After integration, Ezoic slowed my website to a crawl. It increased the number of requests from 26 to 612, my Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) from 1.5s to 4.6s, and my first-byte time from 0.8s to 3.38s. This was an unacceptable price in terms of speed, and I ended up giving up, even after configuring the Ezoic site speed accelerator.
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Ezoic Site Speed Impact
Here are the metrics on how Ezoic slows down your site:
Before Ezoic: Page Speed Metrics
Here are my WebPageTest results without Ezoic integration:
My TBT times are high, but with real-world users, it works just fine, as seen in this screenshot using Cloudflare as an alternative to Google Analytics:
I’m pretty proud of the speed at which my site loads. I achieve this using the Super Page Cache plugin that lets me cache my entire WordPress site using Cloudflare.
After Ezoic: Page Speed Metrics
Here are the WebPageTest results after Ezoic integration:
That’s crazy – Ezoic is slowing my LCP by three and the total blocking time by twelve! These differences are so high that they deserve a table of their own for comparison:
| Speed Metric | Without Ezoic | With Ezoic | Percentage Change (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | 1.5s | 4.6s | 328% |
| First Contentful Paint (FCP) | 1.5s | 4.5s | 300% |
| Time to First Byte (TTFB) | 0.8s | 3.4s | 425% |
| Total Blocking Time (TBT) | 1s | 12s | 1200% |
| Total Number of Requests | 26 | 612 | 2353% |
| Total Size of Webpage | 288 KB | 1,810 KB | 628% |
The difference in site speed with and without Ezoic is staggering. The total number of requests is more than twenty three times higher for displaying just a couple of ads with Ezoic.
The Ezoic WordPress Plugin Slows Down Your Site Even More
If you’re using WordPress, Ezoic recommends downloading and installing the Ezoic WordPress plugin. But this plugin actively removes existing speed optimizations on your site. For example, during installation, it requires you to uninstall Autoptimize, as seen in this screenshot:
For those who don’t know, Autoptimize is an invaluable WordPress plugin that improves CSS and JavaScript loading and has many other features, allowing you to inline above-the-fold CSS. If you follow the Ezoic WordPress plugin’s recommendation and uninstall Autoptimize, you’re immediately making your site worse.
The Ezoic Chrome Extension isn’t Much Better
The Ezoic Chrome extension will slow down your site just like the WordPress plugin. Even though you can keep using plugins like Autoptimize and manually select the location of the ads, your page speed metrics won’t improve much. Autoptimize can’t do anything about the external CSS and JS that Ezoic injects into your site. Your site’s files are a drop in the ocean compared to what Ezoic adds.
The Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator Won’t Improve Site Speed
To help speed up your site, you can enable the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator on the dashboard. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t help much. Even with all the optimizations and caching, it won’t reduce the number of requests or the page size. This includes a CDN as shown here:
The idea of the CDN is appealing. Ezoic says it will cache your entire HTML and not just the static JS and CSS files like a traditional CDN. In a way, it’s like Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) or QUIC.cloud’s dynamic caching. I’ve written about cheap CDN hosting using Cloudflare and QUIC.cloud, and Ezoic hopes to implement something similar.
Unfortunately, the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator doesn’t improve loading times, despite its promises and what customer support says. Even with full caching, the site response times are too high, and it won’t help with the total loading time either. Worse, if you don’t use the Ezoic WordPress plugin, you can’t cache your pages because of the “cache-control” header. Even though you can instruct Ezoic to ignore cache-control headers and cookies to permit full-page caching, it doesn’t appear to work.
But even with the WordPress plugin and full caching enabled, Ezoic slows down your site to an intolerable degree.
The Ezoic Page Speed Price is Too High
While I rely on affiliate sales from WP-Tweaks.com, I thought I’d try and add some extra income to my site with display ads. Ezoic is one of the most well-known ad networks, and you only need monthly website traffic of 5000 visits to get started, so I figured, “Why not?”. The integration went smoothly, and I had an accommodating customer rep who reached out to me with suggestions and encouragement. So Ezoic gets high marks for the speed and personalization of its support staff.
