If you’re running an ad driven site you’re absolutely going to see slower load times – all those ads and related pixels have to be loaded. In our WordPress Site Speed speed test tool SiteSpeedBot.com we actually probe for several different networks and provide advice on how to speed them up.
Before going any further we’d assume you’re on a good quality host and you’ve checked the important boxes for site speed. If not, this post on The Fastest WordPress hosts detail who we recommend using for site speed and this post on How To Fix Slow WordPress provides a basic checklist on important site speed optimizations.
Get a Baseline On Site Speed Before Making Changes
Before making changes it’s important to get a baseline to make sure the changes are pushing you in the right direction, here’s two free tools worth trying right now:
SiteSpeedBot – our tool is free and it’ll take ~90 seconds to test your site and provide detailed site speed recommendations. It’s worth running it on both your homepage and inner pages where ads are likely more prominent.
Core Web Vitals CRUX Dashboard – Passing Core Web Vitals is an important part of the overall SEO picture. If you want to see how you’re doing overall right now, CLICK HERE to create a free Google Core Web Vitals report in Google Data Studio. Here’s a link to the report for our website if you’re interested in seeing what the report looks like.
The first page of the report details the three core web vitals metrics. The TTFB and FCP tabs are also worth looking at as these are important speed metrics for user experience.
Video below walking you through the setup process along with a basic explanation of the report
How To Fix Slow Ezoic
Ezoic is a little different to other ad networks like AdThrive and MediaVine because it sits itself in between your visitors and hosting versus loading via Javascript.
This introduces several speed issues including high TTFB which isn’t a core web vitals metric but will make the site feel super slow to load.
You’re going to have to use Ezoic LEAP which is their speed optimization service (kind of like NitroPack), in order to get your site loading moderately fast. *As of the time of writing, LEAP is free for Ezoic publishers.
Like all cloud based optimizations its claims of magical world beating performance are severely overblown and not based in reality. They may be able to show a good score and cheap Google Pagespeed Insights but ultimately, passing Google Core Web Vitals is what we care about.
Typically, we’ll combine on-site optimizations such as image optimization, lazy loading and caching (via WPRocket) with Ezoic LEAP to get the best result.
Without any optimization Ezoic sites are almost guaranteed to fail core web vitals as the ads compete with the page render for bandwidth and CPU resources on the device and ultimately both load slowly and create a poor user experience. One of the key features you get with Ezoic LEAP is optimization of the ads whereby to load later in the pageload process and don’t interfere as much with the browser rendering the page.
If you’re looking for help with your Ezoic Site Speed Optimization, request a FREE site speed audit on our homepage and one of the team will review and advise what’s possible.