Why Your Google Ranking Drops and Tools to Fix It

Imagine you’re someone who works hard to make your website show up on Google when people search for things. It’s like a race, and you want your website to be at the front. But one day, you wake up and realize your website has fallen way behind or has vanished from the race altogether. This can be really scary and frustrating!

The process of making your website do well on Google is like planting seeds in a garden. You have to wait for those seeds to grow into healthy plants, and it takes some time, maybe a few months. But what’s even more frustrating is when it seems like all your hard work isn’t paying off.

Many things can affect how well your website does on Google, and in this article, we’ll explore why your website might be doing poorly and what you can do about it.

Don’t panic!

If you notice that your website isn’t ranking as high as it used to, you should not panic — it might just be a technical glitch. So here are some simple steps you can try first:

1. Check your rankings using a different tool or service. I like the search console to find the ranking for pages, here’s an article that explains how you can leverage scanning search rankings on GSC. Additionally, you can use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to track the position status across different countries.

2. Notice if it’s just one specific page that dropped in ranking or if your whole website is affected. If it’s just a single page with high-traffic intake, you can analyze the page rankings for its organic keywords. Again you can use GSC, Ahrefs, or Semrush.

3. Take a manual look at your rankings across countries where most traffic comes. You can use SERP watch to track live rankings.

4. Keep an eye on your competitors’ websites. If they’re experiencing a drop in traffic too, it could be due to a recent change in Google’s algorithms. Here’s what I do:

  • Take the page address of any competitor page ranking on 1st page of Google.
  • Go to semrush and scan the URL with the “exact URL” term.
SEMrush URL scanner
  • This will give you an idea of organic traffic for those pages in recent days.
Organic Traffic And Keywords
  • If traffic data is low on your competitor pages, there might be a drop in seasonal demand or the topic is heading toward needing to be updated.

In case you’re confident that the drop in your rankings isn’t because of technical issues after checks on your rank tracking tools or Google itself, it’s time to investigate why your orders have gone down. 

That takes us to some common reasons why a WordPress website might not perform well in search engine results.

Possible reasons for your Google ranking drop and fixes

1. Algorithm changes

One of the main causes of search result drops is obviously the changes in Search engine algorithms. These updates are to improve search results, and thus in the process, these updates can hurt your site with a significant decrease in rankings and is quite frustrating, to be honest.

This year (2023) Google had two major updates in March and August followed by a helpful content update in September, causing many websites across the world to lose their rankings. These updates particularly affected sites that the system thinks need to be more helpful or have unverified information.

Barracuda Tool Analytics

Every website has a different impact after an algorithm update. Some sites may shoot to the top and other drops drastically. If your site did great after a core update, it does not mean it will be intact following the next in case your site falls behind other sites in fulfilling what users are looking for.

A tool you can use:

A handy tool you can use in this situation is called the Penguin tool by Barracuda. This tool connects to your Google Analytics and helps you see how your website’s traffic is affected by Google’s algorithm changes. It’s like having a map that shows you when your traffic started to change and if there were any updates from Google just before that happened. 

Even if you see some changes in traffic and ranking, it’s important not to rush into action right away. When there’s a new algorithm update, things can be a bit crazy for the first few days. Wait for a couple of days and monitor the situation as things tend to calm down and get back to normal within a couple of days.

2. Change in Seasonal Demand

If your website’s rankings have fallen, it could be because your topics are no longer as popular or the season when it’s in high demand has passed. For instance, if you’re in the business of selling snow shovels, your rankings will probably decline as spring and summer approach since people won’t be searching for snow-related products during those seasons.

Obviously, we know that Google Trends, in this case, is the best free tool available to find out seasonal changes and how trends go up and down over time. You can customize it to see the bigger picture, like focusing on specific locations or time periods.

Typically setting the time period to the past 12 months or yearly gives you the best view of seasonal demands changes across your target location or worldwide (in case your market is international)

Change in Seasonal Demand

3. Check for manual action

Another major reason your websites can see a significant drop in search results is due to Google penalties in place for websites that break the rules, and these penalties can be applied either through algorithms or manually by Google’s team.

Algorithmic penalties are updates for ranking high-quality content. If your site doesn’t align with these new algorithms and Google’s many ranking factors, it might drop in the search results.

Manual penalties are like a warning from Google that remains for an unknown duration when you don’t follow their rules for website owners.

