Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today. I'm Laura Azege, a course lead here for the MITx MicroMasters in SEM program. I'm co-hosting this live event with Kellen Betz, also of course you may know and we are super fortunate to have here today with us Dr. Josue Velazquez. Josue is a research scientist and lecturer at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He has recently launched his first massive online course on sustainable supply chains and today he's joining us with one of his many hats here at the center as the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab Director. Welcome Josue. So before we move on and as you know we love to have polls here and all our webinars we will kick the event with a poll. We want to know why are you here today. So Lisa here who is helping us will launch the poll so you probably see it popping up on your window. Let us know if you're here today because you just want to learn about optimization models with sustainable practices. If you just want to know more about sustainability if it's probably because you're here for the technology and visibility portion of the event or if it is that you're part of our MicroMasters program and you don't miss any live event. So with that I'll give the word to Kellen for the agenda of the session. Awesome. Thank you Lara and pleasure to have you Dr Josue Velazquez looking forward to our conversation today. So just kind of a quick agenda for today's webinar. The next 15 minutes or so Dr Josue Velazquez will provide some context on sustainable supply chain management and the role of optimization and technology to drive sustainable decisions. It also illustrates some practical examples from applied research projects conducted here on the MIT CTL and sustainable supply chain lab that he directs and discuss the challenges faced when implementing sustainable supply chain practices. Lara and I will then have some questions prepared in advance. The last 10 minutes will definitely be saved for your questions and so start thinking of those and please use that webinar Q&A feature in Zoom. It's that Q&A feature at the bottom there to ask your questions and be sure that you're logged in with the name. We won't read any anonymous questions today. Also share a couple more polls during our event so be prepared to participate with those and with that let's check on the results of that first poll here if we can share those results. Awesome. So the poll the question was why are you here today? Lots of looks like lots of great learners in our audience so I want to learn more on how to connect with optimization models and supply chain practices. That's awesome. Almost 60%. Almost 40%. I'm interested in knowing more about sustainable supply chain labs. That's cool. You decided about that answer as well. I don't know if you have any comments or thoughts on those initial poll results there. But with that in mind, maybe we'll just outpass the stage to you and you can kick it off, share your slides and take it away. Fantastic. Well, thank you. Thank you so much first to Lara for the invitation and Kelly as well. Very nice introduction and it's really a great pleasure to be here today. So let me just start the presentation with a couple of slides that I would like to share. All right. So all good. Fantastic. So the intention of today's discussion presentation is to illustrate a little bit about the importance of two main tools and techniques which is one optimization and the other visibility. Both supported by the technology and the idea is how we could use these methodologies, these approaches to actually achieve sustainability strategies. And as you know, there are plenty of discussions around the topic. We've been working on sustainable supply chains and sustainable logistics for many years and the idea is to just illustrate some of the projects we've done in the past to also give you a glimpse how you could use these techniques that you potentially may also learn in these awesome courses, C2X, C4X and all the micro masses in general that are provided by MIT CTL. So let me just start. So the first is of course, many of you commented actually in the poll the importance of sustainability and there were three or four questions related to this topic. We know that it's hot topic. We know that plenty of companies are starting to look into this and there are different dimensions. But of course, there is a particular interest in the environmental sustainability. And we saw it. We actually ran last year around this time a poll with some of our corporate partners. So what you see here in the screen is actually for last year, some of the CTL corporate partners that also engage with us in different capacities. And when I was invited to give a presentation on sustainable logistics, logistics, I asked them this question. I said, either you as a company or key customers have established clear carbon reduction targets for the next years, for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And then I'm giving three options. Yes, no, I'm not sure. And I will venture to say that those that are not sure is probably they have heard something about it. And probably it's not still very explicit. But this is what we saw. The vast majority actually has either companies in their strategy or key customers that are actually moving also their strategy in the supply chain that have a specific carbon reduction targets. And of course, now that we know this information, the question is why are we looking into this from the from the perspective of supply chain management from from logistics? And this is this is a key question. To answer this, in case you are not very much familiar with this with this topic, you know, supply chain management, at least the way that we see it actually has to do with almost all the processes that exist in any business in any organization. And the way that I always like to illustrate this is to just by looking at this at this picture. So this this young lady is buying a blouse or a shirt. And there are there are some statistics that show that all the all the processes that are required and all the strips that this shirt has has done in the past, actually way more than what in average, a person like ourselves, we are going to travel for the rest of our lives. So in other words, this shirts has actually traveled more. And the reason is because of what I just explained, there are plenty of activities related with the upstream in the supply chain that are actually creating a lot of of transportation movements, extraction could be that the materials are coming from, I don't know, cotton extracted in Texas, moving Long Beach, sending China for assembling and dying, maybe send again to Europe for, you know, other type of SKU packaging allocation. But there are different activities that are happening, you know, so that this shirt can actually exist in this show. And those processes in general are designed in a way that we can achieve, you know, either the optimal ordering in terms of having sufficient amounts to serve the the demand, you know, expectations in on time delivery and field rate and service level. But at the same time, are also designed in a way that we are we are looking at the manualization of costs. So we try to be as efficient as possible. Now all these processes again imply different flows of materials, which is, you know, part of the foundation of supply chains. But of course, the one that actually creates the impacts for the environment are actually related to the movement of materials. You know, and that's why also when we look at the supply chain and different topics on sustainability, we tend to pay a little bit more attention to all the transportation activities, or what are the decisions in the supply chain that are actually driving the transportation activities. And what I'm going to do today is explain an illustrate with some of these examples, particularly for the transportation. Now, imagine that you are this company that needs to also serve these customers with certain expectations in demand. So the question is, how can I achieve those carbon reduction targets? While at the same time, I have to meet also my business goals. Now, different approaches. The first one is a key. First, you need to know what is the size of the problem. And the first step usually companies have started to do that probably 10 years ago, five years more intensively is to conduct a carbon footprint. And this is this is key. Again, like in any other problem in business and in supply chain, you get what you measure. So looking at the different supply chain activities and processes that are actually explaining a specific business are key to really identify what are the different ways that companies can operate their supply chain, make investments in different equipment and technology, and leverage different capabilities to achieve their carbon reduction targets. So first step has to do with that. So you identify what we call the hot spots. So where exactly the supply chain, you can observe certain, you know, increasing in environmental activity. And by looking at this, remember, this can be caused either because you have inefficiencies in the equipment, but could also be caused because of all the decisions you are making. For instance, when you decide different replenishment strategies, these immediately may affect the transportation activity, both, you know, downstream or upstream in the supply chain. If you define different service level targets and inventory strategies, again, you're going to affect again, what, how much you're going to keep in the inventory, how much energy you're going to be using in your own warehouse or in material handling. So the different processes are important in this stage to really spend time identifying these operations. Now, once you have this information, then the next question is, okay, so how I'm going to use this information to make decisions. And one of the frameworks that I used to teach, you know, in the topic of sustainable supply chain management, has this famous impact effort charts that are very common in consulting. And then you have, you have usually