This is a key reason why Google’s page experience signal — which measures page speed, the stability of web pages, and user interaction — has played an essential role in how websites now rank in online search results.

If your clients’ WordPress sites get poor overall Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores, they won’t be as visible in searches as others in the industry that get a “thumbs up” from Google for their loading speed, visual stability, or seamless user experience. This is why fine-tuning a website for optimal performance is so important.

So, what exactly impacts a site’s performance, and what can you do about it? This blog looks at the top six performance factors for consideration.

Performance factor #1: Web host

Regardless of the website’s user-facing front, its files have to be stored somewhere. A web host describes the server space that houses all databases, images, code, and other files necessary to display and run the site. Naturally, the quality of the hosting service you choose can significantly impact your site’s performance.

Businesses often choose shared hosts as a comparatively cheap option because multiple websites share the same server. Shared hosting introduces performance bottlenecks and can seriously slow down your website when traffic gets high for websites sharing the same server. While a private or dedicated server is more expensive, you can rest assured that your server will be exclusively optimized for your WordPress site.

Regardless of the host type, reliability is critical. Ensuring that your WordPress host is appropriately configured, and has a reliable uptime, along with fast support, is key to sustainable website performance.

Performance factor #2: Website cache

A web cache stores pieces of your website in your visitors’ browser, so pages load more quickly each time they visit your site. Each of the three types of caching can have a major impact on performance:

1. Browser or client-side caching happens in your visitors’ web browser. The right configuration in your site can tell browsers how long to store information. Through WordPress plugins like WP-Rocket and WP Super Cache, you can control cache headers that help to optimize performance from the visitors’ browser.
2. Page or server-side caching cuts down extensive PHP and MySQL queries by serving simple HTML files to browsers that previously used the website. Its ubiquity and simplicity of use mean that every WordPress website should include page caching, controlled through all standard WordPress caching plugins like those mentioned above.
3. Object caching is especially relevant for highly dynamic websites that pull in lots of content, tables, user-generated content, ecommerce transactional data, and custom post types. Through a plugin like Redis, your website can serve users a snapshot of the site, reducing the load on your hosting server and improving page load times.

Performance factor #3: Website images

Online users love visual content, but these files tend to be the biggest ones on your site. Ironically, your oversized graphics can overload your users’ browsers and cache, making your website slow and unreliable, increasing bounce rates, and impacting the time users can spend on your site. None of this is great for conversions or any other performance metrics you are trying to measure.

It pays to optimize each of your website’s images for loading speed. That means sizing them to fit the exact space for which they’re designed and using a file format like JPEG or PNG to reduce file size. You can also use a WordPress plugin like Imagify for real-time image compression as you build and update your site.

Performance factor #4: CSS and JavaScript files

Modern websites are no longer coded in simple HTML. Instead, they use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (JS). CSS is essentially your website’s style guide. It defines a set of rules that all the HTML on your site will follow, from defining your headline styles to embedding videos and more. JavaScript, meanwhile, is designed to execute automated scripts that turn static pages into dynamic experiences, such as animations, scrolling image galleries, hover-over designs, and the like.

Each of these programming languages is essential for any modern website. But the files they require for a visitor’s browser to reference and ‘read’ also take up quite a bit of space. If you’re not careful, your website gets slow or (depending on the quality of the code) becomes unreliable. Optimizing your JavaScript and CSS files by trimming the fat or removing accidental render blocks becomes vital for site performance.

Performance factor #5: Server location

We’re used to an almost seamless online experience, so it might be a surprise to hear that server location can drastically impact site performance. But it does. In a world where every microsecond counts, hosting your files on the other side of the world can lead to performance issues that neither your visitors nor Google will tolerate.

The reason is simple: data still has to travel physically. From image files to CSS and JavaScript code, all the points we’ve mentioned above become magnified when that distance increases.

But what happens when you have visitors from multiple countries, and no single location will satisfy all of them? A content delivery network, or CDN, can solve that issue. As its name suggests, it’s a network of servers across the globe, caching static web content and files to deliver them more quickly, based on where the request originates. CDNs help minimize any location-related performance issues.

Performance factor #6: WordPress database

Any website built on WordPress has an integrated database where the platform can store anything from usernames and passwords to posts, pages, comments, and even information about your visual theme. While it’s an essential piece of the overall configuration, it can become overloaded over time.

