413 – WordPress speed: Akshat Chaudhary on Airlift’s one-click optimisation

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 413, entitled WordPress Speed, Akshat Choudhary on Airlift's one click Optimization. It was published on Thursday, the 13th of March, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few moments by Akshat to have the chat about Airlift, the brand new platform to one click your site into optimization heaven. That's the promise anyway. We'll find out more about that in a moment.

Before that, a few bits of housekeeping. The first thing to mention is that tomorrow I'm heading off to CloudFest. If you're going to be there. This gigantic event held in Germany at a theme park. I've never been before. And if you are gonna be there and you are gonna be hanging out, I would love to hook up with a bunch of you.

I guess the best places would be to reach out to me. Dms open on Twitter at WP Builds, or if you are using Bluesky, then the handle over there is @nathanwrigley.com, and Wrigley has a W in it. Would love to hang out, hook up with some of you during the time there. I'll be there for about five or six days, so probably until Tuesday next week. That would be very nice.

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Okay, as I said at the top of the show today, we are talking with Akshat Choudhary about something really, well, it has an amazing promise. It promises to optimize every single thing on your WordPress website in one click. Literally one click.

It's called Airlift. You've probably heard of Akshat and his company's things before. They do things like Blog Vault and Malcare. So they've definitely got a history, and a heritage in the WordPress space of making things which work. But this really seems on the face of it to be truly remarkable.

So we talk about that in the podcast today. In fairness to Akshat, I don't think I did the best job on this interview. It was not him. It was me. I'm not entirely sure that I asked the right set of questions.

But here's what we covered. We have a bit of an introduction to each other, and then an overview of what Airlift is talking about, all the features and functionalities. We get into the technical things and how that is all created from their side. How the tech was built and what it's using. What the users might experience, and any feedback that you might be able to give to the company.

And then of course we get into the stuff like pricing, and how all of that works and it's all coming up in the podcast today, and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Akshat Choudhary. Hello Akshat.

[00:05:04] Akshat Choudhary: Hi Nathan. How are you?

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. Thank you. Really nice to chat with you again.  Akshat and I have had many interactions, several of them in person at various word camps around the world. And we're recording this just before Word Camp Asia and, both of us will be attending this. I'm looking forward to seeing you in person, but before we get to that, we'll, we'll have our podcast episode and we're gonna be talking.

About something called airlift. We'll get to that in a minute. Prior to that act yet, will you just give us your potted bio, your one or two minute intro, who you are, what companies you've built and work for, and how you've worked with WordPress over the years. Just a couple of minutes on that.

[00:05:44] Akshat Choudhary: Alright. Alright again. hi Nathan. Go. Good to see you again and we'll be again. Good to catch up with you at WordCamp Asia. and, oh yeah, so I'm the founder of Block Vault, and, I've been doing this for more than 15 years. we, started as our first plugin was called Block Vault itself.

We backup up WordPress websites. but beyond that, we have also built some of the other plugins, which are called Mal Care, WP Remote Migrate, gu, and now Airlift. with Mal Care, we let you secure your websites with WP Remote. If you're an agency, we'll let you manage all your websites efficiently.

With Migrate Guru, we let you migrate websites and with airlift finally, that's our latest product. And yeah, we let you optimize our website with a click of a button.

[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting. So I was just thinking about this. I hadn't really made the connection. E every plugin that you've got is a sort of technical. Backend thing, you don't really have any plugins, which put stuff on your WordPress website. it's not like you've got a carousel plugin or a custom post plugin.

Everything is about the technicalities of kinda managing a WordPress website, so keeping it secure, keeping the database backed up, keeping the files backed up, and in this case, optimizing it. And, oh yeah, that's interesting, portfolio. And I'm sure that many of the people, listening to this podcast will have either used your stuff before or come across it.

However, this, is really interesting, brand new to me at least. Anyway, perhaps you'll tell me a different story. It's called airlift. You can find [email protected] by the way, cracking URL. I'm sure that wasn't easy to track down, but, airlift.net, probably the best thing to do is go and pause the podcast, go to your browser of choice and inspect that URL and you'll get an impression of what the.

