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 AdThrive
Without any optimization, on an AdThrive site typically you’ll see a fully loaded time somewhere in the 5-15 seconds, LCP 5+ seconds, some CLS in the 0.05-0.15 range and the number of requests will likely be 200-400 or more. That’s not great for user experience. You’re going to see quite a few red warnings in our tool as a result.
Adthrive have some built in optimizations that will help with load times – the feature is called Deferred Ad Loading
Turning on this setting changes the way the ads load – essentially they let the page load first and then fire the ads instead of firing the ads at the same time as your browser software is trying to load and render the page.
If you scroll down to the bottom of this article it’ll explain in more detail.
It’s a feature they have to manually enable so you’ll need to reach out to their support team to get it turned on.
We’d also recommend NOT pausing or delaying or messing with their ad scripts as this will break some of their built in optimizations and potentially mess up your monetization.
Tools like WPRocket and NitroPack will do this by default with some of their optimizations so you’ll need to manually exclude them from their optimizations.