here, like those efforts that you require that is less or a lot. If a DMD impact is not really relevant, don't waste your time on those strategies. The question is more whether you need to put a lot of effort to achieve long-term significant reductions to achieve your carbon targets, or you can actually have also what we call the quick wins. I don't need so much effort because I already have the infrastructure, the information, and I can actually leverage that by looking at different decisions in the supply chain. So as I said, one side, the equipment could be investment, for instance, in electrification in the supply chain, or in the other side, looking at the different decisions. And regardless of where is your strategy, both of them can actually benefit extensively from both what we call the optimization and also the visibility. And I will give some examples. So the right approach, the way that we see it, has to do with balancing these two strategies. From one side, how we can squeeze for efficiencies, usually we try to, you know, get as much as we can with the minimum, you know, resources we are operating. So this is the foundation of optimization model. And on the other side, we look at also the consumer facing logistics, which has to do a lot with growing the capacity that you have to squeeze again by having visibility and leveraging the visibility that becomes also like a strategy to involve also customers or consumers in your strategies. All right. So I'm going to illustrate with both and I will start actually with the power of visibility in this example. And hopefully by now, some of you already are aware of the type of projects I'm presenting, because I've been trying to, you know, disseminate part of the projects we call the green button. And here everything starts with understanding, for instance, in transportation, as I said, the importance of e-commerce and the concept of fast shipping that I started three years ago, if I recall correctly, the fast shipping in terms of the same day delivery promise before it was today delivery promise, it was already fast, but it became faster. And then once Amazon launched this strategy, as we know, all the other companies that are offering also e-commerce is starting also both proposing strategies or struggling with this. But as we know, this fast shipping and e-commerce in turn also involves an increase in the carbon footprint. And this is just intuition, because at the end, you have less time to really do the planning, which means probably you're going to be delivering to same neighborhoods multiple times, either during the day or the week, which means increasing in trips. When in fact, you could probably wait if you will have more days to deliver and then improve consolidation and then do better planning, which in turn also reduces the amount of energy and CO2 emissions you will have in this operation. So for this example, we worked on a project sponsored by Coppell, which is one of the Mexican retailers. And what we did is to take information about the different last mile logistics operations. And the idea was to look at this information and try to first understand what are the what are the emissions associated with that operation. Now, to do that, we started working with a lot of data. Remember, in this case, we are talking about plenty of delivery notes, plenty of transportation activities, different SKUs. So what we did is to conduct a very comprehensive estimation of the carbon emissions and then capture the information of what happens every time that we delay one day the delivery. So in other words, if I have to operate and I need to deliver with a window of two days, so how the distribution center will have to operate and how many drugs will I need for a specific demand that I'm estimating. Now, if I have three days to deliver, if I have four days to deliver, how will reorganize my scheduling to make sure that I serve the customer and then I improve consolidation. And by looking at the improvement in consolidation and amount of trips, we were able to estimate quite accurately what will be the amount of CO2 emissions that we will save by having more days to deliver. And what you are looking here at the slide is actually a real simulation of one of the distribution centers by looking at all this operation of the data conducted in this last mile delivery. Now, what we did in this case is to use this information, not just to improve a squeeze for efficiencies, but in fact, what happens if we are able to use these estimations to actually disclose it with the consumer at the moment of the purchase. And that's the concept. If you know when you are buying that asking for fast shipping will have an effect either in the kilograms of CO2 or all the type of displays in environmental information, will consumers be willing to delay their home delivery? And if that happens, then we are showing in fact that the visibility is helping the supply chain achieve, in this case, sustainability strategies. And this is what we did, what I'm just illustrating here is the short video when we were featured by CNN on this just mock-up in the e-commerce platform. It's just a mock-up, but it looks something like that. Like you have their fast shipping, but then imagine that you disclose this information and then incentivize consumers to select the green delivery option. And what we observe in this case that we took two cities to do the analysis, Mexico City and Monterey, we actually observed that more than 50% of people in fact changed their original decision to select now green deliveries. This is decision, this is not a survey. Now, this is awesome, right? And of course, the question here is, okay, imagine that now we actually get information for all the different distribution centers that by providing environmental information, consumers are willing to wait five days more for the home delivery. Fantastic. Okay, so now what do we do with these five days of delivery? Well, this is when it comes the other side of the coin, which is the power of optimization. And the concept is, okay, so if we have more days to deliver, let me just illustrate the potential of this problem. So this, what you see in the slide is actually a two real trajectories. So in two days, by the end of February and the first day of March, we were having different trucks going exactly to the same neighborhood, the same zip code. And what you see in the notes that are in red, this is the deliveries for one day, and those that are in blue are the second. Now, imagine that you are able to deliver green, sorry, not green, blue and red, any day, right? So you can either deliver the last day or the next day, or actually you have even more days to deliver, which in turn also implies you'll get new orders. But let's say that you have now flexibility. There is no same day delivery. There is no fast ship, and you can deliver any day. The question is, how would you rearrange this? And then what we see here, this is just done with a basic heuristic, similar to the one that we did in the simulation. By rearranging, immediately we see that we are mixing both delivery nodes, the red and the blues in both days. We actually observe already significant reductions in mileage in area cover, more density, which in turn also means much more efficiency that we are expecting here in reduction of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. So we follow this intuition and we say, well, we realize that traditional transportation management systems are having plenty of overlaps because they are looking at the minimization of distance. And what we say is like, what if we create a different mathematical model that instead of delivering following the distance minimization and having overlaps, is actually deciding to consolidate, wait a little bit more, so postpone certain orders so that delivery can be done later. So we work this project with a couple of colleagues, Andres and Sergio, and the idea was to take information of expected orders, current orders, critical orders, and then define a grid for delivery that will optimize the amount of distance travel and the amount of stops conducted in a specific zip code. And just to give you a glimpse, for those that were saying that we are interested in knowing more about optimization, you should be thrilled at looking at this large scale optimization model. So this was really a big deal, managed in the largest settings, and we tried different ways to model this. We started with some good old, we started later with the Google OR, but there are different tools that allow you to manage a large scale setting. And in this case, as you can see, we got more than 70 million variables overall that were actually used to map this optimization. The idea is by having this extended delivery windows, how we're going to use this information to improve the consolidation. And the interesting part is that we actually conducted a pilot to compare the current proposed software that the company was using versus our proposed large scale model. And what you see here are the absolute reductions we obtained. From one side, what I really love is this one, because not looking at the whole cost was actually huge, but just looking at the field consumption, which is the CO2 emissions, the amount of savings is huge compared to just squeezing efficiencies. This is a mix of looking at visibility and transparency, plus also using optimization. And there are plenty of examples on this. I could spend the whole webinar just talking and talking how you could improve your distribution network, delivery sequence, inventory sourcing, etc. But again, the recommendation is you squeeze for efficiencies using plenty of technology, optimization analysis. But on the other side, you also want to implement some consumer facing logistic sustainability by looking also at the power of transparency and visibility. Anyway, I appreciate your time. I hope that you find this interesting and we can have now a nice discussion. If you're more interested in knowing more about all this content, feel free to reach out to us in our website, sustainable.mit.edu. Thank you so much. And back to you, Kellen and