Product is about, come back on pause and, we'll kick into it. So just give us the quick pitch. actually, what is airlift? What does it basically do?

[00:07:48] Akshat Choudhary: All right, airlift in essence lets you make your website fast and do it for all, for any web. Site out there, do it for the click of a button. And, the whole idea is that while the promise of a fast website, there's, everyone wants a fast website. I don't think I have come across a single person who doesn't want a faster website,

[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:08:09] Akshat Choudhary: right?

And everyone promises a fast website. So every web host, every plugin promises a fast website. But you, if you go to a person and say, are you happy with your website being fast enough? And they will tell you no. Then when you start exploring, why are they saying no? You realize that actually having a fast website is really complex and people have, in our opinion, have the completely wrong diagnosis or for why the website is slow.

And when we started digging deeper into it, we felt that technology is the best way to solve the problem. And that's why we built airlift. and we, and I, think what you, it's very interesting that you mentioned that, all our products tend to be backend products because the reality is, even after 15 years, I consider myself a WordPress outsider.

I, don't consider myself a WordPress inside. I don't, I don't have the confidence to go in and help you figure out how to make a website better looking and stuff like that. That's not. Just not something, I don't think I use WordPress that heavily, but I do understand the technology behind it.

And so we end up building the products, which we feel can, technology can enable you to, can enable you to just get the most out of your website. So that's, I think what you have, the thread that you caught onto is very true. And, and I think that's, given how much we love WordPress, That's the one area we thought we can add maximum value to.

[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it, it's all the hotness, isn't it? Over the last, probably even coming up to eight or nine years, something like that. We've all been worrying about the speed of our websites. core web vitals was this great big thing that came along, and suddenly the speed of your website was gonna be a significant factor to how well you ranked.

And ever since then, everybody's been worrying about it. I'm just gonna read the, fairly interesting claim that you make at the very top. the first thing that you see on the Airlift website is. The following, and I'll quote it directly, Ultrafast WordPress sites with the click of a button. Then it goes on to say, airlift will instantly speed up your WordPress site and boost your Google Core web vital scores.

It's a complete performance solution for your website, including caching CDN image optimization, CSS improvements and more. Now. Let's just establish the ground rules first. My understanding, and I could be wrong about this, is that if I were to install this plugin, there are no options. I install the plugin, click a button, wait a bit, and then it just gets faster.

Firstly, is that true?

[00:10:52] Akshat Choudhary: Yeah, that is entirely a hundred percent true. I. You, the one thing I will tell you is you have to create an account with us. So there is, it's more than a click, but once you create the account, the rest of the setup is you install the plugin and you actually don't have to click the button. Also, just automatically, once you install the plugin, it, it does its thing.

You don't even have to, it'll just be like, Hey, wait up, let us, let us inspect your website. Let's understand what is going on. It'll do a thorough analysis of every part of your website and then figure out. What is the way to optimize it correctly and apply those optimizations? It'll do it, yeah.

[00:11:32] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just interrupting. Firstly, I'm just gonna say, I'm gonna drop this in. Anecdotally, I have not tried the plugin, but there are a few people who I know who have tried the plugin, who thought upon hearing about it, they would give it a go and those few people came back to me and said, yeah, we did that.

And, I won't give you the numbers and I won't give you the names, but in, in the cases of the people who tried it, they came back happy it worked. The core web vitals, the sort of lighthouse scores that they were getting went from a. To B and b was a number that they preferred to a put it that way.

And these people are people who I respect and there are people, they are people who I think know what they're talking about. these are people who, for many years have used traditional caching plugins, but possibly in some scenarios, didn't really know what the thousand of options were inside that.

Plugin, and I'm guessing that your, commercial rivals, the traditional plugin companies that do caching and what have you, they will have all these options and they're, I'm no doubt very valuable. But many people won't understand what those options are, me included. go

[00:12:46] Akshat Choudhary: this is where I'll actually disagree a bit. They do have a lot of options and let me not deride any of them. There are many use cases when I will say that go for, go use one of the other plugins out there. Some of them we have ourselves learned a lot from while we are building airlift, so I'm not going to be like, yeah, they're not, they're useless.

