Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator Price Review and Test
In this post I am going to test out Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator and share my thoughts on the how it works, the price and if the price is worth it.
Plus, Tyler Bishop from EZoic answers some of your tough questions about EZoic Site Speed accelerator.
What is the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator?
Technology provided by EZoic to help your website load much much faster.
Is it a plugin?
If you are using wordpress you can setup EZoic with wordpress.
Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator Price:
The subscription for Ezoic Site Speed accelerator starts at $29.99/mo for sites with 50,000 pageviews or less and scales upwards from there.
Is it worth it? The short answer is if you are struggling with speed for an important site then it is definitely worth testing out!
How to Get Started:
- Create an Ezoic account.
- Integrate your website with Ezoic.
- Go to Site Speed Accelerator and activate
- Choose the “Recommended” settings.
- Test the preview URL to see your score.
- Activate the version on your live website.
Tips:
- Create a backup before getting started
- Review your website before to ensure it is working as you believe it should be
- Make Sure to check the site after and make sure everything is still working
- Don’t be afraid to reach out for help… very responsive!
- If you are looking for a way to monitor your site speed checkout this tool a friend built
Results – Did it speed up my website?
This is what really matters! How did EZoic site speed accelerator impact my sites speed?
Mobile Before & After
Desktop Before and After
Summary:
Incredibly Fast – I am impressed with the speed increase!
Super Easy – It literally took just one minute once my site was setup in EZoic. Running the site speed tests took longer than activating it.
Simple Sites Work Best – The simpler the site… content + display ads the fewer the opportunities for things to break. However, if you have a few pages that might give you difficulty such as some eCommerce pages you can simply exclude those pages in the EZoic backend.
Damn, I Suck! – Some of my site speeds suck! I really need to work on my site speed for some of my sites!
Great value for people who want to be efficient with their time (don’t want to constantly be messing with CSS, image compression etc) and REALLY care about site speed for a site already having some success.
EZoic Site Speed Accelerator FAQ:
I was able to ask Tyler Bishop from EZoic some tough questions about EZoic site speed accelerator and give him the opportunity to address some of the questions people have.
Doesn’t this just game the test and not actually speed up the site like Volkswagon did with emissions?
The Site Speed Accelerator is not tricking any tools. The tool is truly unique and provides unprecedented results because of meticulous attention to solving common speed issues for all sites while providing cutting-edge technology designed to optimize scripts and 3rd party calls. We actually had an engineering team work on this for a very long time and they continue to make updates to keep Ezoic users ahead of the curve. It makes common speed recommendations actually work on all sites.
Most solutions to speed up sites require multiple tools or plugins that need to be configured specifically to every site. What’s more, the combination of these tools can be costly and they are often ineffective together. This is especially true on sites with tons of exterior calls that can be pre-connected at their origin (tracking tags, ads, analytics).
The Site Speed Accelerator, in every instance, will make the User Experience objectively faster. Everything relative to what the visitor needs from your website– meaning, the content, navigation, ability to interact with other elements on the page– all those things should load nearly instantly like they would for something like AMP or instant articles. The Accelerator uses a proprietary script delay to delay elements that are not as important to the user experience, this proprietary script delay also defers these less important scripts from loading in an order that actually is unique to every site. The order in which scripts are loaded can dramatically impact total page load time, so differing scripts that are unimportant to the user experience until after the visitor has had a chance to engage with the page is one of the reasons the Site Speed Accelerator works so well.
Do Ezoic ads slow down your site?
Ezoic is the fastest solution a site can use if they display ads. That’s something I think people might struggle to understand for a few reasons. One is because we have tens of thousands of customers. This includes sites using Ezoic to display ads for the first time and they don’t realize that ads slow all sites down. It doesn’t matter where the ads come from – a website with ads will objectively be slower than a website with no ads. Anything served out of DFP or Ad Manager will be slower than a single ad network tag on the page. That means that Ezoic and pretty much anyone doing sophisticated ad ops is going to be at a disadvantage in terms of ad loading versus those with unsophisticated or no ad set-up at all.