Left unchecked, your WordPress database will continue to accumulate information. As it does, users will need to wait longer and longer to get the information they need. Cleaning up your database regularly thus becomes a vital part of the optimization process.

Fortunately, that cleanup process is relatively straightforward. Plugins like WP-Sweep can help you automatically clean up old and unused tags, expired user information, and post drafts. Each request to your site becomes less complex and requires less data, improving website performance in the process.

There is no shortage of factors that could negatively impact your clients’ WordPress sites’ performance. Ultimately, though, it’s all about reducing complexity. Streamlining and creating leaner files without compromising quality goes hand-in-hand with optimal hosting and server performance, all of which enable a fast and reliable website experience.

Getting there can take time and requires ongoing tweaks and maintenance. Fortunately, SiteCare can help. Read our guide on How to Get Started With WordPress Optimization In Eight Simple Steps, or contact us to explore us handling your clients’ WordPress maintenance and support needs.

The post WordPress Optimization – What Impacts Site Performance? appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

But optimizing a WordPress website can turn into a complex task. With the vast amount of offered tools and the wealth of technical information available on the subject, finding simple, effective, and routine WordPress maintenance methods can feel overwhelming. 

This blog looks at some of the routine optimizations, tools, and techniques we use at SiteCare to help improve website performance.

1. Optimize the WordPress Database

As you use, update, and add elements to a website, old or leftover pieces of data can build up on the site’s database. This “cruft” (a software term for redundant code) comes from stored revisions, spam comments, or other WordPress programs. 

A good cleanup will result in a smaller database that is easier to backup, carries less load on a server, and increases the speed of a website. You can use a plugin to clean up your database, and WP-CLI is also an excellent tool for this. It’s a good idea to add a code to WP-Config that limits stored site revisions to four:

• Define ( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );

2. Set up a DNS Level Proxy or Firewall

The Domain Name System (DNS) connects users to the server that hosts a website, allowing them to access any web pages. It functions as a map of the internet. Since every device logged into the internet uses DNS, it’s a common target for hackers and requires protection. Installing a DNS Level Proxy or Firewall offer a series of benefits: 

• A Firewall can prevent and filter malicious traffic and bots (no one wants to get hacked!)
• Many DNS-level security solutions also include performance enhancements that can serve up your static web assets (e.g., large pictures) faster. 
• Many solutions create a layer between you and your site host, meaning less server load for faster site performance and better security. 

Cloudflare is a great option that provides built-in global, DNS, Content Delivery Network (CDN), DDoS protection, and SSL (see below) – all for free and with minimal effort.

3. Fix mixed content errors

Well-run websites have security certificates (SSL) that allow for a secure connection (HTTPS) and protect the visiting user. Sometimes, elements of a secure WordPress page will attempt to locate and use unsecured resources. The result is a mixed content error. 

Mixed content opens site visitors to attacks by bad actors, can call up warning signals that deter entrances to a webpage, and lowers SEO rankings. 

You can use audit tools like LightHouse and Why No Padlock to locate any mixed content on a site and migrate it from HTTP (unsecured) to HTTPS or HTTP2 (Secured). Since most browsers only accept secured site access, you will experience a performance gain. 

4. Set up and configure WordPress page caching

Cached pages are static versions of a webpage served up by search engines or browsers (even if the pages are outdated). Compared to information pulled from a site database, cached pages function as a quick snapshot and operate with better load times and enhanced convenience. 

WP Rocket is an ideal tool that can increase your site speed with page caching. It offers features such as:

• Lazy loading, which only loads pictures immediately visible to users as they browse
• Google Font Optimization, to adjust fonts for faster loading based on platform needs
• And XML Sitemap preloading, where certain pages of your sitemap are preloaded for optimized times.  

5. Set up and configure WordPress object caching

Object caching refers to storing common database requests in a cache. The more often a request happens, the more likely a visitor wants to access that object. Storing such highly-used site info makes it easier to serve up priority web page elements, creating an ideal user experience. 