Laura. Awesome. Well, thank you, Dr. Velasquez. It's a fascinating presentation of the example of kind of showing both sides of the balance there, if you will, engaging the customer and seeing if you can gain maybe some flexibility from the customer, gaining more days. That's sort of fascinating to see that 50% of customers will choose a slower option in today's Amazon same-day delivery world. I mean, at the same time, using an optimization to kind of see how you can squeeze out some of those efficiencies. Fascinating discussion. There's tons of questions that we could probably expand on number of different areas. We already have some great questions here in the Q&A, but maybe I want to kind of jump into one particular question and expand on the concept of supply chain visibility. I know you talked a lot about kind of the customer facing side of supply chain visibility. Some of the other side of supply chain visibility involves engaging supply chain partners, also sharing information with upstream suppliers, downstream customers that are other businesses, if you will. So it often involves sending and receiving data with these partners, but maybe sending and receiving emissions data, operations data, et cetera. But often the challenge involved with this sharing of information, if you will, is not as much technical. It's not as much how you send that data, as much as it is the trust and the security and the collaboration with that interaction, with that transaction. So for example, a company may feel that they share their emissions data, will be less competitive, for example. So I wonder if you could discuss a little bit about how some of these other considerations around sharing data on this disclosure and transparency side of supply chain visibility. Yeah, absolutely. This is a very interesting topic and you actually hit already very interesting points related to the trust and the willingness to collaborate. So we know that plenty of the companies at this stage, almost any medium-sized or large company in the developed world, but also in developing countries, are actually disclosing their emissions one way or the other, either because governmental reasons or because they want to also be part of their carbon disclosure project. So you look into this and you will find almost all of them are disclosing their emissions, disclosing the methodology they follow. And they commit for carbon reduction targets. But again, for me, the question is, okay, those are absolute numbers, then you start growing as a business, then you report again, and it becomes an exercise that is not that clear particularly if you are as a company aiming to involve customers or consumers in your sustainability strategy. I believe there is an important gap that at this stage, those estimations are not translated, not just into something that can be understandable for the customer and the consumer, but also that they haven't seen the potential to really help their own strategies. Now, when they start doing it in the operational level, this is what you were describing, it's very hard. So at this stage, if you are using a carrier, for instance, you are, I'm just going to say, largest cosmetics company in the world, and then you're using 70 different logistics providers. Again, the question is, I need to assess performance, but they are going to disclose their own emissions, and again, it's going to become a competition how they are going to use that information, and it can be very tricky. On the other side, they can always say, this is the fuel consumption I have in your operation, but disclosing that information means they're going to give a strong point that can be used against them in the negotiations. Divine, no, this is what you're spending a fuel. This is, wait a minute, why you are changing me 10 times that price. So those things become, of course, difficult, and that's why, at least to my understanding, it's always important to define the specific scope of that collaboration. So I was describing now with the consumer and the e-commerce company, but if we look at B2B, for instance, we've seen also examples in which a company is looking at the carrier, and it's saying, can you help me? A shipper is saying to the carrier, can you help me? Because you need to help me achieve my carbon reduction targets for the scope 3, those emissions that are not related to the assets that are known by the company. And say, okay, so I can reduce emissions, but you guys are asking me, for instance, to have various strict delivery windows. So you ask me to deliver between 9 to 10 all the time, your place orders that are not consistent, you change both frequency and amounts, and that actually creates a more complex environment for me to reduce emissions. If you can help me do better planning, if you can actually send more information, just collaboration, those things can actually imply significant reductions, probably in the magnitude of what I was just showing here with the 30% and above. So I believe there is potential, and this is always a discussion. I fully agree with you, Kellen, that this is no more a discussion about whether we have the technology or the software, is whether we both want to and have certain rules in how to use this information and how we are going to also allocate the benefits that we are going to be obtaining by this collaboration. But this is a very interesting point that definitely needs to be even discussed further in the transparency and visibility topic. Thank you, Josue. And even though we are talking a lot about the technology and it, I love the fact that we're talking about collaboration and communication as a way to make our plans more actionable and to actually be able to achieve results. Like sometimes our goals are different to the actions we're taking, trying to get those. So it's very important to have that in mind at all times. So I am a huge fan of optimization. So if you're okay with it, I would like to go back to that part of the presentation. In your presentation, you described how to optimize the network design, considering longer lead times accepted by customers in order to do, as you just say, this reduction on the carbon footprint. And we usually use in our courses optimization for achieving a budget restriction or a service level. And we also know that it's possible to include a variety of components. And we were wondering if you could share a little bit more on whether it is possible to include something like kilograms of CO2 as a decision variable in a model and with that in also in our goals. And I would like to add on that that some of the members of our audience like Remy is also asking, how can algorithms deal with the additional complexity of adding those variables? And if there's anything else like I mentioned, CO2, is there any other variable that you usually include in models when you're thinking on optimizing towards sustainability? Awesome. This is great questions. Obviously, you're where my student taking my class and sustainable supply chain management one day, but I need, I should say the lower actually got an A plus. But this is true. So let me start answering some of the questions. So from one side, your first one is, is it possible to include an estimation of kilograms of CO2 or environmental estimation when doing optimization models? The answer is, absolutely yes. And most of the time, I'm not a fan, even though I showed that example, I'm not that a fan of showing the kilograms of CO2 as a part of a cost objective function. A single objective. And this is very common also in supply chain. We do it because it simplifies. And that's okay. We did it also because the company was interested in looking at the cost. But it's possible to actually measure this separately, either as a constraint, as you were describing with the budget, say, okay, so we have a carbon reduction target. This is what we want to have now with the new design of the network. Let's make sure that all the flows we are going to have on the location of facilities are going to guarantee we will not exceed this amount of CO2. And then you're going to start playing with that. You can, in fact, look at the model and say, well, I will just change my objective function. And I will look at the minimization of CO2 emissions instead of looking at the others. Or you could include all of them, the multi-objective optimization. But the answer to your question is yes. Kilograms of CO2 is usually the one that is potentially easier to include in a model that you are aiming to include sustainability criteria. Although there are definitely many others. Like, for instance, last year, we advised a nice capstone project for UNICEF in Zimbabwe. And Tim Kim and I co-advised that with Vitaute. These guys did an awesome work. They took information to establish an objective of minimization of kilograms of CO2 for the network design. Plus the minimization of cost. And plus they also look at the social perspective. They say, what happens if certain sourcing are going to be limited by only buying from local? So that we help the community. And then you can change your network. This is, as you probably know, just changing certain constraints to make it work. But you're going to be able to measure how many of the suppliers are actually coming from the region and get an estimation of the ratio. How many or quite the proportion. And then understand also another social sustainability criteria. So there are different ways. And in general, you just work with them with different techniques to model it. Similar to what you teach in the course in AC2X for sure. Now, you were asking me the algorithmic part. That's the part that always, oh my, it's always very complicated. But there are a couple of things to say. From one side, there is a lot of advancement on the use of different heuristics, right? Like, you know, genetic algorithms, meta heuristics, there are plenty of things already exist in the literature and the advancement has been impressive in the last decade, mainly also because of the advancement of the power of computers. Now, with the new large scale software, like the solvers, right? And I'm talking probably, you know