Unfortunately, the cost of Ezoic in terms of page speed is unacceptable. The site speed archive on WP-Tweaks.com is filled with tutorials on improving page load times, so I couldn’t countenance implementing Ezoic – I would feel like too much of a hypocrite.
Alternative to Ezoic – EthicalAds?
For now, I’m giving up on Ezoic. My site traffic is still too low, but once I hit 10,000 page views per month, I will try EthicalAds. They claim to allow ads without cookies and tracking. When I hit my target, I’ll write a post about it and share my experience!
Awesome article, great website.
My site has been on Ezoic for four years now. In the past six months, they basically seem to have sabotaged my site. One day, I saw PHP errors at the top. I traced this back to their plugin, which deleted my .htaccess file. They “fixed” it. Ever since then, my site has been losing traffic.
One of my competitors operates a much bigger site on Ezoic. He’s in good with them and mentioned on their website. He made several attempts to purchase my site. A few weeks later, I have 30% of my traffic. I’ve been operating for 10 years now, and I’ve never had lower traffic in my life. I think Ezoic is trying to screw me over.
I even bypassed Ezoic ads on all of my top-ranking web pages, using Amazon affiliate ads that I made myself from images and links. My site scores very high page speed tests, but the “lab” results, based on real-world tests are very bad. Why? Ezoic downgraded my hosting. After four years, they sabotaged my site so I’ll sell it to this turd, then he’ll turn it around.
Pages that score 100/100/100/100 in Google’s page speed test don’t pass the real-world test, because Ezoic downgraded my web server. I believe they’re doing this on purpose so I sell to the turd.
Both Ezoic and the turd will make more money if he buys my site. They’ll upgrade the hosting and, voila, it will rank high again.
The whole thing is very suspicious. My articles still rank high. It’s as if Ezoic basically allocates a certain amount of page views, then shuts it off. I haven’t been hit with any ranking downgrade or Google Update penalty. Ezoic is gradually shutting down my site so I will sell it to the turd.
I really liked Ezoic. I’m pretty surprised how they ended up screwing me over. I think they’re probably in poor financial shape.
After the holidays, I’m going to move my site to a new host and use Ezoic more as a way to backfill pages that get less traffic. In Q4 of 2022, the web advertising business tanked. So only the fat cats are getting the good ads. My advice, go for Amazon Affiliate ads. You can make your own, simple ads out of static webp graphics. Just add a link. So far, it’s paying off better than Ezoic or AdSense (mediation).
It’s a bummer. I really liked Ezoic. At my peak, I was earning $16 per 1000 visits. Now I don’t even make a dollar a day, and my traffic is 1/5 of what it was 5 years ago. That can’t be explained by a dip in advertising.
BEWARE OF EZOIC. THEY HAVE CHANGED. THEY’RE A SINKING SHIP. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Finally! I am glad that someone talked about it. I was confused if I was the only one facing this issue. One more thing i noticed was that my traffic was increasing, and revenue was decreasing. Ezoic blamed it on the cache i was using, which was built-in from my hosting. In the end, I had to remove Ezoic to save my website. I guess it was a good decision. I am still looking fro an alternative and currently using Adsense, would appreciate if you can share some other platforms for small bloggers! Cheers.
indeed, Ezoic will slow down any website, by a lot. they are loading many ad networks, even if their ads are not showing; thus so many files added and so much blocking time. they do lie a lot about their features, they all seem great until you actually test them! in terms of speed at least, nothing works as it should. Of course all your PageSpeed insights will go terrible, but they will not even care, they will try to convince you this is ‘normal’, regardless of the fact that they are promoting themselves to speed up your website and promise good PageSpeed insights scores!