Adsense Slows Site Load
Googles Adsense, Custom Search & Analytics were costing me an average 4.5 seconds in site load times, even after adding Gzip compression & expires headers!
A ridiculous situation considering the fact that Google now uses site load times as a ranking factor.
You may recall an article I did earlier this month ” Site Speed Web Search Ranking ”, where I brought to your attention that Google had indeed made the announcement that they were now using site speed as a new & additional ranking factor. However at the time of writing that article, I was unaware of just how ludicrous this was going to be & what utter hypocrites Google appear to be!
Ok before you all start screaming for blood, let me explain what has taken place over the last month. I had already written another article on site speed, where I managed to reduce my page load times by up to 75%, which on the face of it seemed great, but it left my page looking a tad bare & uninviting so as can be expected, over the space of a few weeks I start adding little things back onto my page in order to get it looking nice again. You know the sort of stuff, little header bar buttons, a custom search in the sidebar & of course a few Adsense adverts. These small (or what I thought small) additions gradually pushed my home page load time back up to around 7.5 sec. Now I didn’t really worry too much about this as the site seemed to load fairly quickly on my crappy Internet connection!
However times & minds can quickly change and having Google inform me that my site was loading slower than 90% of all other sites, prodded me into action a little quicker than expected. This is the main reason I have not done any posting on the site for the last week, I have been busy researching gzip compression & expires headers as advised by Yslow, but no matter what I tried, my website was still loading slow, an average of 8.1 secs at the last check. (see below)
How Many Of You Have Had This Sort Of Report For Your Own Sites..?
Guess Who’s Guilty Of Slowing Your Pages Down..?
Now for the bit your not going to believe, I eventually discover that Google Analytics, Google Adsense & Google Custom Search were all playing a part in slowing down my website & each one by anything from 0.5 sec to around 1.0 sec UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE! Now when you realise I had a total of 4 Adsense ads + Googles Custom Search + Analytics all loading on my home page, this is what the result was;
Adsense slowed home page by 4 x 0.5 = 2 sec. To 4 x 1.0sec = 4 sec.
Analytics slowed home page by 1 x 0.5 = 1 sec To 1 x 1.0 sec = 1 sec.
Custom Search slowed page by 1 x 0.5 = 1 sec To 1 x 1.0 sec = 1 sec.
This means a slow down of anything from 4 to 6 seconds on my home page, when the idustry standard is a mere 2 seconds !
The best part is that these slow downs are rumoured on Google’s Webmaster Forum, not to happen at all if your using the Google Chrome browser..? Now is it just me or does anyone else smell something decidedly oceanic here..? hmmm
Well lets face it, any sensible webmaster is not going to optimize his pages for a browser with such a tiny share of the market now are they..? (see below)
So doesn’t it strike anyone as strange that Google’s own browser seems to be the only one not suffering from slow down by Google’s own Adsense, Analytics & Custom Search..? Well strange or not, I had enough evidence before me, to justify the removal of the Custom Search, the Analytics & all but one Adsense advert from my home page & guess what..?
Success At Last !
Yes you guessed it ! just take a look at my latest page load time in the bottom right corner..? That’s 2.063 seconds & one hell of a drop from the reported average of 8.1 secs in the image from Google Webmaster Tools.
Now don’t get me wrong here guys, this ain’t a witch hunt & I ain’t baying for blood ( well not just yet anyway! ), but what does tend to rub me up the wrong way, is when some big multi-national like Google starts telling us all that we better pay more attention to our websites, because they are now looking at side speed as a ranking factor! Especially when it is they, (Google), that are one of the major factors is slowing down our pages! Talk about being bloody hypocritical eh..? Well here’s a message for our friends at Google, from a very irate Welshman;
” How about you guys put your own house in order before you start pointing your fingers at others! Strewth your a company that’s worth tens of billions of dollars & you can’t even get some decent script written..? “
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Apr 21 2010. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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i agree with you because i have noticed a lot of pages loading time is very long especially for those that have analytics code, but for adsense or custom search, it is my first time to hear about that… thanks a lot for share.
It is my first time to hear regarding this. I have no idea that Google has it’s negative effect on the site but I think in my opinion it is a minimal one but thanks for this reminder. I’ll keep this and learn more about it.