better, but there are plenty, as you know, it would all be Cplex, Yps, which others, Lingo probably, but that's, there are plenty. I don't want to cause here, there are ones that I'm missing. Google OR as I was saying, right? All of them have already some sort of heuristics coded already. And it's possible to call them to actually solve some of these complexities that you are increasing because of now having more variables and other type of objective functions. And now the power also, because you know, in OR, there are the guys that are fans of heuristics, and there are the guys that are fans of exact methods, right? So those that are in exact methods, they also have better techniques now, better formulations of the model, a better way to really conduct just typical methods coming from the branch and bound, but actually doing even with more power, better cuts. So computing power has grown significantly. And I believe now that gives us access to really solve even much more complex problems. And I believe we should not be scared of that. We should in fact, go into the high level of detail, as you know, I'm very big fan of providing as many data points and detail as possible, so that really the formulation of the problem captures to the best of the possibilities, what is exactly happening in reality, so that the solution will actually be practical and impactful. Awesome. So many, so many fascinating topics to jump in there. And, you know, we could expand on so many of those and, you know, even explore ideas like incorporating machine learning and AI into some of, you know, solving some of these optimization problems as well. But in sake of time, Laura, I might jump to kind of our last pre-prepared question before we get into the Q&A. And if you have any questions, again, please pop those into that Q&A feature and we'll jump into those next. But just jump into our kind of last prepared question. Some of our participants here today are part of our MicroMasters program. Let's shout out to all our MicroMasters learners out there. And they may be looking to involve themselves using optimization or technology to help achieve more sustainable supply chain. You mentioned the importance of this, obviously we discussed this in many different ways already as well. But it might seem like kind of a daunting task to a MicroMasters learner just kind of starting out on their journey. So I'm wondering if you could kind of maybe give some advice to our MicroMasters learners on where they maybe where they should start, you know, where they should start their journey during this program. You know, they're just kind of learning these topics maybe for the first time, you know, where can they go from here? So those that are starting the journey should definitely take both of your courses and the whole MicroMasters. That will be honestly a good start, right? If you take also the zero X, you will get also an idea of what, if you haven't heard of optimization and everything else. Now, once you have completed this, then definitely there are plenty of ways to work on this and either you, you know, it's very modest at this stage all the data scientists that many of the companies have and careers on that topic, many of other courses also on data analytics and machine learning. As you mentioned, this is something I probably missed just because it brought me back to my time when I was doing heuristics, but definitely telling you are totally right. There are better ways also by combining techniques of machine learning now to solve problems like that. But there are careers both in practice by looking at how to develop with certain courses, participating in companies that are working with this type of problems, both in logistics as well as to understand consumers. And on the other side also academia, right? So some of the students may potentially want to either join the SEM program in some moment or a more technical because the SEM is more like in between, right? Like business with engineering, but there are also maybe they say, no, I want something in operations research. All of those things are opportunities to grow the understanding. So this is honestly what will be my recommendation. There is so much information at this time available for those that are interested in growing this understanding. But make no mistake, getting more knowledge and abilities in both as I said, optimization, all the technology or the visibility, all the things that we are discussing. It's something that will serve you for almost any problem. In this case, I'm talking about sustainability because this is something actually quite new in a way to be able to leverage that to improve your strategies and sustainability. But this could be used for almost any field, any discipline, anybody that is working in supply chain knows this is really, really key. So my recommendation is embrace it, learn it, practice it and disseminate with others. Tell everyone about it. Thank you. It was a great piece of advice and definitely something that everyone in our audience can apply no matter if they are taking the courses or not. I'm just willing to launch the last poll before we go to the Q&A from the audience so that we can let that populate meanwhile. So I appreciate Lisa's help to launch that one. This is just to know what are you taking away from today's meeting, today's event? What was the most interesting part for you that will help us a lot to get some feedback and to see what are you into next for our next webinar in the series? So I will let that populate. I want to connect one question from the audience. It is from Arslan Ahmed with some thought I had while you were going through the presentation, because Arslan is asking about other ways to ensure sustainability in supply chains. It's also asking about different initiatives like probably going paperless or using renewable energy for your manufacturing processes. But I was thinking a little bit of e-commerce and you talk about just patch upon e-commerce growth and the challenges that may bring with the fast shipment. And then I think with that there is a trend to be closer to the customer and I know you have some research on that. And I wanted to know about the inefficiencies and what is the cost in terms of carbon emissions or in terms of sustainability for an inefficient supply chain or for a process that is not working as expected, not only because you're not delivering on time, but also because there is this need to return the product back or to attend some emergencies, probably. Yeah, and also there are many, many topics that you touch, Laura. And of course, we discuss about the design of a network that also is going to consider returns. We should probably be talking with Eva Ponce, right, on those topics in closed-loop supply chains and reverse logistics, which by the way, these are topics we definitely discuss in our edX course on sustainable supply chain management. As you were saying, one of the things that I definitely have studied with the team on the lab related to the proximity with customers, right, with consumers, particularly in e-commerce. When the companies, the bigger retailers launched the strategy to do fast shipping, their main argument was saying we are having a higher footprint, we are getting closer to consumers, we are going to be able to react very fast to unexpected changes in the demand. And this is also what Walmart.com and Amazon and Target, many others have said. What we study is that this cannot be just taken as granted, because every time that you change proximity with customers, you are definitely extending the footprint both in the logistics side, but also in the environmental side of your operation, right? And this is important, like if you do it in that way, that means you're going to have to revisit your inventory policy. You're going to probably have a little bit, what we call the water bed effect that by reacting very fast here, somebody has to be prepared with you. And that also creates more inbound transportation on expected changes. So those challenges need to be considered, right? So part of the things that we study is also to capture the changes that we've seen in the different landscapes of delivery of cities, right? Like when we look at the network designs, the course discuss about using the Weber model. So I never know if I'm pronouncing it correctly because I believe his last name is German, but there is a model that comes from more than 100 years that helps understand the center of gravity approach. And what we argue is that the approach still definitely works, but you need to consider that now there are streets that even if you are assuming a collision distance, a stray distance, now you have congestion, now you have limitations in the type of vehicles you can access. So again, you know, all of these things that I'm saying, I know it sounds a little bit like, well, how do you account for that? Well, there are ways to really capture what is happening in a network and try to include that in the models so that again, you help companies achieve everything that they need in the business goals, but at the same time also achieving their carbon targets. So I hope that, you know, I know that your question worked plenty. Laura, so I don't know if I was able to answer, but at least to create a little bit of the awareness how we deal with these issues. Thank you. That's fascinating. There's so many different angles and I think maybe what it really does is just to show the complexity of this space, you know, whether it's sustainable logistics or sustainable spike chains more broadly, just the complexity of the space and so much opportunity to learn, to explore from a research perspective, from a business perspective, you know, just a fascinating space. Awesome. So maybe in the interest of time, maybe we do one more question, Laura, and then we jump into our poll results and wrap things up here. And so I wanted to kind of expand on a question here from Linda Lynn and expanding on it, you know, in the context of, we're obviously in a very challenging pricing environment.  