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
Read the full transcript of this video on NitroPack Review - Worth It Or Too Blackhat?.
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.
Video transcript: Ezoic LEAP Settings for Optimal Site Speed
0:00Ezoic LEAP Speed Settings Overview
So, Ezoic LEAP. Let's talk about speed optimization settings. This is a short video, hopefully just to explain my thinking around the settings and where they ideally should be set. Let me run through the easy ones quickly. Minify: don't use Minify. Minify is a terrible optimization anyway. It breaks cacheability, it's slow most of the time, and it's generally just better done at Cloudflare, if at all. So just turn off Minify straight away. Make sure Minify is turned on in Cloudflare, but I wouldn't sweat it anyway.
0:24Image Settings to Leave Off in Ezoic LEAP
Images: I wouldn't use any of these settings in here either. The lazy loading isn't great, so instead use Autoptimize for lazy loading. For next-gen images, use EWWW or do it inside Cloudflare, but EWWW is probably going to do it the best. Those you don't really need to use. If you need to use this one, the WP Rocket setting to set the image sizes is probably a better way to go, if you need to use it at all. The rest of the stuff won't do anything for speed generally. Resize images, don't use that. Preload background images, I wouldn't waste time doing that one.
One of the problems with Ezoic LEAP is that it has to process the pages in order to inject the optimizations. So there is a lag time in there between processing the pages, injecting optimizations, and then editing or manipulating the HTML to send that to the visitor. The less we do in LEAP, the better we're going to do overall in terms of speed. The more we can do in WordPress one time, the better, particularly stuff like image compression and next-gen images. If you're using a CDN, every time that image goes through that CDN location it has to be compressed, or the next-gen image has to be created. Whereas if you do it in WordPress, it's done one time. It doesn't need to be done every cycle, every time the cache is cleared. That's why it's generally better to do it at the WordPress layer.
1:59Script Execution Settings
Script execution: this stuff here, "reduce CPU intensive tasks", is not great. I don't know what it's doing, but on this particular site it seemed to be manipulating the JavaScript in a weird way, slowing down that entire page, so I just turned it off. It was just doing weird stuff. Strip and delay, again, is better done at the WordPress layer one time, as opposed to at the CDN layer, because it's going to need to process the page and the JavaScript first. So I just turned all this stuff off. It's better done at the website.
2:22CSS and Font Settings
CSS: again, this stuff is better done either in WP Rocket or in Autoptimize, such as inlining the CSS. In this case I just turned all the CSS optimization off, because the site is using GeneratePress, which already has very heavily optimized CSS anyway. We don't need to add any additional CSS optimization, as it's just going to slow things down. Optimize fonts: WP Rocket does this already, so there's no need to do that.
3:09Lazy Loading iframes
Turn off lazy load for iframes in this case, because it wasn't working. There was a page on the site where the YouTube video wasn't working, so I turned that on in WP Rocket instead and that did work. So that's lazy load iframes, and also the thumbnail for YouTube videos, and that was sorted there.
3:32Preconnect and Static Cache Policy
Preconnect: there's no real harm in doing that. It will preconnect to ad origins, which will speed up the ads a little bit, so it's actually probably a good setting to have in Ezoic. Static cache policy doesn't really matter. It doesn't do much, if anything. If the site is still slow, or if the time to first byte is poor, then turning this off is probably a smart thing to do, because Cloudflare will deal with it instead. The site is sending cache headers anyway, so this is probably either doing nothing or slowing things down, and it can be turned off. If you have a time to first byte issue, it would be worth turning it off.
4:19Why Do As Little As Possible in Ezoic
That's pretty much it. It's pretty straightforward. There isn't much to leave on in Ezoic. Its main benefit is that it will optimize the ads, or manipulate the ad code to make the ad code faster, lazy load ads, and all that sort of jazz. So doing as little as possible in Ezoic and as much as possible at the WordPress layer is going to be a better all-round result, because you do it once in WordPress and it's generated, so the page cache has a cached version of the page with all the optimizations in it.
Whereas if you're doing it in the cloud service, it's done every single time the page is going through that POP, that location on the CDN, or every time the cache is flushed, so it's kind of inefficient. That's particularly so because Ezoic is also, on top of that, manipulating the page to add a whole bunch of ad code into the HTML. So this seems to be the fastest way to get those pages to load anyway. That's it. I hope that was useful. Leave it to it. Cheers.