But also, I, also want to explain to you the. The thinking and the complexity of the problem when it comes to optimizing a website. Alright. and I'll give you one angle why an, a configuration based approach just does not work. And it'll just tell you, like you, you'll have a website. The homepage will have sliders, it'll have testimonials and stuff like that.

You'll have a bunch of. Articles now, the way you optimize articles will be different from the way you optimize homepage will be different from the way you optimize your contact page will be different from the way you optimize. for example, your, pricing page or, or where to find us page or something like that.

Each of these pages has very different content. Content and the way you optimize it is very, different. Now it's not possible for any configuration to give you that ability to say that these are block pages. For example, how do you even communicate to a plugin that these pages belong to blog?

Because today you might have five blog articles, and tomorrow you might have a sixth article. So how do you even preemptively and you're not going to go in and feed that information and, but you know that when you, or in a blog article for, the longest time you might have no images, but then one fine day you decided you want to add images to a blog article.

Now how should you optimize it? An image. Now you can also be like, Hey, but I, the plug, I can say that optimize all images in this way and that doesn't apply. It doesn't work that way. So it is lot, more complex and configuration based approach has, you'll just see very clear, limits. And so you might be able to optimize a page and which is what a lot of people do, is they will optimize the page, their homepage.

They will do everything based on their homepage. And it's, a very strange quirk. it's a very strange quirk as to how people behave because we ourselves, actually it's very interesting, like when we are optimizing airlift, we were trying to optimize all pages together at the same time. And obviously it would take a much longer time because we are to analyze a lot more pages.

Then we realize that people actually want to check their homepage first. So first we optimize the homepage because we realize that's what they're checking first. And then that meant that I can give a result for the homepage upfront and then I can show you what are the other pages are optimizing.

So again, people are fixated on the homepage to get the score, which I'm sure whenever you check a score, a website score, you only go to the homepage and check the score. You are

[00:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: much. Yeah.

[00:15:43] Akshat Choudhary: exactly right. So that's a quirk. But they also optimize the homepage only. But they're not thinking about, but whereas Google is sending traffic to all the pages or your visitors are visiting all the pages, so in fact, most likely, most of your visitors will start from a non homepage, come to a homepage later.

Now, if that experience is slow, then your homepage experience can be great, but doesn't matter because, and this is actually the other thing which we, I, know you haven't brought it up yet, but hey, what the hell does even go where vitals mean? Is it like a stupid score, which means nothing? And that's a question we asked ourselves a lot and many times they're like, oh yeah, we've also D dialed on.

And okay, yeah, maybe it works. Maybe it's actually means nothing. Or no, it's just a vanity metric. It means squat. Just go about making feeling what your website is fast. But now I can save. It's quite certainty that it's not, a while. It can be a metric that can be gamed and some people try and do that, but, Essentially it's a great metric, which very well corresponds to how your visitors experience websites, and it does consider, take that into consideration to a great extent.

[00:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: okay, let's just pause what you're doing here. So you, the claim is it's gonna speed up your website and core web vitals are the measure against which you can judge that. And, but the methods that are bundled into this product are maybe things that we would traditionally associate with a variety of different plugins.

for example, there's caching, there's, A CDN. There's image optimization and CSS improvements, okay. I might combine caching and CSS improvements into one, but then CDN might be an, a different service that I acquire. And image optimization might be a different service that I acquire, but you are bundling all of those up into, to one.

And so if I install the plugin. What exactly is going on? are you spidering the website from the moment that I, install it, and then obviously homing in on the homepage. It sounds like you're doing the work there first. Are you, what are you doing? What is, obviously you don't wanna give away the secret source necessarily, but roughly speaking, what's going on in the background, and how long does it take to complete its work on a, I don't know, a medium sized website?

[00:18:09] Akshat Choudhary: Alright, so it's, again, lot of, interesting question, but I'll start with the secret sauce because when we started the project we thought we'll have a secret sauce. And what we realized was there is no secret sauce,

[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: Excellent.