Some server hosts do not allow for object caching, but here is a shortlist of quick-enable object caching hosts:   

• Pagely
• SiteGround Optimizer
• WP Engine
• Liquid Web Managed Woocomerce
• Redis on Kinsta
• Redis on Cloudways 

6. Optimize front end code

Front-end code optimization is the process of updating your site’s content and code so that it performs better. You can achieve front end code optimization in several ways: 

• Combining, Minifying, or Concatenating Files: By combining or minimizing the size of a file, you can achieve faster load times.
• Creating and adding critical CSS: Your site consists of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Essential extracts of CSS and renders the immediate or above-the-fold CSS content a site visitor sees. Better Critical CSS means a better user experience.
• Lazy Loading: As referenced above, lazy loading refers to a site loading only the critical, must-see elements first, deferring resources from hidden elements for later (i.e., when the user scrolls down). 
• External Scripts: Parts of a website that use a third party are considered external scripts (e.g., ads). External scripts adjustments are out of your control, but WP Rocket can help minimize slow loading effects. 

You can use several WordPress Plugins for your front end code optimization:

• WP Rocket 
• Autoptimize
• Fast Velocity Minify
• Permatters

7. Image optimization

Images and graphics contain a lot of data that can slow a website’s performance. To improve the speed and capabilities of a WordPress site, it is a good idea to compress media for faster retrieval. Ensure that all compression is lossless so that quality does not suffer. There are several tools you can use for image optimization:

• Imagify
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• Short Pixel
• WP Smush

8. Advanced troubleshooting and debugging

There are several advanced troubleshooting options available if a website still operates poorly beyond the first seven steps. For example, debugging tools can help you locate problem areas or plugins that have malfunctioned and are causing site bottlenecks. You can also search for page issues or monitor performance with visual data tools such as New Relic, Query Monitor, or Xdebug. 

Key Takeaway

Forty-six percent (46%) of users do not revisit web pages with poor site performance, and 64% of shoppers say they will visit a different site if they are unsatisfied with their initial experience. Regular WordPress optimization and maintenance are critical if your clients want to reap the rewards of a positive online business presence.

Luckily, there are steps to take to optimize any WordPress site. Use the information in the above guide to update and upgrade your clients’ underperforming web pages. If you want extra help with your WordPress optimization or need a WordPress site maintenance partner, Contact SiteCare to talk with the experts. 

The post WordPress Optimization – Getting Started in 8 Steps appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

There’s nothing more nerve-wracking than stumbling across the Google PageSpeed Insights tool for the very first time and seeing the words “Poor” or “Needs Work” stamped on your website’s report.

We know this because we periodically hear from clients who discover this tool and immediately call us up to learn what the page score number means and whether it’s affecting their SEO efforts.

A less than stellar PageSpeed report and score might seem alarming at first, but you’ll be relieved to hear that it matters less than you think. In this post, we’ll walk through the basics of how Google PageSpeed works, why you shouldn’t fret too much over your page score, and how to properly leverage the tool for your SEO efforts.

What is Google PageSpeed?

Google PageSpeed is a set of tools that analyze and offer suggestions for optimizing the speed and performance of your website. There are several PageSpeed tools, but for our purposes, we will be discussing Google PageSpeed Insights and the implications of the tool’s infamous page score number.

How does Google PageSpeed Insights work?

When PageSpeed Insights crawls your site, it takes a look at all the backend coding of your site and makes on-site recommendations that may (or may not) make your site faster. It also gives your site a page score from 0-100 based on these recommendations, categorized as “Poor,” “Needs Work,” and “Good.”

Some of the most common recommendations include (but are not limited to):

• Optimization of large images: Your site’s images must be as compressed as possible to ensure speedy page loading. Waiting for high resolutions files to load on your site is among the most common drags on your site’s speed. Luckily, this issue is easy to fix once it’s identified.
• Elimination of render-blocking Javascript/CSS files: Your Javascript and CSS files — the stylistic elements and coding of your site’s design — can sometimes cause a small (but typically negligible) delay in the rendering of your site.
• Leveraging of browser caching: As Google explains, setting an expiry date for browser caching “instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network.”

At first, it might sound nice having a concrete list of actionable items to improve page speed and a score to measure your progress, but there’s more to this picture. While some of PageSpeed Insights’ recommendations can certainly help speed up your site, implementing all of their suggested changes often come at the expense of your site’s design, user experience, and SEO. That’s right. Blindly following PageSpeed’s recommendations in the pursuit of a perfect PageSpeed score can actually hurt your search engine rankings.

The myth of a perfect PageSpeed score.

The loading speed of your site plays a significant role in SEO, but it’s important to realize that your site’s Google PageSpeed score is not the same thing as your site speed. There are plenty of sites with poor scores that run just as fast (or faster) than sites with higher scores. In fact, some of the internet’s biggest sites boast incredibly dismal PageSpeed scores. For example, take a look at the report and score for Amazon.com:

Why? Because the score isn’t solely based on how fast pages load, but on the recommendations, which as we already mentioned, are not always appropriate to implement if they don’t match up with the goals and intended functions of your site.