1. Using content that’s not original.

2. Sneaky redirects that hide where a link goes.

3. Keeping hidden content or links on your site.

4. Creating low-quality pages that just lead to other pages.

5. Automatically generating content without human input.

6. Using special code in the wrong way.

7. Having harmful pages on your site.

8. Stuffing your pages with too many keywords.

Your site might suffer a slight decline in ranking or vanish from Google’s search results based on how severely you have broken its rules.

Tool to use:

Utilize, Google Search Console in this case. Expand the security and manual action section > click on Manual action. You will get a warning explaining the type of issue your site has triggered and needs to be taken action on your side.

Manual Action

If you don’t find any manual penalties, it’s likely that the decrease in your ranking isn’t because of spam or bad practices on your site. Instead, it could be related to technical problems, SEO, changes in what people are searching for, or outdated content – which we’ll discuss later in this post.

4. Have you recently changed anything on the website

At times, drops in your Google ranking can be tied to changes you’ve made to your website. In fact, any improvements you have made to the site or design alterations can impact your site’s ranking, either in a positive or negative way.

A positive change is great, but you need to know what type of changes can lead to a ranking drop.

  1. Content Updates: If you or someone managing your site changes the content or adds new keywords, it can lead to a ranking drop. Such a drop typically appears when you use a keyword too frequently or reduce important texts related to the topic on a page.
  2. Moved a page: When you move a page and redirect it to the new page, it takes time for search engines to find and update it. During this period, your site may not perform as well in Google search results, and the page might seem like it’s gone.
  3. Change in internal links: When you adjust the links within your site, you can change how “link juice” flows. Thus, some pages might lose their importance in the process.
  4. Design Change: Significant changes in your website’s design can sometimes make it harder for people to use and slow down how quickly it loads. These factors can affect how users behave on your site, which is an important factor in your ranking.
  5. User Experience: Factors like a cluttered layout or layout shift, intrusive pop-ups, or difficult navigation can negatively impact user experience. Google uses web vitals to matrices to rank the pages in terms of performance and user experience, so when your new site design miserably fails on those matrices, chances are your site may have a drop in ranking.

Tool to use: 

There isn’t a specific tool that directly shows how changes to your website affect its search rankings. That’s why, it’s important to keep an eye on the positions of your site’s pages using Google Search Console for at least up to 2 weeks after making any changes or improvements. 

If you encounter issues, you can use Google Fetch and Render to investigate if there’s any issue on the page or check for issues in structured data that might be preventing search engine bots from properly indexing your page.

If your page’s position in the search engine results page (SERP) hasn’t improved within a few days, you might consider trying to restore a previous version of the page from the Wayback Machine.

wayback machine

5. On-page issues

If you have recently optimized your website, you might run into certain issues that could have a negative impact on your search ranking once Google’s bots have indexed your site. It’s very important to make sure your site does not face critical issues during load so everything loads fine for the bot to be able to index it properly.

Commonly, when a Google bot finds a broken link on your page such as when you have linked to a nonexistent page, or added half of the link, or you had a link inside design elements such as a button that is broken/inaccessible due to optimization rules can negatively impact on your SERP ranking change.

For each page, it’s very important to create Title and Description meta tags and include Alt attributes for images. If these tags are missing or incorrect, search engines may reduce the page’s visibility in search results.

Furthermore, it’s important to ensure proper HTTPS configuration, prevent mixed content issues, address duplicate content concerns, manage permanent and temporary redirects properly, and avoid blocking Google bots from crawling your pages via .htaccess rules.

Google does not like paid links and link exchanges. If you have done so recently and they detect those links leading to questionable websites, your ranking in the search engine results page (SERP) may be negatively affected.

Tools you can use:

There are several tools at your disposal for optimizing your on-page SEO. The first one would be your browser console, which helps identify various issues that may occur during the loading of your web pages. You can access it, by pressing Ctrl + Shift + I on a Windows PC or Option + Command + K or (Option + Command + J) on a Mac. 

This guide should help you out on how to look for errors via the browser console.

SEMrush and Ahrefs can be used for scanning and detecting a wide range of page-related issues. These two tools are my go-to place for checking internal page issues that we don’t see with our eyes. 

Apart from that, you can utilize Page Speed Insight’s page accessibility and SEO section to identify issues with your page. This is something that can be done via the browser lighthouse report tool.

