Some ad networks are causing my site performance issues

[JS_Harris]

I made a few slight changes to my site layout and made a few more changes with my adsense settings to try and clear up some visual issues I was occasionally having. When done, and with A/B testing active, I monitored the site for performance issues and was stunned by one ad network causing a full 4 second increase on page load times. Without ads the page loads in less than 0.5 seconds, with ads it usually hovers around 1.5 to 2.5 seconds... but this particular network ad pushes it up to 6+ seconds.

I ran speed tests on a handful of pages twice hourly over the span of 3 hours to get a sampling. The ad only appeared twice but the pagespeed and yslow scores on those two pageloads is horrendous, below 70% vs 95 on average.

1 link unit, 1 image/text unit and 1 text only unit per page
- 61 additional javascript calls for this network ad vs adwords ads
- 5 redirect chains of 3 or more steps
- URIs with more characters than a data packet can hold at one time, seriously, 1 ad with thousands of characters and approaching 100 parameters in a uri is a bit much.
- additional requests for logo images, branding
- not using a CDN warnings x 5 per ad
- various css, expires, reduce DNS lookups and make fewer request warnings as well

Compare that to an adwords ad and the difference is night and day. I know it's a network ad because of the domain names in the URI requests. I don't know which ad network because the domain and company name aren't in the ad network list for their name or domain name, and I don't know their name.

Anyway, I did additional A/B testing with different settings, including having ad networks blocked 100% and with all enhanced features off, and that's as good as it gets. I have a choice, increase earnings a little or speed up load times a lot. I chose the later.

Is my account at greater risk of being banned if I'm essentially opting out of 90% of the options available in the dashboard? It's not that I don't want to take Google's advice or participate in all their efforts and features, it's that performance isn't optional for me. I've read of others being banned after major settings changes due to invalid traffic. I also don't want to perform further A/B testing because the testing itself causes pageloads that are technically invalid traffic too.

[netmeg]

Probably not a problem, since I've been opted out of all that stuff (including 3rd party networks) for years.

[robzilla]

I wouldn't recommend making decisions like that based on tools like Pagespeed and YSlow. They have their merits, of course, but they don't say much about how your pages actually load for your users. If you use Google Analytics, real user monitoring (RUM) is built into that, and will give you accurate statistics, but there are other RUM services, too. Furthermore, I think Page Load Time is less helpful than Document Content Loaded. Assuming your ads load asynchronously, your page will be usable from the moment the DOMContentLoaded event fires, and from that point onwards some ads will load slower than others, but that's largely outside of your control and, in my opinion, does not have that much of an impact on the user experience*.

_{* Unless the loading of the ads causes your layout to jive and swing. I hate that.}

[JS_Harris]

I look at the waterfall of said services to see where the bottlenecks are. My content loads before the ads do which might be leading to accidental clicks. That problem is made worse by poorly configured ads, some of which have so much tracking going on that it takes as long to load the tracking as it does the page content itself.

I've done as Netmeg has and blocked all ad networks for now, I'll go back a few months in the data and see if any of the 4k+ ad networks were worth keeping. I already see a performance boost without much loss of revenue, if any. I won't post about which ad networks did well or were problematic because they may do well for other site topics etc.

[leebow]

All this is because of apples attack on Flash.

Html5 ads are now just as animated and terrible as their flash counterparts - but flash was a single swf file - usually under 10kb.

HTML5 ads are massive! Loads of external js calls - uncompressed images, slow loading - just terrible.

And the best part about it is - everyone thinks it's great that flash is dead. Brainwashed by Apple who only wanted it gone - because Apple wouldn't be able to charge for apps in the AppStore when there were already free flash versions available on the web.

The net is getting slower - because we've all been pushed back in time by Apple.

[IanCP]

Some ad networks are causing my site performance issues

I would say from personal experience that some ad networks are causing site performance issues for the visitors themselves.

That, and that reason alone encouraged me to install NoScript in Firefox 43, and an AdBlocker in IE 11.

So far I haven't seen the Ad Networks addressing the underlying issues beyond holding conferences to develop a plan, to make a future plan. The penny will eventually drop with them.

Excepting for a handful of publishers who simply must max their pages out with ads, I can't blame the site owners. They are as much victims as are the visitors.

[tangor]

Wouldn't it be nice if we could be part of the vetting process AND have a say in how content is delivered? Dreaming, I know, but it is a nice dream. :)

[netmeg]

My issue right now is with ad networks that break SSL. I had to go back and forth with Media.net and finally they sent me all new codes. I put them in, and there was still a tiny firing pixel that was not secure. Got them to fix that, and now Disqus is throwing up errors. Always something.