[00:18:22] Akshat Choudhary: it there is just no secret sauce. And essentially. When I say we are doing all of these plugins is if you don't optimize even a small part or if you leave one part behind, then the overall experience can be, you can be back to a terrible score and a terrible experience.

So you would think that I'll do seven out of 10, and I'm, I've improved and you have improved the system to some extent. And definitely your website is faster, but it does not mean you'll actually have a really fast website. Because one small thing left somewhere can destroy the ev, can effectively mean the, all the other work you have done comes to not.

And so that, that part of secret sauce is there is no secret sauce. And why are we doing everything? Because you have to do everything to get, to have a fast website. You can't leave even a single stone unturned. You have to do. Each and everything out there, you have to make sure every image is optimized.

It loads in the right order, in the right way, with the right size, and you have to do it for every single image. If you leave something behind, then you are, then you're in trouble now. so that was the question about secret sauce. Why are we doing all of these things? are we ing the website? What we do is we bring in all your content and we analyze it deeply.

Okay. So we'll figure out, for example. What is your homepage? Let's start with the homepage, right? But what we also do is we categorize your website. So it's not possible for us to analyze every single page. So what we do is we figure out what pages are very similar to each other, bucket them together, and then be able to, then create a set of rules or patterns to optimize that category of pages.

Now, why do we need to do all of, and some of our competitors don't do it this way. They optimize every page. there are big challenges to doing it, but also, with our approach, we can pre preemptively optimize a lot of pages. And also there are websites with million pages, right? To Spider a million pages is not feasible.

And actually you don't need to do it. It's an inefficient way of solving the problem. So it's actually just in, in some ways, when we look at it from an engineering perspective, that's the wrong way of solving the problem. again, coming back to how long will it take, we have seen, it typically takes two to three minutes to figure out everything and start optimizing it, and then slowly and steadily, as people visit this website, more and more pages get optimized.

So we push a set of rules. So think of it as. we consider ourselves actually an optimization expert. Our systems are the software we have built and that is analyzing your website deeply, just as an incredibly talented, performance expert would do. And they're doing it not only for the homepage, but they're doing it across the website, and then they push these set of rules to the website, and then the website itself optimizes.

Serves optimized content to all the visitors.

[00:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: So let, okay, so imagine I've clicked the button. Firstly, let, me, sorry, there is no button. I gotta get over that. I've installed the, plugin and now your software is doing the work in the background and for a, site of a normal size site, let's just go with that. it's gonna take two or three minutes, but it sounds and again, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you are making judgments about, okay, we've got these types of.

content on, our, on this website. There's a homepage over there. this looks like a category page. Okay. And here's another one. They're broadly similar, so maybe they should get the same treatment. Oh, but here's something different that's oh, I don't know. That looks like a, there's a form on that page.

That's. Something else. and this one is just full of images. Oh, here's another one that's full of images. We'll lump those together. Is that broadly what's going on? You're lumping things into the same bucket and saying, for now we're gonna treat those three pages as the same, and then we'll treat those two as the

[00:22:28] Akshat Choudhary: WordPress makes it much easier than what you're, describing it as a lot more intelligent system. While there is some intelligence in there, WordPress makes it much easier also to categorize page as well. So you are able to figure out what pattern they adhere to. So WordPress will tell you whether this is like a set of blog articles, is this so it, it does make, our job a bit easier, but we still need to do, go through that process and then know which ones to optimize how.

Because if you want to sit and optimize each of them individually, It'll be terribly inefficient. It'll be in and then you'll just not be able to optimize enough websites efficiently. And finally, I think we wanted to make sure that we offer the plugin for free to everybody because everybody wants a fast website and needs a fast website.

So if we wanted to make sure that we don't gate, keep or build a product only for the premium tier, but also make it for free and make sure that it's available to everyone. The only way to do it is to make sure that our systems are optimized. So it mean it meant that we had to do a lot more work upfront.

But then because we have optimized our systems to use as little resources as possible, every user of airlift can actually get a free service, or use a free tier and actually have a really fast website in the process.

[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: You said before we hit record that, we, were talking in the context of, maybe you're in a caching plugin and there's lots and lots of options and maybe it's, for a novice user it's hard to understand what those options are. And in scenarios where I. Those things are understandable, but they're not necessarily understood by novice users relying on machines to take that work.