On-page issues

If you come across any issues on your page, make an effort to search for online resources and resolve them. The fewer issues your page has, the more optimized it becomes, making it more appealing to Google.

6. Your competitor has improved their pages

Everybody wants to rank their pages on top of SERP. Similar to you, your competitors are continually trying to enhance their websites. It’s a constant race for the top positions in search engines.

If you were previously ranked higher than a competitor, they’ve been actively investing in optimizing their site, focusing on content, backlinks, and more, while you’ve dedicated less time to SEO or focused on other content. In such a scenario, your ranking could slip, and your competitor might surpass you. Such events are more aggressive during algorithm updates because algorithms are intelligent enough to find those great-quality contents and will try to test them on top of SERP.

So ensuring your content is up to date and contains enough quality information for the readers should help your site sustain such SERP changes.

Tool to use:

You can use Pagescreen to monitor your competitor changes and get notified when a visual change arrives. You can configure monitoring for specific pages and on the dashboard you will see the changes and screenshots taken for each page you are monitoring.

This way you can keep a close eye on your competitor pages and know who has gained the most out of your ranking drops and what they have been working on.

If you find a lot of movements & updates on competitors’ websites, you can analyze those changes and optimize your content so you don’t lose your positions. In addition, use this free content optimizer to analyze your target keywords and competitors’ pages. 

7. Off Page SEO Negative Impact

SEO can benefit or harm your site based on how you are doing it. Not only that, your websites can suffer from the actions of other web admins too. Here’s how:

1. Your competitors may try to play dirty by inserting artificial links to your site. This can lead to penalties under Google’s Penguin filter, hurting your site’s visibility and reputation.

2. Sometimes, other websites might plagiarize your content. If they publish your content before it gets indexed by Googlebot, it could be seen as duplicate content, potentially causing your page’s ranking to drop.

3. Engaging in prohibited backlink practices can have a detrimental impact on your page’s SEO. This can result in a lower ranking compared to previous weeks, making it harder for users to find your site.

4. Beware of fake user spam, whether it’s coming from unknown sources or, in some unfortunate cases, even from yourself. This is a red flag and can seriously affect your search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

What step you can take: use Originality.ai, a highly efficient plagiarism detection tool with AI content detection ability. Originality AI will let you know if your content is also being published somewhere else. In addition, you can utilize it as a traditional content plagiarism check for your writer’s content.

Off Page SEO Negative Impact

Furthermore, you will benefit from the readability score it comes up with, and it is really helpful to re-scale your content as it comes up with real-time suggestions with different color codes.

Originality Ai Readability Check

Regarding, link spam by unknown sources you can use SEMrush’s backlink analyzer and then block the spammy domains with the help of Google’s disavow tool. Blocking the domain would prevent the whole links from the domain and make your task a lot easier.

If you’re dealing with copied content, you can reach out to the DMCA by submitting a copyright infringement notice. For spam traffic detection, Google Analytics should help you out and then block those IPs with the help of your web host.

8. Your site might have lost some critical backlinks

Link building is an ongoing effort that requires constant attention. Your page may lose its ranking when some key backlinks are having issues or are removed by a 3rd party for some reason. These are some of the frequently triggered causes for the loss of links.

1. Link Removal: Sometimes, links that were initially placed on other websites may be taken down. This can happen if the agreement is temporary/ a disagreement in the terms/ or if the site admin asks for payment to renew the link. Losing backlinks can erode your site’s credibility thus hampering your SERP rank.

2. Obsolete Links: Backlinks can become outdated if they lead to pages that are no longer relevant or have been removed from your site. This can affect both user experience and SEO, so you would want to make sure the links that you have made are from relevant pages and explain what readers are about to read on your site, this is a really effective practice in link building.

3. Loss of Domain Trust: The trust flow is bidirectional. If the site linking to you loses its trust or credibility, it can have a negative impact on your own site’s reputation. Backlinks from untrustworthy sources can be considered toxic and harm your site’s credibility thus your pages may drop some SERP positions.

Tools that can help you:

You can find multiple tools to monitor and manage backlinks. I prefer Ahrefs because you get the backlink tracking utility with complete link management and SEO suit for a 7-day trial and $99 per user after that.

9. You Have Not Worked on Your Web Vitals

In August 2021, Google rolled out the Page Experience algorithm, which brought along a set of Core Web Vitals ranking factors. This update signifies that Google is now placing more emphasis on the loading speed of pages and user-friendliness.

