Is Adsense Dragging Down Page Load Time?

visitors reporting site load problems waiting for ads

[backdraft7]

I run ONE tower ad unit in the right sidebar of my page. No other ads whatsoever. Lately, new visitors to my site report that the page header area loads, but then stalls and the info bar is reporting something like "waiting for google" or something on that order. They say this can last for quite a long time.

This might explain how I'm getting a lot of traffic, but no conversions, since people are bailing out rather than waiting.

Like any other screwed up system, it seems they go through periods of high load and just can't keep up.

Any ideas on how to load Adsense last on an html page? My method would be to remove it completely.

[Lame_Wolf]

I have seen this thing before on other sites. 100% of the time, the page itself was full of validation errors.

Have you tried correcting any validation errors on your page and then try ?

[netmeg]

You could load it last with CSS I suppose - just put it at the end of the page, but use CSS to float it back up where it's supposed to be.

Everything Google (and even more, FB) seems to slow down a page. I notice some days where the ads seem to be really zippy, and other days when they load like dogs.

Running a tool like the pingdom loadtime checker can point you to what elements of a page are slowing it down the most.

[HuskyPup]

A couple of nights ago AdSense wouldn't load on any of my sites, wonderful!

[backdraft7]

It's not all the time, just in spurts. We've been seeing sites that apparently lose traffic in on/off cycles. Maybe it's been high load periods for adsense and that's the cause. I'll double check for errors. thx