I is a, from your perspective at least that's a sensible, that's a sensible deal to make because it can decide things that you don't even know about and it can say, yeah, we need to do that. Yeah, we need to do that. But also it doesn't need to go and do the research. it just, it knows that it needs to do this thing and it can do it in a heartbeat.

Whereas you have to go and research, figure out. Do I need that? And if so, how do I configure it? So the, posture really being that let the machines decide because we've built a platform where if, you just trust the system, it'll work. Is that kind of it?

[00:24:46] Akshat Choudhary: Yes, that is, to, to a great extent it, but also the machine, I would not call it AI based system. So it's not that the machine is deciding. Essentially what has happened is our team has gone in and understood each of these problems very, deeply about websites and block and individually and built systems in place so that.

The machine knows the logic to apply when it sees, a certain button, and we had to sit down and really figure out, the when to apply what rule, essentially. And we, but let's assume that I, we have one website and we learn from that website. Let's assume that it's an element of website and it's using a, it's using a slider in element from Elementor.

We decided that we learned that the best way to optimize this experience is. To do a certain set of things. Now, if you learned it for a single website, we can apply it across every website in the vault.

[00:25:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:45] Akshat Choudhary: And the good thing is we didn't have to make rules very specific to Elementor Slider because they, again, you can find patterns even there, but as you learn and make these improvements, the whole world benefits from it.

[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so there's a, there's like a. Because we're using your software to do all of this, you are making the decisions, building up a database of what works and what doesn't work, and so you can repeat that for other people. Okay. I'm starting to get an idea of what it is, the nitty gritty of it though.

So let's say for example, that you take my website, you've improved it. What? What are the actual changes that are taking place? So for example, how are you substituting the images that I've got in my WordPress website? how are they being substituted into your CDN? Are you just consuming them?

Optimizing them based upon, I don't know, turning them to a VIS or Web P, shrinking them to certain sizes. And then every time a page is served, you're rewriting the, URLs for those resources and things like that. And they live on your CDN instead of in the media library on my own website, things like that.

But how are you, how are you deciding what needs to be cashed? What doesn't need to be cashed? Where in the process are you? Getting in so that when something is served up, it's not coming from my website, it's coming from your CDN or from your cash. How is it all working?

[00:27:09] Akshat Choudhary: Alright. So actually we try and use our service as little as possible for the regular serving of the website, simply because we never want ourselves to become the bottleneck or the single point of

[00:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yep.

[00:27:21] Akshat Choudhary: okay? Because you never want ourselves to become the single point of failure at any point of time.

So essentially what will happen is, let's take the case of re resizing images, right? So we will take your media library, understand what images need to be resized, and then we will write it back. To our place on your website. We also give you the option like at, our premium tier to store all of that information on our servers.

But again, that's a very explicit choice that you make. Now, if, because I can write it back to your website, it means that it is a lot, more robust. You don't have a single point of failure. Your website is self-serving. You don't need to worry about some someone else's thing, service breaking, and then that causing your website to slow down, or to break.

So we, again, we are being, we have been very mindful to ensure that ideally, whatever happens, even if a service goes away, your website is still fast. Not that we ever intend to, or we, make sure that our website is, our services are running up, up and fine. But it also ensures that because we are not created this dependencies, it means it ensures that you actually, again, can give you a service for free to every user because.

You already have your hosting, it's more, than capable of serving it fast and free. So why not? So in fact, even the caching layer, like we have our own caching layer. We don't serve data from our cache or we don't utilize the cache if your web host already has a cache in place. So we detect, Hey, is a web host having a cache?

Is it working fine? Yes. Then no need to add another cache layer because we can just utilize that cache. So again, these are, and the reason why we can do this is because our system is acting almost like an end user who is a performance expert. So what happens when you see a performance expert go in and look at a website?

It'll be like, okay, fine. What's the caching system set up here? Let me figure out what we are posting. Are you on, let me try out if the caching is working or not. If it is not working well then the expert will be like, let me set up a caching plugin, and that's when we'll enable our caching. If it already has a.

