MP recently spoke with Deyan Georgiev (Forbes 30 Under 30), co-founder and CEO at NitroPack, about being an entrepreneur, the importance of outside funding, and why website speed matters. NitroPack is a popular website speed optimization tool that lets website owners and managers reduce load times while improving user experiences significantly.
What is NitroPack?
NitroPack is the easiest way to speed up your website. It's a service that handles site speed problems for over 60,000 websites.
According to Crunchbase, NitroPack raised €200k from Eleven Ventures in 2018. Why do entrepreneurs need to consider outside funding when the time is right?
Outside funding is an invaluable tool in the hands of an entrepreneur. While it often makes sense to be scrappy and bootstrap at company stages, the right investors can be game-changers. They bring experience, challenge you to think bigger and bolder, and open important doors for you. If you solve a significant and painful problem in a way that provides tangible value, you're likely off to a good start in your talks with investors.
How did you develop the initial idea for NitroPack, and how has it evolved?
NitroPack was created in 2011 by our co-founding engineers, Ivailo Hristov and Simeon Totev. They responded to customers who needed a caching solution for one specific content management system specialized in e-commerce. It started as a small product but grew over the years until it became an extremely powerful optimization platform.
As time passed, we realized that site speed optimization is a global problem for millions of website owners and managers. That's why we decided to rebuild NitroPack into the cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) it is today. We released this modern version of NitroPack in the summer of 2019. Today, more than 65,000 websites trust NitroPack to provide consistent speed optimization.
How does NitroPack help websites load faster?
NitroPack applies a set of proven best practices and unique advanced features to improve web performance. These features include our advanced caching mechanism, image, and lazy video loading, a complete image optimization stack, code optimization, a proprietary resource loader, and more. Most importantly, NitroPack applies all these things without a complex setup.
What statistics can you share about website speed and engagement?
Many case studies and A/B tests show the power of website speed, but some of the most impressive I've seen are the following:
In 2012, Walmart determined that reducing their website's load time by 1s resulted in a 2% lift in conversions. However, they also saw that speeding up pages by as little as 100ms affected incremental revenue by up to 1%.
Another example would be Zitmaxx Women. In 2017, they updated their website to achieve a perfect 100 on Google's PageSpeed Insights and reduce the load time to 3 seconds. The result - mobile conversions increased by 50.2%, and mobile revenue skyrocketed by 98.7%.
A recent example is Vodafone, which increased sales by 8% by improving only a single-page speed metric (LCP).
Why is it essential for entrepreneurs to focus on their business' website speed?
Because users prefer to read, browse, and buy from fast websites. Slow websites have higher bounce rates, less engaged visitors, and ultimately fewer conversions.
Besides using NitroPack, how can entrepreneurs build the fastest websites?
An essential component of site speed is a good hosting plan. Shared hosting plans don't provide fantastic performance, so investing in a dedicated server is usually worth it.
There's also the option to rework your website's code from the ground up. However, there are some drawbacks to this approach. Mainly, it can become costly and time-consuming. But, if you or your developer know what you are doing, the results are still worth it.
What would you like people to know about NitroPack?
NitroPack is a fantastic technology built over almost ten years of boundary-breaking engineering.
It focuses on improving your site visitors' experiences. Studies show that better UX leads to higher conversion rates!