While the score can give you an understanding of what elements on your site are dragging down your speed, it’s not the end-all, be-all of evaluating user experience. Google supports this fact in their PageSpeed FAQ: “While the score is correlated with the speed of a page, it is not completely representative of the real world user experience.”

If the score is mostly arbitrary, why even use Google PageSpeed?

While the score itself is not indicative of how fast your site is running or how well it is functioning for your users, Google PageSpeed Insights is still a great tool for flagging and diagnosing site speed issues. If you visit your site and notice it’s running slower than usual, you can simply plug the URL into the PageSpeed Insights tool for an answer.

The post How Do Google PageSpeed Scores Impact SEO? appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

In technology, we call that clone a Content Delivery Network (CDN). In this article, I explain the “what” and “why” of CDNs, and offer guidance for choosing the best CDN for WordPress sites.

How a Content Delivery Network Works

To start, let’s take that “busy demands of life” analogy one step further. Imagine you’re an important business executive at a global corporation, and you have offices all over the world. You’re occasionally called to perform in some of these more remote locations, but your home is in New York City.

Now if you were needed in your Shanghai office, it would probably be more efficient to send your Taiwan-based “clone” instead of traveling there yourself from New York. Well, that’s essentially how a CDN works, and even better, it does all the decision making for you too.

The place where you host your website is your “home” or origin server. A lot of people don’t realize this, but even though your website is accessible all over the world, your database and files are usually stored in one physical location. The video below does a great job of describing exactly how a CDN can improve your website performance:

If you’re using a quality web host (like our Managed Hosting solution), your website is stored in an Enterprise-level infrastructure, but it’s just as likely that your website files are stored on a server in your weird cousin’s basement from that time during the Thanksgiving holiday when he helped you set up your blog (I hope the latter isn’t true).

A Content Delivery Network makes copies of all of the static files on your cousin’s basement web server (images, pdfs, CSS, JavaScript, etc), and makes real-time copies to servers all over the world. CDNs use geolocation technology to detect the location (generally region, it doesn’t know their actual address) of your site visitors. With that information, it makes real-time decisions about whether they should send files from your origin server (your web host), or one of the dozens of other servers — these are called edge servers — from around the globe.

A CDN does all of this in the background without any special configuration or direction from you. After initial setup, CDNs are typically a “set and forget” technology.

Why Do We Need Content Delivery Networks?

CDNs make the web faster. In the same way that it takes you longer to travel to Shanghai than your clone in Taiwan, physical distance has an impact on the amount of time it takes a file to move too.

Let’s say I’m in Salt Lake City and the website I’m visiting has an origin server in New York City. That website will load more slowly than if it were using a CDN with an edge server in Denver, for example. Now in this Denver vs. New York City scenario, the performance gains may not be super obvious, but as the distance between visitors and origins increase, the performance gains become much more noticeable when using a CDN.

I don’t want to get too Bill Nye here, but although information (ie. data from your website) can theoretically travel the speed of light, in practice that’s simply not the case. Network quality varies all over the globe, and even things like weather can have an impact on the speed at which data travels. Until we reach human enlightenment and perfect our ability to move data, CDNs will be a nice stopgap so we can still enjoy fast performing websites.

Which CDN is Right for Me?

There are a number of different factors to consider when choosing a CDN for WordPress. Depending on the complexity of your website, you may want to consult with a professional, but here are the primary things you’ll want to consider:

• Cost – CDNs typically have a ‘pay-per-use’ model which means the more files you serve and the more visitors you have, the more expensive your monthly fees become. Managing costs while still maintaining a high-performance website can be a fine line to walk.
• Overall performance – How much does using a CDN improve your site performance?
• Ease of Use – The fastest CDN in the world isn’t helpful if you need an engineering degree from M.I.T. to use it.

Here’s a list of some of the more popular options for WordPress today:

• Cloudflare
• StackPath
• Amazon CloudFront
• Fastly
• KeyCDN
• Image CDN from WordPress.com

I’ve compiled the data from some of the top providers so you can get a quick view of how they stack up against each other (be sure to select individual rows or scroll right in the table to see all the details):

Which CDN is Best for WordPress?