So again, it's a, so we actually have approached the whole thing from a, Hey, how would an expert solve this problem? The only constraint on the expert is they cannot change any real content on your website, and they cannot remove any plugin or theme they can, that, ability they do not have. And how do you still optimize the website?

And we feel that you can do it by taking a very. Thoughtful, very clear, very structured approach to solving the problem.

[00:30:01] Nathan Wrigley: Is there. So in this scenario, so let's go back to caching. So if there's caching enabled on the hosting environment that I'm using. Your platform will detect that and make use of that if it's appropriate. But if there's nothing available, you will then basically say, okay, we need to send in the, send in the troops.

Let's switch on caching for this site, but we don't need it for that site. That's fine. And then on it goes, and then from that moment on, it's, in your cash. How, would I as, let's say a developer, how would I do things? the, the. terminal problem, which more or less every developer faces, which, oh, you've gotta clear the caches because, something isn't working.

How do we go in and do things like that? How do we clear the caches if as a developer we need to just check that something's working? Do, is there a way that we

[00:30:48] Akshat Choudhary: Yeah, so you can, you have a button on your, so on a website you have a button comes in there, clear cache. But we also detect, so if you update a post, our systems will detect that you have updated a post and clear the cache only for that post.

[00:30:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay,

[00:31:00] Akshat Choudhary: So again, and that's really smart, right? Because. creating the cache, you never want to clear the cache blindly.

We do it more, a lot more often than we should, but the cache should be cleared very carefully because if you clear the cache blindly on all your content, then if you visit, if you have 10 visitors or a hundred visitors come in at the same time, all of them will start loading your website because the cache is not warm.

So there's nothing in the cache. So everything is out from the website. Using PHP and you have an a huge load on the website, so again, you have to do it again. And because we have a system which is able to observe and work in a smart manner, it can do these things, which otherwise is a lot more difficult to do.

[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: it, it seems like there's an awful lot going on in the background. Have you, how has the feedback been from the customers that you've had so far? Have you, are there any parts of the stack that you have had to take a look at because people have suggested Okay, that hasn't worked out for me, or has it basically been plain sailing?

[00:32:04] Akshat Choudhary: No, it's not. It's far from it. fact, had I known how long, how much effort it's gonna take, we would never have taken up the project.

[00:32:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh really?

[00:32:13] Akshat Choudhary: Because we thought it's going to take a few months. It's been more than three and a half years now we've put in. Yeah. And for the longest time we didn't release anything, just working on the project.

We have spent almost 15, 16, 17 man years of effort on it, of pure engineering effort. And we are seeing, so it's been a process, it's been a learning curve. optimization is a, is a very unforgiving. System because if you break something, the customer, yeah, they the, and things break. if you don't do it correctly then things will break and then you have to learn, fix and move on of and make sure that you deploy to everybody.

The beauty of our system is if you identify that something is breaking and if you fix it, it up, everyone wins after that.

[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's an interesting thought. Yeah. You don't have to push an update to a

[00:33:06] Akshat Choudhary: And I can give you so many examples of it and I can give you some because. Webpage is, the markup is so complex, right? And I think this is one really cool example. how do you introduce WebP images into your website? So you have IMG tags, which are your traditional, image tags, right? And you will add a picture tag around it.

Yeah. You'll change, replace it with a picture tag with the web P in it. Now what happens, and again, doesn't happen very often, but what will happen is you might have some CSS somewhere. Yes. Which says if there is an image tag,

[00:33:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.

[00:33:47] Akshat Choudhary: make border black or something like that. Now how do you, but that, because the image tag is no longer loading, it's a picture tag, which loads.

Now, how should that behave?

[00:34:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. yeah, you, want it to, you want it to rewrite the CSS so that it picked up on the picture tag inside the image.

[00:34:07] Akshat Choudhary: Exactly saana, how do you solve it and how do you solve it correctly while continue to lazy load with the right size? And so once we identified the problem and solved it, it applies to everybody. But until then, obviously, and every other plugin faces the same problems and they don't like, it's super difficult to solve these problems correctly.