At the same time, you know, when you present, you know, different options to customers price is kind of a key feature of that decision making process, right? So her question is about the green button, you know, project that you explore and whether or not the two different shipping options that you presented were the same price? And what is where there's kind of a number of different angles we could take on that concept of what are some of the different price sensitivities versus shipping speeds versus your carbon footprint shipping options that the research is showing in that kind of space? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you for the question. So in the example that I show in the slides is merely an illustration of how it looks the mockup, right? But we actually did a much more comprehensive analysis. So from one side, we started the project surveying first 1000 approximately consumers, right, during the home delivery operation. And part of the questions was first to ask in a specific region, what was their perception of the delivery, whether it was fast as low or normal. Without really saying more, we will say, well, what if now I need to deliver maybe with more days, like three, four days, will you have been willing to wait longer? And there are some that actually responded, yes, no, because some actually were saying you deliver on a Wednesday and then you actually, I was not even at home and I opened the package on the weekend, which, you know, we usually all do that. I would push for shipping, we have it at home and we take five days to actually open it if not more. So we detected that. And then later, we actually asked about economic incentives and said, well, what if I give you some, you know, a gift card or certain money for you to wait more days for the delivery. And then finally, we asked, well, what if I tell you that every day you delay the delivery, I'm able to have a specific savings and environmental impact. And we actually tested different ones. So the project is, you know, we test the killer, I'm substitute, we tested trees, we tested other things. Now, what we saw is that first, people that still are very sensitive to economic incentives, right? And you were talking about the pricing and everything for sure. 71% of consumers claim that they will have been willing to wait longer if given economic incentive. Now, but in that survey, we also asked about environmental incentive. And what happened is that we didn't get 71, but we got 70%. So 70% of customers claim I will have been willing to wait longer if you will have given me the information of the environmental incentive. Now, what we know is that, well, the 70 is not the 52 that I show. But the 52 was at the moment of the purchase. And we didn't have any, both were same, like it was for free to deliver, right? Like they already were members or whatever is the scheme that they are using, but it was not one more expensive or cheaper, right? Because by the way, in the case of green deliveries, it still is for me suspicious why somebody will actually charge more, right? Particularly if they are delaying, right? If you delay, you actually as a company, you are saving a lot of money as I just show in the model. The question is how you also shared that. Maybe you are saying I'm willing to put part of that money to offset certain carbon, so finance some projects. Who knows? But yeah, my point is, we have studied plenty, right? And we detected first that customers definitely have sensitive to economic incentive. We also detected they claim to be under the environmental incentive. We actually captured 52%. They actually changed their decision to delay, which is awesome. But of course, again, that experiment was done before all these issues, right? And I argue that we argue that those results for sure are contingent to plenty of things. If you're buying things because of urgency, could be because hopefully there is a wedding or a party you need to buy a present, could be maybe, you know, in a pharmaceutical context, something that you really need, right? So you're not going to be willing to wait. There are others that maybe you're saying I'm buying coffee, I don't mind to wait a little bit longer. So depending on the type of product, the purpose of the purchase, you know, a lot also of your profile as a consumer. So whether you have time or not to check all the delivery options when you're buying, so there are plenty of different conditions that definitely need to be discussed. And in this project, we have some settings and those that are interested hopefully will see a working paper very soon available to analyze at least our context. But all those questions you are commenting telling are definitely relevant. And it definitely it matters the context, the audience, the conditions in which you are running this analysis. Thank you, Josue. And in the interest of time, I would like to share the results of the poll and just let you know that there is plenty of questions and answered. And we are going to share those with you afterwards just so that you see what the audience interested in. And the interesting part of the answers to the poll is that most people here got what we promised. So they are expanding knowledge on sustainable supply chain and they found that interesting. They also learned about the use of technology and basically to improve supply chains. And that's awesome. So thank you for bringing those insightful presentation and discussion comments to us. I would like to give you the word and let you say some final words. They are very interested in knowing where to find all your research projects or your papers. If you want to repeat again, your website, that would be awesome. Fantastic. Yes, now absolutely. So if you are interested, sustainable.mit.edu. And we should probably have also sustainable logistics.mit.edu. So both will take you to the same one. And yeah, we have also plenty of social media. You can try and find us everywhere. We have, you know, LinkedIn, Instagram, everywhere. Feel free to reach out and connect. And we will be more than happy to expand on your questions as well as the research we've been doing. But no, I mean, just to wrap up from my side, Laura Kellen, really a great pleasure to be here with you. I enjoy very much your questions and also sharing part of the things that we are doing. And I look forward to engaging and working together in this MicroMasters course as well as the new edX course. And thank you again for the opportunity. With your best of luck. Thank you. Thank you, Koso. Thank you, Kellen, for a great discussion. And to everyone in the audience, the winter webinar series is just starting. So we hope to see you all soon in the next live event that Kellen and I will be co-hosting. Right, Kellen? Awesome. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Laura. And thank you, Dr. Vasquez. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Stay tuned. Bye-bye.


I'll leave this door open for like 30 seconds. My name is Drew Barton. My company is Southern Web. It's a digital marketing agency in Atlanta. I've done this slide deck for you. It's called 30 Things to Do Before Launch. And I've done it because in our agency we support about 445 websites. And with that quality of sites going out the door, it's about two to four sites a week that go out. We had to have some way to regulate the quality of the sites that are going out the door with each time. So the way that you do that, in our case, was to put together a list of things that we were going to do with every site that got launched. So I figured this is such a good thing to share with the other people that are doing WordPress. So I'm going to walk you through this. The talk is 30 minutes. There's 30 things. We're going to do one thing a minute. So we're going to go super fast. But at the very end, you'll have the slides with all the links so that if you have stuff. And so if I do one thing a minute, we'll have 15 minutes to do all your questions. All right. Sounds like a plan. All right. So the first thing with any website launch or even before you get started is the preparation. So getting your things together, your thoughts about the goals and what you want the website to do before you even start to download or install WordPress, really important. So the first thing that I recommend having on that new list is actually having a checklist. How many of you have a checklist? No, no. Okay. So about a quarter of the room has a checklist. I'm going to run through these things. It's really important to ensure quality with every site that goes out the door. The other thing that it's really good for is when you include the checklist in your proposal and you're meeting with your client, they can then use that to see, oh, look at all the things that I get with this particular website that's built versus the competition. It's very helpful in that way. Drew, do you want the lights off? Are you guys able to see or do you want to turn the lights on? It could be better if the lights were dim. All right. I don't know if it has a dimmer. I think it's a 1 or a 0 over there. Okay. Oh, easier. Can you still see it? Okay. All right. So think about in your checklist when you're launching this site, what do you want to have included on it? Do you share it with your clients? Do you share it with the rest of the team? And before the site is launched, do you have a pre-site, pre-launch checklist and then once the site goes up, a second checklist, because there are certain things you can't do until the site is live on the URL. Also, when you do this and you show all the things that are in the checklist, the client can see the things that are not and then ask about them because part of communication with clients is to make sure that you don't want to get involved in that situation where they said, I thought this was included, right? So the checklist helps with adhering to these are the things that you're going to get as part of the deliverable to this project. And then every one of the team is graded on whether they accomplished everything that's on the checklist. Tip two, admin users. Limit them. Everyone in the company doesn't need admin level access. If you're posting blogs to the site, not everyone