Before we get to our recommendation, I should note that lots of managed web hosts include a content delivery network in their offering. For example, Pagely has a product included in all of their plans called the PressCDN. If you have managed hosting already, be sure to check with your provider to make sure you’re taking full advantage. If you have questions about your current setup, hit us up in the comments below and we’ll be happy to help.

In our experience and based on the data above, there are two CDNs we can easily recommend depending on your specific needs.

1. We recommend Cloudflare for a number of reasons. It’s hard to beat a $0.00 price tag to start, and they have over 152 global data centers. They have a dedicated WordPress plugin and also integrate pretty seamlessly with popular caching plugins like WP Rocket. We also really like that includes some security features out of the box as well. Cloudflare is the CDN we recommend for most people.
2. If you have more specific needs and require more granular control from a CDN, we’ve been really happy about our results from StackPath. StackPath allows for more ability to fine tune and optimize your web performance, and we’ve found simple tasks like invalidating caches for individual files to be very easy on StackPath too.

In all, we highly recommend all WordPress users take advantage of the performance benefits that a content delivery network can provide. It can be hard to know how our website is performing on the other side of the world, but we have global audiences and want to make the visitor experience as great as we can for everyone.

Final Thoughts

Implementing a CDN will offload some work from your web host, improve website performance around the world, and after the initial setup, it’s a very low-maintenance service that you’ll rarely need to bother with.

If you have questions about setup, optimizing your current CDN configuration, or have more specialized needs that we haven’t addressed in the article, leave a comment or send us a note and we’ll be happy to help out.

The post How to Choose a CDN for WordPress appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

The speed of your website is the first impression you ever make on a customer. And, as you know, first impressions count. Website speed affects user experience, rankings on search engines, and even sales and conversions. Sadly, 40% of visitors will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This is especially true for mobile sites.

If your slow website is driving people away, then it’s driving away potential conversions and sales, too; your website’s speed is important when it comes to website traffic and your bottom line. The SEO importance of site speed is rooted in Google’s Core Web Vitals. This article will explain what Core Web Vitals are, how these updates might impact bloggers and website owners, and the role ads in slowing down a website.

Table of Contents

• What are Google’s Core Web Vitals updates?
• What impact will these updates have on bloggers?
• Ad networks and site speed
• Discover why your website is loading slowly
  • Testing ad impact with the right tools
  • HTTP requests
  • Varying physical locations
• How to prevent ads slowing down your website

What are Google’s Core Web Vitals updates?

Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of user-centered metrics that measure important elements of real-world user experiences with websites. These usability metrics track things on a site like page-load speed, user interaction, and the visual consistency of material on web pages as they load.

Google is now launching a new update – the Page Experience update – that will include page experience ranking signals in Google Search ranking. These signals measure how visitors perceive their user experience with a web page and contribute to Google’s efforts to ensure that people have relevant and enjoyable experiences on the web.

Most importantly, Google will use the new page experience signal (alongside many other signals) to determine the best content to present first in response to a search query.

An important aspect of your page experience is page speed — how long does it take for a page to load when a user clicks on any on-page link? An acceptable page speed score is 70/100 and higher, but according to Google, you should strive for 90/100. Websites and pages with better page experience might perform better than those without, so we suggest making site speed improvements as soon as you can.

There are three ranking signals for Google’s Core Web Vitals:

• Largest contentful paint (LCP): How fast does the page load? Here, you need to take web images, videos, and text into consideration. Page load time can also be influenced by your server time, your CSS, and JavaScript.
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS): How quickly does a page stabilize? Have you ever waited for a page to load on your mobile phone, click a button, and at the last second, it shifts, and you hit something else? That’s what Google measures with this signal.
• First input delay (FID): How quickly does a page react to user engagement? When a user clicks on a button or link to an event, how fast can the browser process that input or instruction and produce a result?

What impact will these updates have on bloggers?

This update will affect all regular search results for both mobile and desktop based on certain criteria. However, and this is a key point, Core Web Vitals will become the main criteria for you to appear at the top of a search engine’s results page.

Bloggers shouldn’t have to worry too much, as Google will still prioritize pages with the best information and content overall – even if some aspects of page experience lack on your blog. However, this is still a ranking signal to consider as it will improve your overall user experience. A better user experience means more visitors and, essentially, more customers.

