Keep your ads under control for optimal load speed

By
Angie Herrera

These days a lot of websites have ads everywhere. And it's completely understandable given that depending on traffic and the ads, the revenue isn't too shabby. Depending on the kind of site you have, this is a perfectly good thing. However, sometimes ads can greatly reduce the load speed of your site. Many ad networks will give you a piece of code to use in order to have the ads show up on your web page. More often than not that code will be in [JavaScript](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript). That in itself is not the problem. The problem is that the code will insert new code into your site that references the ad network, which will more than likely be on a separate server. It's the *external server calls* that will make a difference. If you have 2, 3 or 4 ads you probably won't notice. However, bump that up to 8, 9, 10 or more ads and your page's load time will suffer. What this increase in load time comes a major issue – increased [bounce rate](http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986). Basically, your users will not wait for the page to load if it's taking more than a few seconds. So what ends up happening? You lose ad revenue because those visitors aren't sticking around long enough to click on your ads. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you determine how fast your page is loading. Here are a couple that we've used: - [Pingdom Tools](http://tools.pingdom.com/) - [Self SEO Free Website Speed Checker](http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php) - [YSlow for Firebug](http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) - best for web developers who use Firebug on a regular basis Be sure to take a look at them. Even if you don't have ads on your site, it's not a bad idea to run your site through one of the tests.