needs powered, religious and installing plugins or updating the thing. It also creates a security risk when you have every single user at the company or organization with admin level access. Also, make sure that everyone that's working on the website has their own username and password and that username shouldn't be admin. Now we're going to get into SEO, search engine optimization. So link structure. We know in SEO that the default way the WordPress handles permalinks is not the best for SEO. So if you're seeing question marks or people signs in your permalink structure on the site, it's a no-no for SEO purposes. And you'll change that on settings in the permalink sub-name. So a lot of these tips will have a place for it to go. And so if you don't want to take notes, if you get a slide to ask where you can go see where those things are, the light blue bar on most of the panels will tell you where to fix those things. Tip four. This is my favorite. I got a call from someone that says my site's not showing up in Google because your web developer never unchecked a box. So you'll see in the search engine results the robots.txt file is blocking the site from being indexed. Don't want sites with that box checked. You can change that under settings in the reading tab. Or install a plugin for SEO. I'm in the list of which SEO plugin you install, but you should install at least one of them for your clients. Yoast or all-in-one SEO will do the job. You can't rely on fun. The default way that WordPress handles your title tags. Tip six. Title tags are unique for each page. So at the bottom level, you can have your title tags and meta tags just being what is on the content page. Then a step up from there would be to have default title tags and meta tags that are throughout the entire site. And the top level would be having unique ones for each page entitled on the site. So these two sites will help you then index the site to see where you've duplicated those efforts. And tier two, which is where everything is the same, to tier three where everything is unique, these tools will tell you which pages are duplicated. The other thing to check is when you're dealing with the blog categories, oftentimes most people will forget to put title tags and meta descriptions on the blog categories. So that's a good thing to do to help you get further indexing. But those two sites there will help you discover which pages are duplicated. Google Tag Manager. So how many of you are already familiar with what GTMS? Two. Good. All right.   What Google Tag Manager does is it installs this one injection point into your site and you can install every other injection that you need. Whether that be remarketing code or Facebook tracking or Google Analytics, it's all done throughout that one point of contact. So rather than have multiple little snippets of code, you can have this one place and then regulate it. The other thing is you can turn it on and off so it doesn't create code load and cause the cycle load. The third thing is you can see when it's firing, when it's not firing. It's good to have some sort of message if people are telling you that. So you can install that at Google.com. Or it's like analytics. Or it's like Tag. To date, install Google Analytics. There are some people that still don't install Google Analytics. You can't make any decisions about your website, not any educated decisions without having Google Analytics installed.  You can't really make any judgment calls on content. You can't make any judgment calls on SEO until you have the Google Analytics installed. The second piece in there is annotate. How many annotate your Google Analytics? Nobody. Good. So annotation happens when you launch your website. Analytics and then Tag put a pin on the date you launched the website. So when you're looking at your Google Analytics over the course of time you can see these pinpoints of each major event that happened in history of your website. So that could be the date your site went live. That could be the date you hired a digital marketing company. That could be the date you sent that email newsletter to your list. So next time when you're looking at these sort of bumps in your chart of traffic you can then say, oh that large bump in my traffic happened because I sent out an email newsletter. Or I hired Joe to start doing SEO for me. So that happened on October 5th and now I can actually track the upward trajectory. So it's really nice to put those annotations in there. If you're installing Google Analytics for the client with that annotation in there we launched the site on this date. 5th and 9th, Google Search Console. Previously called Google Webmaster Tools. So Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console is sort of a dashboard if you will of how your website is performing. So from here you'd be able to submit your XML site map of all the pages of your site. You'll be able to see how many pages of your site have been indexed. You'll be able to see the crawl rate. So let's say your site has 50 pages on it. From the Search Console you'll be able to see that only 25 of them have been indexed or 30. From out of that you can then diagnose how do I get those other 20 pages indexed. More likely than not especially with WordPress is because of a canonicalization issue. Canonicalization is what happens when you have duplicated content. With WordPress you have these archive pages that will display the blog posts where they could display custom post types. That content is what's going to be the same as what's on the single post layer, the individual blog post itself. So if you have this archive page with all the content on it and you also have the single page with the same content on it even if it's just an abstract it'll get flagged for Search Console because they'll say Google's whole motto is show me something I haven't seen already. Tell me something I don't know. So if it's seen that archive page the same content on the single post in WordPress as it is in the archive page it's highly likely that it won't be indexed. So that's where you'll see discrepancy in your Search Console between especially in WordPress sites. The third thing that Search Console does that's really nice is let's say heaven forbid your open source software gets some sort of virus installed on it. Heaven forbid Search Console, when Google gets notified that your site has malware on it will then send you an email saying your site's been infected. That's kind of a nice thing that could happen. That was a bad work choice. Tip 10 redirects You want to create 301 redirects for all the pages on the previous site to the new site because you've done all this work on your old site to get it ranking well. Now you want to make sure that that page about doggie daycare redirects to its new counterpart because if the old counterpart was a .asp page you're not going to be able to recreate that in WordPress. So now you have to create a 301 redirect so that that old content will then go to the new page. When you do that and set it up properly there's no loss of link juice in that old page to the new page. When you don't create those 301 redirects all that good value that you add in the search engine is then lost because it's going to a 404 page that can not be found. The second day after your site goes live you can then go into Search Console and there's a tab to see all your search errors. The biggest search error is going to be your 404 issues. So on day 2, day 3, day 4 after the site goes live you're going to be able to see all those pages that were previously indexed and are now creating 404 errors. This is highly important especially if you like to go into WordPress and play around with your permalinks. So let's say you went to this SEO seminar and you then decided oh I need to change my permalinks to be Jacksonville doggie daycare and the old page was just doggie daycare so all those old pages could be creating 404 errors if you're not setting up the redirect properly. Page 11 or tip 11 this one's high level but it's for the developers in the room make sure they're viewing their JavaScript and their CSS functions in the PHP file and not in the thing in itself. If that went over your head that's okay I got 29 other. Tip 12 test the load time this is one of my favorite tools in the whole wide world. Tools.pingdom.com you take your website and drop it in there and it will tell you your overall load time.  We get a B and we think something's wrong with us. Don't worry about the letter grade that you get worry about the announces of what you're seeing if your site is loading and it's larger than 3 megabytes and that's our internal barometer at my company if it's larger than 3 megs it's too heavy. So that usually means that your images or your videos that you have on your homepage or whatever page you're testing and I highly recommend testing more than just the homepage with this to test it to make sure it's under 3 megs as you go down to tools.pingdom.com you're going to see all the resources on the page every single image every single javascript file every single file that's going to be enlisted there. Each resource that is pulling off the server it is possible if you love yourself some plugins that you're going to see some red lines where resources couldn't be loaded so if you're seeing a bunch of those on plugins you're not using anymore that's a sign that you need to uninstall those plugins because each time you're pulling and pinging that other server for that it's slowing down your load time of your own site. Tip 14, that personally has this great site you can pop your website in there and you can see how your website is going to look on pretty much every device for free you don't have to go out and buy any browser testing software by browser stack or anything like that if you're not an agency you can go there and see where your breakpoints are for tablet or smart phone for desktop so that way you can see how it's going to look in all different various devices Tip 15 so it goes for all in one SEO are going to give you an XML site map that's a data file file type that you can then take into search console on google