the day you have to also try to see what other folks are doing. You have to see what type of Solutions the hosting provides. So a lot of hostings are building equal systems around themselves. And within those equal systems, you have quick installs from anywhere in their panels.

For instance, we where we work with any hosting around. So we’re compatible with all the postings in the wordpress equal system. But we have direct integrations with a few ones. The main name drop I’m going to use this Dow EP engine. We work with them for the past four or five months, and we already are sharing a pretty good amount of customers that are enjoying a very fast page speed.

Ever since we created a solution for hosting providers, services which we call NitroPack OneClick. Essentially, we were able to onboard a few more hosting providers. It’s not like you cannot install us if you’re not part of this program, but if you are, then a user will be able to access NitroPack within a single click of a button.

Again, talking about ease of use, I just think it’s the right way to go. At the end of the day, we are slaves to our user base and to our customers. And we need to work our asses off to make their life as easy as possible. And so they trust us with their money. I would say posting go whenever your heart is.

And if you if you’re in doubt you can just test a few, just like with everything else.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You’re obviously obsessed, Mikhail, with Speeding up websites and you’ve been doing it for a long time. And you, have this strong mission to make the internet faster.

Tell us what in your crystal ball for the future and how nitro packs going to continue to, innovate and WordPress. What do you see in your crystal ball for speeding up the internet?

Mihail Stoychev: That’s a great question. Essentially. What we’re doing today is again, focusing on front end optimizations.

So for us, we want to find more ways that the users can interact in a predictable and fast way with their websites. This is the number one priority. Another strong domain for us is essentially being able to gauge what is the real user value of browsing the website. Again, we were talking about lab tests, about synthetic tests, and then we’re talking about how the real users are essentially experiencing the website.

And what and how does this relate to exactly the service that we’re bringing to the table? So not like going. Yo, come to our website. Okay, you installed the plugin, now go and do a test, then come back, then see what’s wrong. But being able to provide a 360 picture of where your website is, where it used to be before, how good it is now, how many interactions did we help with, how many of those were prolific, let’s say, and reach the final goal.

By the way, what’s the goal? How is the user experience? How is the different use case going to differentiate from, let’s say a publisher to an e commerce website to let’s say a platform, which is on a mission to transform education and help users create educational content. So all of those are different use cases and what we’re trying to create is.

A very simple way for us to essentially show exactly where helping, who are we helping to and if there are problems, how those problems can be pinpointed and addressed with a single click of a button so that you excel and you’re successful Way ahead of your competition. So my dream would be for someone let’s, say, not just starting out because that will be unrealistic, but let’s say a small and medium enterprise.

To be able to do something better than this fortune 500 company, not having this big budget, just being able to use this as like a gorilla secret if type of a tool and being able to win. So being able to arm the, let’s say growing up guys into believing that they can compete with the big wells in the blue ocean.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I love that. Yeah. I feel the same way about helping the little person or the startup succeed. If somebody has questions, this has been a great conversation and they want to explore NitroPak or connect with you or your team. What’s the best way for people to connect with NitroPak?

Mihail Stoychev: So they can connect with NitroPak by going to our website.

Again I don’t know if I mentioned this, we do have 24 seven support. If they want to reach out to me, I’m always available on LinkedIn or they can email me. I’m at if you see my first name, it’s Michail. So I’m at michail. nitrofac. io. So if you have any particular questions, you can reach out there.

We have a Facebook page. We also are on Twitter. One of the few European companies trying to be on Twitter. So we, we, try to be as as, as open and available as possible. And either me or someone from the team would be able to to, get your questions answered.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Mihael.

I really appreciate it. I want to encourage you out there listening or watching to go install the free nitro pack plugin. And really don’t wait to speed up your website because only good, things come from doing that, but thank you Mihail for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Mihail Stoychev: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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