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Comment by linkjuice4all | Hacker News Reader

I just moved out of the ad agency/SEO industry (using a semi-burner account for that reason) and back into full-stack development. In the past couple of years I put a lot of effort into performance analysis and improvement (mainly site speed but other critical factors) but got very little buy-in from my clients. I was also looking beyond basic "SEO metrics" and the cookie-cutter output from Google Page Speed test and even building a solid ROI model from wasted ad-spend on slow sites with high bounce rates.

Is this something you're seeing a lot of demand for? If so are people actively searching it out or this just a consulting/who-you-know sort of thing?

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It's incredibly popular in the ecommerce world where every 1kb reduced is a lot. Target large ones - they often use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, BigCommerce, Magento.

Also any business with embeddable products and SDKs. No one is happy to make their page heavier with a script they don't own. Fintech comes to mind. Analytics companies too.

Anything with complex dashboards. Anything tailored to power users - CRMs, help desk software.

Figure out your pitch too - your job may save server costs (and increase development costs but maybe don't mention that), optimize response time of employees, increase productivity, or retain shoppers.

My experience with e-commerce sites is they they tend to accumulate enough tracking and ad network scripts to ultimately kill performance.

It's really quality vs quantity. Some really utilize whatever analytics tool they use, others just throw in more tools. It's a bit of a hit-and-miss industry in terms of code quality. Even the big ones.

Any recommendation on how to make the e-commerce world find you? And especially the large ones ?

I was thinking about scouring the web for e-commerce sites with bad performance and just send them a cold email with some simple actionable items.

Unfortunately my experience is as an outsourced employee so not too relevant for pitching as a contractor.

But product managers are usually pretty happy to hear you out and usually benefit from referring people they've talked to. And they respond on LinkedIn.

It shouldn't be too hard, contractors were common, employee turnover was significant too. Platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud usually have an API that supports an older version of JavaScript so employees are a bit harder to retain and a lot depends on contractors. That's why I suggested that particular platform, plus it's easy to find their customers if you browse the SFCC customer stories.

I realize it sounds like a terrible job after the above but I truly enjoyed my years there even though the quality of the websites varies a lot.

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