Optimizing for Web Vitals does not always mean getting the greatest score on speed testing tools like Page Speed Insight, GTmatrix, and Webvitals.dev but more about finding the right balance between speed and accessibility of your site so from a performance point of view it can satisfy the following matrics as well as your site is accessible by users and bots.

Let’s take a look at web vital metrics and what they stand for in simple terms:

LCP: Largest Contentful Paint. This measures how long it takes for the largest element on a page to appear on the user’s browser.

FID: First Input Delay. This indicates the average time your pages take for the browser to react to the initial user interaction.

NIP: Currently there are limitations on FID to measure the responsiveness of a web page hence Google is planning to replace FID with NIP in the coming March of 2024. This is why focusing on optimizing your site for NIP is a forward-thinking decision right now.

CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift. This tracks the overall amount of layout movement that happens while a page is loading.

web vital assessment check

How do these Core Web Vitals matter even more in a competitive SERP landscape? Well, they can give you an extra edge. In a crowded field, having faster loading and more user-friendly pages can help you stand out from the SERP competition, attracting more visitors and boosting your rankings in search results. 

So, paying attention to these web vitals isn’t just about keeping Google happy; it’s about making your site more appealing and competitive in the online world.

What tools to use?

The first step would be to use a speed testing tool and analyze the site performance record. Then Go to Google Search Console > Page Experience > Web Vitals. Check if you can see any poor URLs or URLs that need improvement. 

In case there are any, you should focus on improving your performance and page experience.

web vital search console

The performance test tools combined with WordPress caching plugins can help you fix these performance-related issues and prepare for a better web vital status. 

You can also rely on a hands-off approach and have a discussion (including pre-order analysis) with our web vital optimization team at Speedy Site. This service has been helping a lot of site owners fix their page speed issues and pass web vitals so I bet they can offer an optimal solution for your site as well.

10. Look for Geolocation fluctuations

A website’s ranking isn’t set in stone; it can vary significantly depending on the location. In different countries, regions, and cities, a page’s position in search results can differ. For instance, your site may rank very well in your country but drop its position in another region.

Google tailors search results to individual users which means that two different people searching for the same thing may see different results. Additionally, whether you’re signed in or not to your Google account can also influence the results you receive. So, keep in mind that search rankings can be quite dynamic and personalized.

The best tool to get an overview of your pages and target keywords (topics) is Google Search Console. I have explained how you can leverage GSC’s search performance data to analyze the average position of your page for many different countries.

GSC queries

To improve your page’s ranking across various geographic locations, you need to focus on offering top-notch original content and configuring multi-language support on your site.

11. Avoid low-quality contents

It’s really not worth your time to put out low-quality content that doesn’t genuinely benefit your readers. Instead of churning out a massive quantity of articles that essentially say the same thing as others, it’s much more effective to focus on a smaller number of high-quality pieces.

The key to valuable content is to offer solutions that might be similar to what’s out there but are presented in a way that’s more user-friendly, easy to follow, enhances the overall reader experience, and top of all provides a real solution. 

Even better if you can inject your own unique approach that sets your content apart and earns the admiration of your audience.

Furthermore, you should update your content; if:

  1. Your content is plagiarized. Even copying a portion of someone else’s work can lead to Google penalties.
  2. Make your content engaging for users without resorting to clickbait tactics. Using numbers and questions in headlines can still be effective.
  3. Include information about the content creator, such as their name and links to their social media accounts, to establish expertise.
  4. Always use verified data and provide links to reliable sources, especially when dealing with content that impacts health, happiness, safety, or financial stability (YMYL). Misleading content can lead to severe consequences.
  5. Optimize the user experience by breaking up large blocks of unformatted text. Google assessors value a readable format, as it can impact bounce rates and ultimately your ranking.
hemingway readability check

Recovering page ranking in SERP

When your WordPress site takes a hit in the Google rankings, it can be a bit of a head-scratcher. 

To tackle it head-on you can try the tools I have mentioned above and then work on updating your content with a compelling and valuable intent that should keep your audience engaged and eventually help your site align with what Google thinks is more user-friendly content.

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How to find the source of CLS issues on your website

According to a study by Google, about 53% of websites have a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score of 0.25 or higher, which is considered to be a poor score. This means that a majority of websites are affected by layout shift issues.

