Adverts and Pagespeed Insights

[city17]

I was working through Ryuzaki's Kitchen Sink method, and improving some technical issues with my site. Fixed a few small things, and now my site is fast again, except for one thing: ads. My PageSpeed Insights score for pages without any ads is around 95 (mobile) but 45-55 (marginally better for Desktop) on pages with ads.

The main problems are Time to Interactive, Speed Index, and Total Blocking Time. The other measures are fine even with ads (Cumulative Layout Shift, First Contentful Paint)

Is there anything that can be done about this? Or is this 100% down to the ad network (I'm with Newor Media at the moment)?

I've read about lazy loading ads, but wasn't entirely sure how that would be implemented as I think it's to do with the javascript of the ad network, rather than a few tags I can add myself.

 

[mikey3times]

I asked my ad provider if they could do anything about speed. They said, yes, they can delay loading ads until the first user interaction, but it would likely reduce my revenue by a few percentage points. I went from mid 40s to high 90s after they made the change.

Reach out to Newor and ask what they can do.

 

[MrMedia]

I asked my ad provider if they could do anything about speed. They said, yes, they can delay loading ads until the first user interaction, but it would likely reduce my revenue by a few percentage points. I went from mid 40s to high 90s after they made the change.

Reach out to Newor and ask what they can do.

Thoughts on Newor vs Adthrive?

 

[city17]

I asked my ad provider if they could do anything about speed. They said, yes, they can delay loading ads until the first user interaction, but it would likely reduce my revenue by a few percentage points. I went from mid 40s to high 90s after they made the change.

Reach out to Newor and ask what they can do.

That's definitely an improvement worth a few percentage points. Will contact them to see what they can do.

Thoughts on Newor vs Adthrive?

Haven't use Adthrive, so can't really say. My earnings are decent, but nowhere near as good as some figures I've seen around this site. Don't really have any comparison so it might just be my niche. Compared to Google Ads it's about 3x I think. Reporting is barebones, but sufficient for me. Customer support is generally very good. Requirements are a lot lower than Adthrive though, 30k users / month.

 

[city17]

Quick update: Contacted the ad network as suggested by @mikey3times and they gave me a lazy load script. This was actually extremely unsophisticated, as it's just a 2 second timeout before it loads the ad script. However, it makes a huge difference, both in Pagespeed Insights score (back at 95 mobile) and just browsing experience.

Also noticed WP Rocket wasn't preloading everything (always assumed it would find all posts automatically, but apparently you have to feed it a sitemap), which also increased speed for 50% of pages. Should be a good update altogether.

 

[thisishatred]

Just to chime in about this, I messaged Newor support back in December of 2020:

"Thank you for reaching out about page speed. Unfortunately the page speed issues you mentioned are par for the course with header bidding. That being said, we have a team of developers and one of the fastest loading scripts in the entire header bidding space. We're always working to make our script more speedy and lightweight, but header bidding by nature does slow down the page load time slightly across the board. there's no real way to get around it unless you use a lazy load, which will have some impact on earnings. The script is as optimized as it can possibly be within the constraints we have to adhere to in order to make sure the bidding process works effectively, but we are always working to make improvements."

I might have to do the same, that or switch providers once certain sites meet the requirements for Adthrive.

"Compared to Google Ads it's about 3x I think. Reporting is barebones, but sufficient for me. Customer support is generally very good. Requirements are a lot lower than Adthrive though, 30k users / month."

Agree with all these points to a tee though.