And we have taken this. So there are like a million such things which you need to solve, and we are continuing to solve them. But, the other thing is every plugin we have seen keeps breaking sites and people don't. So this is the other sad part, right? People don't care enough in the sense that if even the website owners don't care enough, so if something breaks, they're like, okay, I'm fine, but I finally got this thing to work somewhat.

If it breaks a little thing first, they don't notice it. But even if they do, they're. It's a lot more forgiving about the whole thing. for us, we are, yeah. So for us, we are seeing why are people, so if someone deactivates the website, we'll be like, why did you deactivate? Hey, it broke my website. Let, then we go in there, dig deep as to understand what exactly happened.

And, but yeah, so it's not a straight, it's not smooth sailing at all, but the problem we are solving is so important and so useful that it's worth the effort.

[00:35:26] Nathan Wrigley: I'm, gonna guess that if you are really into this topic, if you are a, an optimization expert and you just have a whole. History of delving into all of these problems. maybe you are not selling to those people because they can do these things for themselves, by themselves, and they probably can tweak things in unique and interesting ways because they know the site that they're working on and they know exactly what needs to happen.

But I'm guessing you are going for more the sort of 80 20 kind of thing where most people haven't got the time. If you're an agency and you're a freelancer and it's just you, don't really have the time to become a designer. an expert in JavaScript, an expert in CSS, an expert in caching, an expert in image optimization and all these things.

Are you aiming more at that kind of freelancer market?

[00:36:21] Akshat Choudhary: No. So actually again, okay, so first of all, I think the number of people who can actually do it that well, we, in the WordPress world, we can count on, our hands on the f or count on our fingers, if at all. If it all, they exist. So a lot of people, what they do is they write, they build websites. that makes a big difference at times.

But again, if you are creating enough content, if you're adding, I want a chat widget, I want this, I want analytics, I want this and that, as your website evolves, those websites performance will come down. again, so even for that 10 or five to 10 people who exist in the world who can do this, I don't think they are even, they have the right tooling or the capability to do it or the time to do it. Some of them keep so essentially, so the wrong approach to look at it is, I'm solving for the 80 80 no, you have to solve for the 99.999

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. Okay. All

[00:37:21] Akshat Choudhary: because, 99.99, again, the smart guys don't wanna waste their time doing all of the, and like I mentioned, how do you do it for 10 pages?

How do you optimize all 10 pages and tomorrow if you create an 11th page, which the most valuable websites will, now what happens? so yeah, our goal is not to, not to exclude people out or focus only on the eight 80. Also, I generally feel that if, any product is aiming just for 80, they lose actually the 80 and the 20.

So you, they lose everybody. Because you're just not creating a product, which is good enough.

[00:37:56] Nathan Wrigley: The, one of the things which you've alluded to already, but I just wanna clear it up, is if I were to install this and get familiar with it, but then at some point in the future, I think I, don't wanna be using airlift anymore. Can I just uninstall it and everything? In, the uninstall process will be returned to normal.

we mentioned that rewriting of the CSS, so that the pictures work instead of the images, they now have the black border and so on. Do you put it back how it was basically,

[00:38:25] Akshat Choudhary: Yeah. So if the, when the moment you uninstall the plugin, every change we make, so we make sure that every change is fully reversible and we don't modify the actual website in any way.

So again, so these are again, very conscious, very clear choices we have made. Because, especially while we are building the thing, it was not as robust as it is today, and we still feel that in a year time it'll be much more, even more robust.

So we never want the person to feel, they're locked into some situation which they can't get out of. So just again, treat people the way I would have liked to be treated in this way, in this situation.

[00:39:03] Nathan Wrigley: So getting to the pricing quickly, you mentioned that there's a free version. as with all things free, this is probably, if you are in, if you're interested in what we've just been talking about, this is probably gonna be your gateway to. Figuring out whether it works. And, and I'm on the, the inevitable pricing page, airlift.net/pricing, two options, basic and free.

the, basic plan is for one site, and we'll get into the details of that, but then there's obviously it's free tier. You can try it. and then you will get page caching, font conversion, dynamic CSS calculation. you'll get a performance report, Google font handling up to 10 custom pages will be handled, and then up to 1000 images will be optimized.

