Ezoic
Best Practices
Using Ezoic’s Monetization apps should ensure that your site speed is comparable to your original site (or marginally faster). Read on for an overview of Ezoic’s site speed features, and tips to ensure your site is seeing the full benefit of our free tools!
Ezoic's Site Speed Features
When you integrate with Ezoic you automatically update your site to run to a number of Google’s site speed recommendations. This applies to any traffic which you choose to send to the Ezoic system and includes:
World Wide CDN - Ezoic serves all of your static content (e.g. images, CSS) from a world-wide CDN. Just install the ‘Caching’ app in your Ezoic App Store to take advantage of this.
Amazon Web Services - Ezoic uses cloud computing from AWS, including latency based routing to send each individual visitor to your site to one of ten world-wide data centers (and numerous local data centers) that will bring them the content fastest.
Asynchronous Loading (a.k.a ‘lazy loading’) - Ezoic staggers the loading of resources on the site in order to make sure the content gets to your readers as fast as possible. This means that the content is loaded with priority, then images, ads, then other resources which are not necessary for your readers (more on this below).
Combining Resources - Ezoic combines external resources on your site into single requests to reduce latency.
Compressing Resources - Your site’s external resources like images and CSS files are compressed to decrease their file size and help speed up load times.
CloudFlare - As an official CloudFlare partner Ezoic can offer you free access to their industry leading site speed and security features. This is enabled for sites that are name server integrated by default in your Ezoic settings.
Site Speed and Lazy Loading
Ezoic works as a proxy, serving much of your content via a cache and uses lazy loading which prioritizes the essential elements for site rendering and functions over the non-essential elements that don't affect user experience and loads them in the background. This is recommended by Google.
Unfortunately, many online speed tests are more interested in the time it takes to load all of the elements on the page. When you’re doing lazy loading, it can take some elements - such as ads or unimportant files - longer to load which drags down the speed score of the site. However, the actual experience for users is very fast, and this is what search engines like Google are actually measuring. So although your site score is lower on some tools, it's actually rendering faster and giving your user a better experience, which reflects in real user engagement metrics.
Site Speed Best Practices
To measure user facing speed, Ezoic recommends looking at the ‘Time to Interactive’. This is a result of years of extensive testing and also discussions with Google’s team. If you are seeing an objectively slower site speed after integrating with Ezoic, there is a very strong chance that you do not have one element of the platform setup properly.
Here's a short checklist to ensure your website is faster with Ezoic.
These two elements can make a huge difference with Ezoic. There could be cases where the site speed optimization from Ezoic’s Monetization tools is not working properly when initially integrated because of header rules being sent by the original website. For example, you may have a caching plugin on your WordPress website that is overwriting Ezoic's cache. Ezoic always obeys cache headers coming from the original website by default, to ensure that Ezoic does not conflict with your website.
Additional Tools
Lastly, Leap features automated rules that allow you to quickly satisfy many of the common Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations with the click of a button. This is an additional tool that provides extra optimisation on top of your original site and many sites see 'Green' Core Web Vitals when using it.