Website loading extremely slow (SiteSpeed)

4rahul

Hi there, I am having issues with my website loading extremely slow and is now starting to affect my bounce rate. I noticed over the last few days the site speed is now taking around 30 seconds on average to load which has resulted in my SEO rankings suffering a bit. I am using Ezoic Leap as my caching plugin and using Generatepress theme which is generally really fast but the website is still really slow. I don't think Hostinger would be the issue as they are generally good in terms of speed and I have other sites hosted with Hostinger that don't have Ezoic ads setup and are loading within a second. Would anyone be able to help me diagnose this issue? Thank you.

Heather

4rahul Hello Heather here I hope you are well. I have taken a look into this for you and was able to load your home page straight away.

Please can you try clearing your devices cache and cookies and re-try your site in incognito mode and let us know how you get on?

If you are still having problems please can you let us know the browser you are using and where in the world you are located and we can then go from there. thank you

4rahul

Hi Heather, yes I have tried using incognito and clearing my cache and the website is still really slow. I have done speed testing with GTmetrix with servers located in the USA and some other tools and it's really slow in comparison to competing websites which get under a few seconds of loading time.

Heather

4rahul Thank you for clarifying. We don't recommend testing a website with GT Metrics as it doesn't understand the ads lazy loading that we do that is inline with Google's best practices.

We recommend either using your Big Data analytics which is an average of all the readers user experience on your site or using Google page speed insights. Google page speed insights is a tool to help you understand what Google is seeing on your site at that moment in time and is dependent on what is happening on your device as well as the wider internet speed that you are accessing.

I have taken a look at your website and am not able to recreate the slow loading that you are seeing. Do you have a particular page that you test and can you confirm what metrics you are testing and I can then look into this further for you?

4rahul

On Google Page Speed Insights everything seems fine. It's just that when looking at my Analytics I noticed that my bounce rate increased significantly and this is in line with my impressions dropping also as the site was on the upward trajectory but I suspect the website is being penalized due to slow loading times or bad UX. I decided to then actually open up the website on my phone and desktop without being logged into WP and found that the website took really long to load. There's also the volume of ads which is a lot and that might be slowing the site down significantly. If I put myself in the user's shoes I would not like browsing the website as the ads are just too much with the pop-ups and so I am considering maybe removing the ads from the header and removing the pop-up ads also to try and make the UX a bit better for my visitors. How much will this affect revenue if I did this? I know you guys don't believe in GTMetrix but I would just like you to have a look at my website's loading time in comparison to my main competitors. I use this tool a lot and never have I seen a website take so long to load. Note that all website's in the coffee niche are using display ads on their website's also

Heather

4rahul Thank you for the information that you have kindly provided. With GT Metrix as I mentioned before it doesn't understand that Ezoic lazy loads it's ads in line with Google policies and so the data that it provides isn't accurate or a true reflection of the real readers user experience.

In terms of the dates that you are seeing the bounce rate increasing and the impressions dropping please can you confirm the date range when you are seeing this happening on and the reporting that you are using to track it?

You are of course free to make any changes that you would like to the ads on your site. It's important to note that this will impact your revenue and you may be making these changes unnecessarily. I'm not able to recreate the page speed issues that you are seeing and if page speed insights are saying that everything is fine then it is likely that the issues that you are seeing are either isolated to your device or just happening intermittently in certain circumstances.

As a Publisher you are classed as a super user - someone who isn't impacted by ads and so the AI will always show you the most ads. It's unlikely that your readers are having the same experience as you.

Please let me know the date range where you are seeing the impressions drop and bounce rate increase and the reporting that you are using to track it and I can then happily look into this further for you. many thanks

4rahul

Hi Heather, okay thanks for clarifying that. Well, according to my GSC, my impressions dropped drastically From June 19th this month. It was averaging around 6,000 impressions with around 120 clicks or so per day and the website was steadily growing. With regards to bounce rather or rather session duration, the average session duration also dropped slightly but this might also be skewed due to the drop in impressions. I am not sure if this is to do with the usability of the website itself or if my website has just been affected by an algorithmic update which I doubt is the case as most of my pages are indexed and no errors are showing up in GSC. I have attached a screenshot of the drop in impressions. Note that the date it began to decline was on the 19th this month

Heather

4rahul My apologizes for not getting back to you sooner I have been out of the office on Thursday and Friday this week. From everything that you have said and from what I can see in your data it sounds like you have been affected by the latest Google algorithm updates that were rolled out in June. You can read more about this here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-fluctuations-35551.html

If you take a look at this report and compare the date of the traffic drop to date to the previous period you can see that your sites New visitors have dropped off by just slightly more than the overall visits: https://analytics.ezoic.com/reports/behavior/returnVisitorFrequency

Going forward I would recommend connecting your Google search console to Ezoic as we can then track your average position in the SERPS for the keywords: https://pubdash.ezoic.com/nicheiq/webmaster-auth

It is likely that with this your website has dropped down in the rankings as part of these fluctuations. The good news is that your visits are already starting to increase https://analytics.ezoic.com/reports/traffic/trafficDaily

4rahul

Okay, thank you Heather I will do that and yes I have started to see a rise in traffic again, fingers crossed that the site will recover. Thank you for your help.

Heather

4rahul No problem at all I am happy to have helped, if there is anything else we can help you with please do get in touch. 🙂