Ad networks and site speed

Few things are more frustrating than when you notice your website loading slowly. Many factors contribute to performance bottlenecks and slow page speeds, but one of the most notorious culprits that we’ve encountered recently is ad networks.

Ad networks have become the bane of the internet. It’s become enough of a problem that Google has started penalizing sites that go overboard with interstitial ads, or ads that try and trick users into downloading software.

We see ads causing performance issues on our client’s websites all the time. You can indeed make a decent amount of money from ad impressions, and, for many publishers, it’s their sole stream of revenue. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that poorly implemented ads, or ads that haven’t gone through quality control, can cause serious performance issues that frustrate readers, and keep people from coming back to your website.

Below is an example of poorly implemented ads. It seems like a joke, but this is not a joke.

That’s not a fun place to be, so I want to go over how you can figure out if ads are to blame for your slow loading website, why ads are a bottleneck at all, and what to do if you find yourself in a situation where ads are ruining your user experience and page load time.

Discover why your website is loading slowly

The first thing we need to do is dig into why your website is loading slowly in the first place. For this post, we’re going to ignore things like subpar web hosting, bloated themes and plugins, database overhead, and things of that nature, and take a look at ads specifically, and if they’re contributing to your slow page load times.

I made this sweet video that walks us through why ads are obliterating page speed. Have a watch!

Testing ad impact with the right tool

Several different tools are used to test the front-end performance of a website. These tools are free and simple to use. Just enter your site URL, wait a minute or two, and you’ll be given back loads of actionable data. Here are some of the most popular ones:

• Pingdom Tools — Really fantastic interface, but doesn’t give back much technical data regarding performance bottlenecks. Also, there are limited locations for testing.
• Page Speed Insights — This is the tool built by Google to let site owners know how the world’s biggest search engine sees their websites. You’ll want to use this tool regularly if you’re focused on growing your organic traffic, especially since page speed is part of the search ranking algorithm.
• WebPageTest — This is more or less the de facto standard for web performance geeks. The interface isn’t as pretty, but the data is second to none, and overall this is a potent tool.
• GTMetrix — GTMetrix is similar to Pingdom Tools in many ways but has one silver bullet that neither Pingdom nor WebPageTest can provide. GTMetrix gives you the ability to enable an ad blocker in your testing to see true comparisons of how your site performs with ads enabled versus how it performs when they’re disabled. Note: The ad blocker integration is only available in the paid version, but well worth it for the value of the data you get back.

For today’s tests, we’re going to focus primarily on GTMetrix and WebPageTest to show how ad networks impact your site performance.

 HTTP requests

The most obvious impact of any ad implementation is the addition of HTTP requests. Typically speaking, a basic WordPress website will have anywhere from 30 to 150 HTTP requests. The WP SiteCare homepage is pretty well-optimized, and we make 96 HTTP requests, so you have some context.

What is an HTTP request?

An HTTP request is basically just another name for every time your computer requests new information from your server — or any other server for that matter. Of course, as more requests are made, that’s undoubtedly going to take longer to process. Things get even more complicated and involved when those servers are distributed throughout remote physical locations. Even though information travels at the speed of light, there’s still going to be latency if your computer is making hundreds of requests to Albany, Austin, Atlanta, and Acapulco all at the same time. Keeping HTTP requests as low as possible will ensure better performance for your website.

Example: HTTP requests and disabled ads

Now let’s take a look at an example from an unnamed website on the internet. The identity of the site owner has been removed to protect the innocent, etc. We captured the following results using the GTMetrix performance testing tool.

The first screenshot shows the performance of the site with ads completely disabled. 81 requests is a very respectable amount, as is a 2.8s page load time. Anything under three seconds is considered a win in most cases. The page size could be reduced, but for an image-rich website, it’s not uncommon to have a page size around 2MB.

In the second screenshot, ads were turned on. Here’s a percentage breakdown of the exact performance impact of ads on this website.

• Page load time 8.6s — 307% increase in page load time when ads were introduced.
• Total Page size 3.55MB — 152% increase in page size when ads were introduced.
• Requests 446 — 550% increase in HTTP requests when ads were introduced.

This isn’t even an edge case or extreme example. We see and review sites just like this one every single day. We’ve seen sites where enabling ads introduced over 1,000 new HTTP requests!

Varying physical locations

The number of HTTP requests made by ad networks is a huge issue, and it’s compounded even more when you start to take into account where all of these ad servers are located. The more physical distance that has to be traveled to return ads to your website, the slower the page load times will be.