And, and it looks like you can manually reoptimize once a week on that free tier.

[00:39:57] Akshat Choudhary: Yeah, so actually I would say that Apprising page, yeah, that's true. But also that's correct. But also apprising is not something we are focused on at all. Like it's not something which we have really. We are trying to give as much as possible to other free tier. Our basic hypothesis is the best websites in the world, they're more than happy to pay for a quality service, and they want to pay you well for a quality service.

and that's, the basic hypothesis we want to go after, rather than limiting excessively. So our goal is with the free webs, with a free plan, almost any user should get the most value from the product.

[00:40:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:35] Akshat Choudhary: a great product, if you have a, valuable e-commerce site or if you have valuable website, you don't, you want to work with professionals who know, who can provide you support if required, who will give you the best of everything that you need, and then, you pay a premium for it.

So that's the basic hypothesis we are trying to work with more than adding some limits, and trying to reduce the number of limits we have as far as possible.

[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: There. have a look at the pricing page though, because there, there obviously is a, paid tier if you want to check that and you can look at the, different options and there's a sort of, you can extend the number of sites and so on and so forth. be able to see, it's the usual affair of there.

There's some ticks and there's some crosses depending on where you land. But the, the interesting thing from my point of view is the piece of this which can't dislodge from my head, is some of the people who I know who've tried it on interesting websites who've then come back to me and said, wow. I dunno what happened, but stuff happened and it now gets a better call web vital score. so maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth, dear listener, you checking it out, airlift.net. go and have a look at what Actha and his team have built over, many years. Sounds like 17 years worth of labor has been, poured into this and, and see what you make of it.

And, obviously if you got any intuitions about it, whether it worked or not. let me know, let Actha know and and they can obviously improve that service. Actha is, there anything that we didn't touch on that you felt that you wanted to impress upon people the importance of something or other?

[00:42:15] Akshat Choudhary: I think we are, I think we are covered as much as we could. there's, I, we can talk about it indefinitely because just the sheer scale and the number of things to, to talk about. There are, so just it's such an interesting topic where the number of challenges, the, and once you just keep going deeper and deeper into to realize that.

The right approach to solve this problem is through automated systems now. And yeah, it's a super interesting space. I think it's a very important problem. we know for sure. I think this is the one place, in fact, this is the thing that I would definitely like to add, is often people check core web vitals for SEO reasons.

What I can tell you is, and what they don't realize is the importance of a fast website. And you will see. A fast website is important because if you have a fast website, people will use a lot more of it and you, I'm sure you can just see it anecdotally, especially on mobile, is you will visit more page if you, if a website is slow after the first page loads you, or even while the first page is loading, if it's spinning, you'll, go and switch on Instagram or you'll switch on Twitter, and it's just because.

We cannot, people have become very impatient. So what, having a fast website makes a tremendous put impact on your conversions, on the engagement with the website. And I believe that's the main reason why you should have a fast website more than SEO, more than those other factors. You will see a tremendous improvement in engagement and which is what finally is most important, having a highly engaging website.

[00:43:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting and certainly a subject that for many people is just something that they don't really want to get involved with. So the idea of a service, which where they can install it and then stop thinking about it, is definitely gonna be appealing. Brand new to me at least brand new to the world I think as well.

airlift.net. go check it out and act chat. Chow. Thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:44:21] Akshat Choudhary: thank you again, Nathan. Always glad to talk to you.

[00:44:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for today. Like I said, at the top of the show, I'm not entirely sure I asked the best set of questions of Akshat, but hopefully you got an impression of what Airlift can do. And truly what a remarkable promise it has. Maybe go and check it out for yourself and give them some feedback about whether it works for you or not.

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Okay. Truly, really, that is all that we've got time for. As I said, if you're at Cloudfest, give me a message. DM me on Twitter at WP Builds, or at nathanwrigley.com on Bluesky. I'd love to hang out with some of you. That would be really nice if you're gonna be there.

But that is really it for this episode. I am gonna fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.