webmaster tools or search console drop it in there and then it will then give the search engine all the pages of your site so they don't have to index the whole site because you're handing them essentially the table of contents of your website the other one to do that everyone often forgets about is to do it to Bing's webmaster tools as well might only be 10% of search but I think we would all like to raise like 10% remove the test links if you're developing your site on WP engine or pressable or any one of these website posts they're going to give you a test link bad developers leave the test links still there just change the main URL of the site this tool here at WP3.org is going to allow you to test all the links on your site and if you're seeing one of the old let's say page link links you can then go back behind and then check to see which one you have to remove sometimes just by changing the base URL in the settings on general settings has not been to change all the file links for all the images on the site especially if they were developing a custom site for you so this will test that tip 17 and for accelerating mobile pages will help accelerate your mobile pages so really nice tool make sure your pages are super fast the other thing that's going to be really helpful with really dark and rainy all of a sudden the other thing that's going to be helpful for is if you are in a place or if you are marketing to a population that doesn't have unlimited data plans that AMP logo is a weekend for them so they know that they can click on that link and it's not going to use all their data on their phone in India the AMP project is hugely important if you're working towards either if you work for a non-profit or an organization where they just don't have the luxury of having unlimited internet this AMP installation is really going to help you get faster and faster and faster so one issue is it doesn't really fit on the WordPress ecosystem but that's a whole different conversation curating the client experience so this is some of the nice things that I like to add when we're launching sites if you have user manuals there's something nice about handing your client a 90 page manual on how WordPress works you print it out you hand it to them I even find it it's out of date in six weeks as we know but there's something super nice about it video user manuals also has about 80 different videos that you can show the client so when they forget how to add an image or they forget how to add a new page they can rely on the video user manual for that and it's updated with each new point of view tip 19 especially if it's a custom WordPress site that you can build on the theme feel a little bit this is often overlooked people miss that 404 page very frequently and it's a great way to sort of capture and send them in the right direction so giving them a search tool saying here's your way back to home here's some different options for people to have done before and you can find out all the people that are heading into your 404 page where? Google search console is going to give you all your 404 errors style your pages consistently so one of the big separators between what is a custom between what is a professional website what is an amateur site is style so if you're using multiple fonts and colors that you wouldn't paint your house those kind of things create sort of an amateur look so you want to avoid that thing so when you're creating these custom sites to limit the number of fonts in the CSS that are there remove the development plugins so often times when you're moving the site from the development server to the live server and you're using plugins typically to move that plugin from your development to production well once the site is launched that plugin is not needed anymore but also often developers will leave that transfer plugin in there forever and a day and it's just not needed anymore and it's actually producing a vulnerability on that site now so uninstall those development plugins when you're going live especially if the client is never going to use it again tip 22 this is my favorite one to have it all the time so we'll go back to the doggie daycare the designer the designer will get the project they'll do wireframes info at JacksonvilleDoggieDaycare.com they'll set it up they'll figure it out the wireframes will be done the design will get done the client loves it, it's approved the developer gets it, they build it the site goes up three weeks later the client says you're not getting leads or any inquiries from the website and then you realize info at JacksonvilleDoggieDaycare never existed but you got so nose blind to it it's like the Febreze commercial no one noticed that that email address doesn't exist all too often they'll send it off and it'll immediately bounce back so as part of web developers just to send an email to it to say hey does this email even exist because often times it will go to a box if no one is even checking test the forms so again same with the email use all the forms on the site to submit them those forms could be a contact form the form could be the email newsletter form, it could be an e-commerce order form all the forms on the site should be tested the second piece is this is to set yourself a reminder every month to test those forms because just as they worked on February 1st does not mean they're going to work on March 1st as we know we're pushing out all these plugin updates all the time it's very possible that that doesn't work the second piece to this the third piece after you do the counter reminders the third piece is that your web post typically has unauthenticated unauthenticated email so you want to use some sort of SMTP delivery service like a mandrill or sender to make sure that email is hopping off pressable or WP Engine or paging and actually getting delivered to their inbox so testing these forms is a key and crucial piece and it needs to be done monthly because you could be losing business by virtue of not receiving those emails 2.4 success pages how many of you have ever received an email a form submission 5, 6, 7 times I have and it's because they haven't the person submitting the form didn't get that gratification that they filled in the form properly the second piece of what the success form does is you can set up tracking your Google Analytics to fire an event when that page loads so if you are running a digital marketing firm and you want to know how many leads you got over the course of the month or how many orders you can set a tracking pixel on this page that will then create an event that you can use to monitor the number of leads you got without having to go through your email and say oh I got 6 leads this month check for Grammins and Orphans all too often we'll be copying content out of a source that doesn't initially play well with WordPress one of those sources is Microsoft Word so all too often we'll add an ampersand or a quotation mark or a parentheses of some sort and it will create a Gremlin in the title text and meta text just to run through those on the site before the site goes live to make sure that none of those things happen the other things the page breaks inside of Microsoft Word are typically different so you'll see these Orphans of lines that will drop you just have to go through all the content to make sure that none of those line breaks carry through Hello World there's nothing that separates an amateur site from a professional one when you go to their blog and see the original Hello World post there if we're looking at the content this needs to be real real it's fine for your formatting it's fine for your style sheet but when the site goes up and sees Hello World it's not a professional business security those are the email addresses that we mentioned earlier should be obfuscated so that a bot or a spider can index 28 28 break backups most of the web posts that you're going to be using are going to have their own backups but if you're old school like me I like to have another backup somewhere else trust, verify I like to have one copy of the website in my own files and when I build a website for someone I'll typically take the website and burn it to a jump drive and mail it to them when they get that jump drive in the mail they'll put it next to their most sacred possessions they'll put it next to their tax return they'll put it in a safe deposit box because it's something that they've done so much investing into their website and this is their critical backup as we all know you're up to the inside all the time with new content and your posts so those of us in the room know that it's going to be out of date but at least it's a starting point to go back in case there's something terrible that happens it's a 29 using a managed web post and even if you are most of the managed web posts only take care of core so to have some sort of software that's taken care of additional plugins that have been installed we use managed WP and make sure that all the plugins are updated can I ask a question we've got one more slide okay and tip 30 to make sure that your site has an SSL certificate on it there's a bunch of different vendors for this some of them are free I've listed two of the free ones up there because I'm cheap but those are some of the big options that are there and come July if you're using Chrome it's going to say that that website is not secure so if your website is not served by HDBS in July everyone's going to see it not secure on your site so between now and then if you don't already have one install it to make sure that it's installed so if you weren't able to keep up with me you can go to southernweb.com for each other's WP Jacks and download these slides with all the links but we can ask a question stand so wow when you're doing a plugin updates for clients how do you handle if it breaks who be obviously you can revert back but at what point does it become the client's cost versus the client's um yeah so if it moists in our dealer case there's not a warranty that says that that plugin is good and sometimes it's used let's say it goes broke and you had to release it on when that's a fairly simple