Let’s take a look at the same website from the last example, and take a look at how many different servers are being used to serve up this ad content.

The pie chart on the left is completely out of control. This is because HTTP requests are being made to over 150(!) servers across the world. It’s truly remarkable that data can be returned from that many places in less than 10 seconds.

The 15.7% slice of the pie is the server that hosts the actual website. The WHOLE ENTIRE WEBSITE makes just barely more HTTP requests than the top ad network on the site. Let me reiterate that. One ad network makes almost as many HTTP requests as all of the content, images, and assets that make up this entire website.

Take a look at the HTTP request breakdown by domain for sitecare.com. We load data from about 15 different servers instead of 150+. We could cut that number down even more, but we use Twitter, Facebook, and Google APIs to add features like our homepage Twitter stream, and things like that. It’s a conscious decision to include those additional HTTP requests as they allow us to add cool features to our website.

We also know that massive entities rely on Twitter, Facebook, and Google APIs a lot more than we do, so we can trust that they’re keeping their networks maintained and performant.

How to keep ads from slowing down your website

There are a few techniques and tools you can use to prevent ads from slowing down your website.

1. Implement lazy loading for ads

Lazy loading allows you to delay slow-loading page elements – such as images or ads – until after your page has loaded. It’s a way of ensuring a visitor has access to your site (and doesn’t bounce) before loading some of your web page’s larger, non-critical, below-the-fold content. As a user scrolls down the page, lazy loading ensures images only load as needed, making your web pages load much faster, especially on mobile devices. You can apply this to any number of images on a web page.

2. Use a CDN for the website imagery and video content

A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed and cloud-based network of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content. It reduces the physical distance between a server and a device accessing a site and allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading files such as HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. A CDN can result in a significant decrease in page load times for both desktop and mobile users.

3. Use a premium DNS service

A Domain Name System (DNS) is an important aspect of the internet that allows your computer to match web domains (e.g., sitecare.com) to their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

An IP address is a unique string of numbers associated with each domain on the internet. Your website IP indicates its location on the internet so that other websites and devices can find it. Because it would be nearly impossible to remember every IP address of all your favorite websites when browsing online, a DNS connects domain names to IP addresses, allowing people to remember domain names (sitecare.com, for example), while devices on the internet utilize IP addresses.

A domain name registrar, which frequently uses a backend server to supply services to web hosting companies and internet service providers (ISPs), is usually also a provider of DNS hosting services. A DNS hosting provider also keeps track of the domain names that have been configured and handles all domain lookup queries.

Not all DNSs are created equal.

It’s important to keep in mind that, like hosting, there are quicker and slower DNS providers. Premium DNS solutions aim to provide 100 percent uptime reducing the risk of losing visitors to your website. Another benefit of a premium DNS service is that it’s faster! Typically, a free DNS is a sluggish DNS.

If your website’s speed and performance are inconsistent, changing DNS providers is a relatively straightforward way to identify if the DNS provider itself is a bottleneck. Switching to a more dependable provider could be the best solution.

A few DNS web service providers we highly recommend for optimal site performance are:

• Cloudflare
• DNS Made Easy
• Amazon Route 53

3. Optimize or limit ads on mobile devices

Pages loading on mobile devices are often slightly slower than on a desktop; that’s why page speed is a major aspect of mobile search engine optimization (SEO). If you want to optimize ads on mobile to limit their impact on load speed, you can either choose to limit your ads shown on mobile devices or optimize them for mobile.

Here’s how you can limit ads on Google: 

• First, sign in to your Google Ads account.
• Click “Devices” in the page menu along the left side.
• In the “Device” column, find rows that say “Mobile phones.”
• Click the “Bid adj.” cell for your desired campaign or ad group.
• Choose “Decrease” from the drop-down menu.

If you want to limit it by 50%, enter 50% in the % field, and click Save. If you want only to show ads on desktop computers, enter 50% in the % field, and click Save.

4. Defer ad scripts

The defer attribute is a line of added code that specifies that a script only runs after the rest of the page has finished processing. In layman’s terms, this attribute can tell an ad to only load on a page after everything else has loaded. If a defer ad script is not added, the script to load the ad will be fetched and executed before the browser finishes analyzing the page, potentially slowing the page load down.