CLS stands for Cumulative Layout Shift, and it is one of the core Web Vitals metrics used to measure the user experience on a website. Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google and other search engines use to assess the quality of a web page’s user experience. They are important because they can impact a website’s search engine ranking and overall user satisfaction.

CLS measures how a web page’s content moves as it loads. A high CLS score can frustrate users by causing unexpected shifts in page elements. Fixing CLS and other Web Vitals metrics improves SEO and user experience, boosting retention and conversions. Layout shift issues result from element loading hierarchy, not loading speed, and can disrupt the user experience.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, layout shifts can increase the difficulty of reading text by 10% and clicking on links by 15%. Additionally, Akamai’s study revealed that layout shifts can result in a significant 20% reduction in conversion rates.

Layout shifts harm the user experience in situations such as when content is suddenly rearranged or buttons become inaccessible. To fix them, prioritize element loading for a smoother experience. Let’s explore some options to address layout shifts on a page so you can find a way to fix them.

#1. Find CLS on the Web Page Test tool

This method is a personal favorite for pinpointing the element responsible for layout shifts. It’s both straightforward and efficient in identifying these elements. Furthermore, the web page tool offers video snapshots to illustrate how the shifts impact the overall page experience.

  • Select web vitals from the drop-down and paste your webpage URL.
  • Select the device type based on where the CLS issue is prominent. 
  • Then run the test. (Typically, it takes only a couple of seconds)
  • When the test is complete, you will find the web vital outputs, and if you notice CLS being marked as RED and is more than 0.1, then click on that.
  • Under the CLS section, a visual reference on how the layout shift is getting triggered so you can identify the element and take necessary action to fix it.

In this example, the logo (image) had been loading a bit late, so when I decided to preload the image, that fixed the layout shift issue for the site.

You can also look at the asset flowchart to simulate where your assets are loading and which asset you want to load faster so all elements on your pages load stable.

#2. Use Page Speed Insight To Detect Element Shiting

Page Speed Insight is Google’s go-to tool for testing web vital metrics on web pages. It’s a widely trusted tool for evaluating website performance.

While the CLS report it generates may not be as visually intuitive as that of WebPageTest, it still identifies the impacting element. Once you’ve identified the affected element, finding a solution becomes more straightforward, as you can closely observe the reasons behind its shifting.

To detect Layout Shift, visit PageSpeed Insight and enter the URL of the page you want to assess. Check the resulting metrics: A score higher than 0.25 is considered poor, and Google recommends improvements when the metric falls within the range of 0.1 to 0.25. However, the goal should always be to eliminate any type of layout shifts on your web page.

After generating the report, go to the DIAGNOSTICS section and expand the “Avoid Layout Shifts” section. Here, you will find a list of elements that contribute to your overall page layout shift. Each element will be displayed as HTML code, allowing you to identify the CLASS and element ID, which can help you locate it on your web page.

#3. You can use Webvitals.dev’s CLS debugger

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Debugger tool available on webvitals.dev is an excellent resource for visually identifying CLS issues on your web pages. Simply provide the URL, and the tool will conduct multiple tests across different browsers for both mobile and desktop versions of your site. It will identify elements with shifting problems and make it straightforward to address them by marking the affected elements and providing associated scores for resolution.

Steps to use this tool:

  • Visit: https://webvitals.dev/cls
  • Give your URL address > check the consent box and start the analysis.
  • You will see the debugger loading screen as long as the test runs.
  • Once the test is finished, you will notice the CLS visualization over your mobile and desktop versions like this, which I believe is a decent way to know where you need to fix element shifting.

There could be many reasons causing CLS issues on your pages, but here are the most prominent causes of CLS across most of the sites and solutions.

Top fixes for CLS issue: more than 0.25

  • Turn Off Sticky Headers: Avoid using sticky headers that cause content to shift as users scroll.
  • Eliminate Logo Zoom Effects: Disable logo zoom effects, such as zooming in or out as users scroll. Ensure your logo image includes size attributes. Lack of size attributes is a common cause of CLS issues.
  • Specify Width and Height for Elements: Declare explicit width and height attributes for elements like images. Avoid using pixel measurements (px). In platforms like WordPress, these attributes are often set automatically when you upload images. Here’s an example of properly declaring dimensions:
   <img src="thelink" width="400" height="300">

Note that you should use plain numbers, not pixel values.

