trillianjedi - 10:55 am on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have had a few users complain over the last year or two that the AdSense ads on pages of one of my sites in particular cause the page load times to be "quite dramatically" slowed.

I experienced this myself when there seemed to be some intermittent Google server outages yesterday. I now fully understand what these users are trying to explain to me.

What can be done about this? I've been giving it some thought and can't really get beyond about three possibilities that might actually work.

1. Source ordered content

Pull the AdSense code last and position with appropriate CSS DIV markup. I'm not sure that's all easy in my particular case as I'm using a full float CSS layout already which is probably pushing the margins of what is currently possible. I don't know that it would stand any additional complexity.

2. iFrames

I'm not sure that this would work as mediabot would then be crawling a blank page URL? Is it possible to call the AdSense code inside the main page but direct output to an iFrame?

3. DHTML

Something I've been playing around with recently. This would work in the same was as source ordered content, but the DIV's would actually be referenced in their natural place in the source, and the AdSense code pushed into that space when it's loaded.

I don't know if that's workable? As far as I can ascertain, there is no hook into an OnLoad event that could be tapped into?

What would be nice here, although again I'm just not sure if it's possible, would be to use the Body.OnLoad event so that the AdSense code is not called until the page has finished loading, then it's all called at once and shoved into the appropriate DIV slots.

Anyone here playing with this or have a succesful working solution?

TJ