5. Reduce the number of video ads

Embedding videos can sometimes slow down a webpage. Video marketing is an incredibly powerful strategy, but if it’s impacting your page speed, it could be doing more harm than good. While Google focuses on mobile from an SEO standpoint, speed impacts the overall UX and traffic performances, essentially impacting revenue (as fewer people will spend time on the site).

6. Limit the total number of ads across the site

Now I’m not quite naive enough to say publishers should abandon the ad revenue model altogether. There are definitely other business models that can be more lucrative and have less impact on your readers, but when ads are the core piece of your revenue, it’s tough to make that switch without making some big strategical changes. Fewer ads on your site will improve site speed and performance for both mobile and desktop, however. Try turning your ads off for a few minutes and run your page through WebPageTest.org. You’ll notice a huge difference in your load time!

7. Know your ad Provider

We see many ad providers out on the web, many of whom are super reputable, keep their ad servers optimized, and require advertisers to comply with a strict set of guidelines.

The flip side is that we see just as many shady ad providers who are more interested in their own bottom line than they are in your website. They have loose or no performance guidelines at all. They don’t require asynchronous ad loading. They’re totally content with littering your site with garbage code, as long as it keeps their revenue numbers growing.

It’s widespread for these providers to blame any other myriad of factors for your slow-performing website. But when presented with data like we’ve collected, it becomes almost impossible for them to refute. Of course, that doesn’t keep them from defending their poor implementation practices. If the “secret” about ad performance gets out into the wild, that could really damage their business. So it makes a lot more sense to keep things on the down-low.

8. Be excruciatingly picky about your ads

If you are managing your own ads, be picky. Be extremely picky.

There are several reputable ad networks out there. Here’s a list of some of the more popular ones, that for the most part, can be trusted to deliver quality ads in a performant way.

• Google Adsense — This network is extremely popular as it’s easy to opt-in, has few restrictions, and is very simple to implement.
• WordAds — This is the network that runs ads across the entire WordPress.com platform. They’ve recently allowed publishers on self-hosted WordPress sites to apply.
• Media.net — This network delivers ads primarily from the Yahoo/Bing network, which delivers ads at a very large scale. There’s also no minimum traffic requirement to join this network, so definitely worth checking out for smaller publishers.
• RevenueHits — This is actually an advertiser that prides itself on performance, which is really rare in the ad network space. They also have a massive inventory and no minimum traffic requirements.
• Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) — This is another Google product. Still, it’s different than Adsense in that it’s the actual server platform itself. There are some minimum requirements for using DFP, and to maximize your revenue, you’ll want to hire someone to set this up and manage it for you. From a performance standpoint, it’s as rock-solid as they come.

Even this list of trusted sources can slip up from time to time, so if you’re not comfortable evaluating ads on a somewhat regular basis on your own, definitely reach out to professionals who can manage your ads and who can audit your ad setup from time to time.

9. Diversify income streams

The last option to help reduce the performance impact of ads on your website is to start moving away from them. Or, at the very least, to start introducing new revenue streams to help subsidize what you’re earning from ads. Some top-rated models that we’ve seen work well for our customers are

• Affiliate Marketing. This is our favorite alternative to display advertising, as it works 24/7 and makes the reading experience better for the community. Affiliate marketing involves using outbound links on your website with a built-in referral code, so you get a bonus if a reader purchases a service or product on another website.
• Digital products. Create your own guide or handbook that brings a ton of value to your readers, and sell it for a small fee. You could publish your first book or release your first single if you’re a musician. You can start selling more easily than you think using GumRoad or a WordPress plugin like Easy Digital Downloads.
• Services. Do you have an awesome service that you can sell to your readership and community? It might be work looking at how to best provide that in a way that makes sense. Of course, it’s not quite as attractive because you end up trading time directly for money, but it’s definitely something to consider if it pays the bills.

Finally, say no to slow websites

I want to wrap this article up by challenging you to run your website through some of the aforementioned tools. How do things look? Are ads killing your site? How many HTTP requests are coming from servers other than your own? If things look grim, it’s time to start putting together a plan for keeping those page load times in check.

Figuring out a way to increase your bottom line, expand your reach, and doing it all in a way that keeps your readers happy is definitely possible, but I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that it’s easy. It’s a lot of hard work!

A fast load time has always been a crucial aspect of the user experience on a website. With page experience now one of Google’s new ranking algorithm signals, page speed has become essential for ranking. Bad ad practices could deter users from visiting your site.

The post Website Loading Slowly? You Can Probably Blame Ads appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.