  • Avoid Content Overlaps: Never insert content that can overlap existing content, except when triggered by user interactions. This ensures that any layout shifts are expected. Common examples include popups like subscription or newsletter forms.
  • Disable Animations or Use CSS Transforms: Consider disabling animations altogether, or use CSS transforms for animations that don’t trigger layout changes. Ensure that animated transitions maintain context and continuity between states, or consider avoiding animations altogether.
  • Exercise Caution with CSS Minification and Caching Plugins (WordPress): Be cautious when using CSS minification or caching plugins, especially in WordPress. If you’re using a caching plugin, consider disabling CSS minifiers or compilers first. Test by temporarily disabling the caching plugin to check if it’s causing CLS issues. Note that default settings in plugins like WP Rocket have been known to create CLS problems.
  • Ensure Instant Font Display: Ensure that fonts are displayed instantly, even before the font family fully loads. Use CSS code like ‘font-display: swap;’ in each ‘@font-face’ style to achieve this. If ‘font-display: swap;’ doesn’t work, consider using ‘font-display: optional;’. Here’s an example:
   @font-face {
     font-family: 'roboto';
     src: url("https://www.paulhoda.co.uk/roboto/Roboto-Regular.ttf");
     font-display: swap;
   }
  • Disable Floating Ads: If you have a floating ad that covers your content, it’s a simple fix: disable it. Move that advertisement to a location within your content so that it doesn’t obstruct the user’s view. Google introduced CLS penalties partly because floating ads can lead to unintentional clicks when users scroll through an article. Placing the ad within your content, similar to how you would add an image to your article, can help avoid this issue.

Conclusion:

Identifying and resolving CLS issues can be a challenging task, often involving hands-on coding and potentially editing server files or your WordPress theme directly.

If this seems too complex for you, consider enlisting the help of an expert to address your CLS problems and other core web vitals errors. I recommend reaching out to Speedy Site for professional assistance. Use my code SPEEDY50 to enjoy a $50 discount on your initial order.

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How to Speed Up a WordPress Website Running Ezoic Ads

Website performance has evolved as an important aspect not only for SEO but to provide a fast & smooth user experience which will eventually help your site to be in favor of search engines. 

Benefits of a fast site:

  1. Better crawling rate for crawlers. 
  2. Better page experience. 
  3. Less bounce rate.
  4. More page views.

While we have the advantage of CDNs, Caching plugins, and VPS servers for WordPress sites, I encounter many people posting difficulties in passing speed tests and web vitals for sites with Ezoic ads.

With Ezoic connected to a site, it acts as a proxy between the website site and its users. They use a custom CDN that is augmented to improve performance for sites using the platform. Although Ezoic claims that typical caching plugins such as WP rocket, W3 Total Cache, and Siteground optimizer work on sites that are name server or Cloudflare integrated, you might not see an upgrade unless you decide to scale down the heavy assets from your website.

Scaling the impact of your website assets on performance is not straightforward. It might depend on various factors such as your host, theme, plugins, 3rd party codes, image formats & sizes, use of multiple CDNs, etc.

Here’s when the Ezoic’s LEAP’Technology scans come in handy. The technology scanner provides you with an overview of the various technologies being used on your site and their impact on your site’s performance. 

ezoic-technology-review

* Keep in mind that you may not eliminate all of these warnings or replace them with alternatives. But it will give you an idea of which technologies on your site needs to be withdrawn and ensure your site passes the web vital metrics for good.

Here are a couple of tips we internally use in SpeedySite to make websites compatible with performance and web vitals. 

Recognition: Speedy Site is a WordPress performance optimization service that is now helping people overhaul their existing asset-heavy websites to give you a lean, best-in-class solution. If you have sites lying around that need a significant overhaul, have an outdated theme or plugin bloat, failing all google user experience metrics, you can reach out to the site overhaul service on SpeedySite.

1. Use Name Server or Cloudflare Integration On Ezoic

Ezoic lets you integrate your website via different options.

  • Cloudflare Integration (this means Cloudflare runs the DNS server)
  • DNS Server integration (this means Ezoic runs the DNS server)
  • WordPress Plugin (we did not find this option useful for performance)

Using the Cloudflare integration is recommended because a CDN like Cloudflare can speed up your site significantly and take the load off your origin server. In addition, you can customize your Cloudflare settings according to your need when required, unlike Ezoic DNS server integration.

Although, DNS server integration does a great job and manages all the records and server configurations without needing your action.