transfer and it's not something I'm too concerned about it just comes to its end of its life and the client needs to update it you know you have to have a conversation with the client and explain that not only is it the end of life and that's just really a conversation with the client in our field case where we host all of our client sites if they're not willing to re-invest I have to move them off of my manager's environment so it's more like you've got to re-invest back but on our side I make sure that I have a developer doing all the updates so that if it does white screen someone's there to get it back on you got a question okay, yes ma'am I actually have several questions so if I get in the way I know somebody stopped my first question is of all of these 30 things how many of them are going to cost me money to do um I just can't put anything in where it's going to cost you money I can't think did anyone say any one that was going to in SSL potentially that there's a lot of free options for that too I specifically give this so that the things that are that are free the only thing that doesn't freeze your time yeah just doing these 30 things is going to take you a week and a half right if you do something we're going to add to that real quick I've been really good at hosting and because Google making the new release that speed is so important you need to pay for the best of the huge amount exactly and there's some great people in here they're hosting company in here I don't want to say one over the other I mean we all have different preferences so if you ask each one of us we'll say something different we'll probably debate it but that's a clause that you should put in every month to your site and not go cheap on that share it as bad yeah there's like a condo to some of the white things sorry that's a good analogy you said about deleting I love the term flipping pages that was great can we turn on the lights again you said at one point you have to go back and delete the old plugins wow and remove the development plugins I know you just figure out the old plugins because they pop up on your management thing but what do you consider development plugins that should be deleted before you if you had a developer that did a site transfer between your old host and your new host and you're not moving that site anymore once you've removed it, you don't need to have it installed so that's the only thing that would be something to delete if you have deactivated plugins in there that are just hanging around for everything those don't need to be there velvet blues velvet blues is something to cover your URLs when you go live and a lot of people don't use Jetpack and a lot of the other ones there I mean Jetpack is a big element if your client isn't using it if you're moving off it's a Swiss Army night you can take that thing off we'll run a little bit faster I'll say that around that is he here? he was in Miami and I have one other question when you talked about the title and meta tags I know what those are but you sort of lost me when you started talking about the tiers 1, 2 and 3 so the first tier is the default way that WordPress handles it it's just going to be the page title whatever you put in the title field that's one tier 2 is you install a plugin and then it just copies everything over you put the same title tag and meta tag on every single page it's kind of lazy but at least it's a checkbox like you did it step up from there would be to do a little bit of research about what people are searching for and then come up with unique title tags and meta tags for each one of the pages of your site thank you on site 30 you have the words force SSL and I have a SSL but on site ground if I go to my c-panel I will see a little box it's a place for a check and it says force SSL and then I'll give you a warning that if you check that bad things can happen so I have an SSL it's working the box is not checked I'm afraid to check because of the warning so I don't really understand what it means when they say force SSL I'm assuming so I don't know fully but the hint that you gave was there I have an SSL and it sounds like it's not there no it's there it's working I get the HTTP it's all green so you bought the SSL through someone else it's through site ground but the box says force it my question really is about the word force because they are implying or saying that that's going to do something beyond just having it so I really don't know what forcing it means I guess it's my real question I think he's talking about forcing redirect so be forcing the non-encrypted version to the secure version the time when that might be an issue is let's say you put a widget on the site that was unsecured and you're still serving it and then it's throwing an error in some browsers that I think is what the error that the warning is about to make sure that all the content is encrypted and if you happen to be pulling images from another website that could cause a problem too we have that third party stuff whether it be the weather widget or the images or you iframe the site that was unsecure that's probably what the warning is about you mentioned each of the developers has their own login you pull all those logins before it goes on if you're not involved in the site anymore if that site launches the end of your relationship so we would typically pull everything we want and then we need to go back only because half the time you have no idea is that employee still there or is it pure weather you felt there was good practice to pull and everything I would believe one I would believe one but if you have multiple ones and I would make sure that you get a list when you're working with a client of everyone that's going to be administrating the website and it's all too easy to get one user name and then just hand it out and post it to the wall or that notebook that some people have in their office that has all the passwords so here's the kind of thing that I like talking about this at work so if you're selling WordPress and they're at the Drupal school or a GMS school the first thing they're going to bring out is security WordPress is not secure and then you see Brenda at the side desk over there has a notebook with all the passwords in it right? that she's had the same passwords there so if you're looking at a community in terms of making sure the sites are unhackable the notepad in the corner creates a vulnerability in our community so make sure that everyone Brenda with the notepad should not have admin access to the website right? your name isn't Brenda, is it? yeah I'm the one with the notepad can you talk to number 27 I didn't follow you there alright so if an email address Brenda at xyzcompany.com is sitting out there in normal mail to fashion it's like a beacon to the bots and to the spiders to grab that and then start sending via Graspam I mean it's so you can just Google encrypt email address and it will give you the JavaScript that you can plop on the page and send it to the bots going back to the moving plugins moving reactivate I would I would remember each deactivated plugin is still sitting out there it's still sitting in the content folder so if you can remove that vulnerability especially if you're done if you're done done and it's been two or three days you're not going to have to push a new release out there what about templates if you start very often if you start a new website it comes with like five different templates in the background and I heard you should leave at least once because the one you build breaks at least you have something else to show it on yeah that would be a sad website but yeah I would rather see you add backups in place for the website than trying to rely on the theme that isn't the proper theme I'd rather see oh I can do it once like backup then let me find the theme and kind of wing it for a little bit so I'd rather bring back the site that wasn't corrupted yes as a client how is this check going to help do I just hand it to my developer and say do this before they get started yeah you could do that um I mean essentially you're giving an order of what needs to be done most of these things with the exception of the CSS or the JS most of the things that you can do email addresses you can encrypt just in the content block WordPress you can click the force SSL button on the website most everything in this list is not saying you can do it I'm not trying to create a this is not the developer track I'm not creating a version controlled environment where you've got to learn preprocessing script now that's not what this checklist is about so if you go through a lot of these are already going to be there you just click and unclick once you get into WordPress most of the things are going to be here there's maybe three things you won't be able to do I'm thinking back the CSS editing and that's about it I can think of a lot of stuff most of the stuff you'll be able to take advantage of yourself and for free yes I'm launching a project this weekend so I've got an old domain I'm putting on a new domain how do I redirect specific pages of the old domain I know I can do the top level domain the new domain but how would I redirect those old pages so everything you're changing everything on the annotate from old to the new then you would do the whole thing so I can only do the top level domain why would you not want to well I want to get those specific pages I can get all the contacts does that make sense the page pages the page pages have it set up the top page the whole thing is changing you can get a whole new name you can just set it to the base URL unless the page is set as five pages if you get a whole bunch more than five pages then I can get to do the base URL so I suggest more if you had a site launch where you're moving from one page structure to a different one but if you're moving the whole enterprise from one domain to a different one so there's a setting for your current URL and you can check it and tell Google to do the whole thing that is a revamp basically of your site and that's new there's a new feature for that thank you for that people are done on time? well good