Do you display ads on your blog?

optimizedadsIf you have a website with good traffic, you might want to consider selling advertisements. That’s, getting paid for displaying ads on your website.

There are a lot of options and alternatives regarding web ads. However, the story with WordPress.com is a little bit different.

If you’re using a platform other than WordPress.com, please refer to section “Web Developing Issues” from my old post “How to leave Google” for more ads alternatives.

Now, let’s talk about WordPress.com…

WordAds are manged by WordPress itself . They are banners in header, sidebar, and below or in between posts. These positions vary from theme to theme, e.g., some themes don’t support top banners. Videos are another type of ads that are being served below or in between posts. As a premium user, you have the option to hide those ads or to get paid for keeping them displayed.

In my previous Letter to WordPress, I wrote about the need to have more options especially for premium uses regarding locations and types of the ads. They listened but reversely! Instead of giving more options, they removed the available options. I used to have an option to disable optimized ads in header and sidebar. Now, I either have the whole set of ads or none.

Yet I believe that I optimized my WordPress to the max, PageSpeed Insights analysis (and GTmetrix) shows a decrease of speed and thus performance of around 15 – 20% when ads are on. This is a high percentage where the video ads are the worst part. The good news is that logged-in users may not notice this as they already have some components cached locally on their computers upon visiting and navigating their own WordPress’. The problem might be noticeable for non-logged visitors though.

In summary, displaying ads is actually affecting the performance of the site here.

My question is: Have you noticed slow loading of my blog (or yours in case you’re displaying ads) lately? Or, let me rephrase it in different way: Should we scarify the ads’ revenue for better performance?

P.S., if you’re interested, I’m selling ads on this site

105 thoughts on “Do you display ads on your blog?”

    • Hi Marie, I’m pretty sure that there were some performance issues with ads when I wrote this post. I believe the situation is better now. Generally speaking, displaying ads will affect performance. Hopefully it won’t be noticeable. You can test it yourself; try it for two months and see…

      Reply

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