2. Use a lightweight & SEO-friendly theme

A website’s theme affects your site performance and search engine rankings. Having a well-coded and lightweight theme will help your site’s accessibility, SEO, and speed. We use Generatepress with custom premade templates + hooks, and blocks to reduce page size, so a good-looking, clean design is intact. 

Ezoic Technology library can provide you with a list of fast themes compatible with their platform.

Ezoic-Technology-Library

3. Unload plugins & replicate the functionality with custom elements

Plugins are very helpful in extending your website’s functionalities. But overusing plugins can harm your website performance. Try using fewer plugins as long as possible while ensuring your website has crucial active functionalities.

For example, we build author bio blocks, Social share buttons, review blocks, and comparison blocks using WordPress hooks and have them running only where it’s required to avoid installing individual plugins for each feature. This gives us full customization ability in terms of appearance as well. 

Now, this might not be a feasible option for everyone – hence we try to share tutorials on such topics in this weekly email. A few tutorials are instantly available in our previous emails as well. Additionally, you can reach out to SpeedySite for such modules, but that comes with a complete overhaul package.

Like themes, you can identify plugins that can severely impact site performance and find alternatives via the Ezoic technology section.

Ezoic-plugin-list

4. Remove or host Google Fonts Locally

Google fonts can harm your site performance if not used properly. If you don’t want to miss out on the extra level of elegance, it adds you can host the Google fonts locally. In Generatepress, we host the fonts locally using its built typography manager, but you can also utilize the OMGF plugin for this purpose.

If you don’t want Google fonts on your site, check this guide with multiple options to remove Google fonts from your site. 

5. Avoid large images above the fold & optimize fonts

Loading heavy assets on the website head or within the first print is a bad practice. Although, an element with a background image loaded instead of a CSS gradient that occupies the entire viewport is not considered a candidate for LCP issue. 

You would want to load the lightest possible assets in the first viewport of a page. Here are a few tips:

  1. Have your logo compressed and preloaded (if it’s an image).
  2. Optimize page title font size for mobile.
  3. Add a gradient cover or background image to the page title if you want to.
  4. For the background image, compress the size without losing the image quality.
  5. Preload the fonts that are in use within the first viewport.

6. Host Google Analytics Locally  

Hosting Google Analytics locally can help speed up your site by reducing extra DNS lookups. The analytics script warns about caching because they have their HTTP caching header expiration set short. 

When you host it yourself, your CDN or server’s HTTP caching headers will automatically be applied. In other words, you have complete control over the caching of the script. You can use Flying Analytics plugin by Gijo Varghese to host analytics on the server.

7. Load 3rd party & custom javascript at footer

Putting Javascript in the footer of an HTML document is good practice for performance. This is not the case for libraries like jquery because some other javascript might be dependent on that. However, we should design the site so that the maximum javascript code is placed in the end to reduce. 

You can use the Header & Footer plugin or use Element on Generatepress and set them to load on the footer. Even some CSS files that are not loading above the fold can be set to the footer. However, you will need to ensure the stylesheet loads before the ad scripts start loading.

8. Enable LEAP & Ezoic CDN

Next, you should take advantage of Ezoic’s CDN and have the cache settings values configured as below.

  • Enable Caching For Cookies – ON
  • Default Cache Age (s) – 2592000
  • Override Cache-Control Headers – ON

You can keep the rest of the values as default. Once you are done with the cache settings, you must adjust the LEAP settings under the optimize section. This varies from site to site and needs proper testing to understand which configuration will work best for your site.

If you have configured it before but haven’t gotten a positive output, you can reach out to SpeedySite professionals

9. Additional Tip To Improve Web Vital Score With Ezoic

This is not something related to performance tweaks, but when you enable Ezoic’s Interstitial ads, which basically are full-screen ads that cover the interface when you visit another page on the same website, it improves your overall web vital record, especially LCP and FCP. 

This is because when a user tries to visit the next page and the interstitial ads loads, the target page is actually loading behind the ad cover. Users can see the page almost instantly when they cancel the ad. 

This is a similar concept related to link preload or instant click mechanism used in most of the caching plugins but with the additional advantage of an ad being displayed for a revenue boost.

Summary: With such steps combined, we successfully passed web vitals with Ezoic ads running on our sites, even though these sites are not entirely lightweight. Here’s how our site recovered from vitals & page experience issues.

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