The second is that many sites using Ezoic fail to ever implement any of the best practices that allow us to help them dramatically impact speed in a positive matter (for free). Universally, sites using Ezoic are fast by every meaningful measure when these free features are in place… Nameserver or Cloudflare integrated
- Ezoic CDN/Caching is turned on
- Caching is confirmed and plugins are disabled that conflict
- Free Site Speed Accelerator features are enabled
Think about it this way too, Google makes $88 billion a year (and rising) from advertising. It sounds self-serving to say that speed is the most overrated and overblown metric we see publishers worry about, but that factually accurate. SEO is complex, but the fastest page on earth is a blank page and it’s not a good result for any query. There are a lot of things we’ve observed that are far more important and it’d be naive to think Google would penalize any site for the speed impact of their number one source of revenue.
What is the price for Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator and why isn’t it included?
The Site Speed Accelerator is free. I don’t think this is well known. There are a few paid features we added because they replace the multitude of tools we saw about 60% of our customers already paying for that were totally ineffective at delivering results.
So, we decided to invest in solving this problem for sites that may already be paying for stuff that didn’t work very well. To do this, we offered on a tiered plan based on the traffic levels of the user. The subscription starts at $29.99/mo for sites with 50,000 pageviews or less and scales upwards from there.
The paid product includes features that have a cost to us for implementing — aside from the time and energy it took our product team to develop something no one else can actually deliver — like serving images in next-gen formats, processing and compressing all the 3rd-party scripts on the page. This along with features we continue to add so that Ezoic customers can have a truly fast mobile page speed score without doing tricks like not loading ads on the first page and other silly things that cost publishers a lot of money.
How do Ezoic ads compare to other display advertising options in terms of speed?
Ezoic sites are literally some of the fastest on the web when displaying ads. We have customers with speed scores higher than just about every major brand publisher not using Ezoic. What’s more, our customers using the Site Speed Accelerator blow away any other sites using 3rd-parties or adops teams to implement sophisticated ad setups.
There are next to zero sites on the web with speed scores on mobile above 80 that display any kind of ads. If you take a website and put ads on the site, no matter where they come from, that website will objectively be slower. That being said, Ezoic provides tons of free speed features that aren’t provided anywhere else, like a free CDN and advanced caching tools.
Could you make these changes yourself (CSS optimization, image compression, caching) what is the advantage of using Ezoic Site Speed accelerator vs doing yourself?
It actually works. Seriously, most sites trying to optimize speed can relate to lots of tools and plugins breaking their site or taking lots of tweaks before they make any meaningful difference. With the Site Speed Accelerator, you can instantly implement best practices for website speed like Critical CSS, Lazy loading images, Next-Gen Formats, Resizing images, Pre-connecting origins, Script delay, Ad delay, Lazy loading iframes, and more all in the matter of a few Minutes.
There are no other tools on the web that can replicate this on all sites with ads. If you are technically advanced, you could probably figure out how to do all of this on your own if you dedicated enough days to complete the job.
The benefit of Site Speed Accelerator is it’s like a one-stop shop for speed. Instead of having separate plugins or scripts that minify CSS, serve images in next-gen formats, remove unused CSS, etc. etc., the Site Speed Accelerator has all those features and more baked into a single tool that is designed to work as easy as “on and off”.
This is a benefit to both the publisher’s day-to-day and the objective speed of their site. Because it’s known that, especially with plugins, the more you have, the longer TTFB becomes since plugins have to make callbacks to the origin server to execute.
Can I still use Cloudflare with an Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator?
Absolutely, Ezoic is a certified Cloudflare partner and one of our highly recommended integration options.
Will the Ezoic Site Speed accelerator break my website?
No. We are diligently working every day to solve one-off’s and other instances where it’s not as easy to implement as flipping a switch. It’s a hard problem to solve. Really, it’s like finding a vaccine that works and is safe for everyone. Sometimes, you find examples where it might not work in particular instances the way it’s designed, but we will usually fix that within hours, or days at the most.
How can you achieve these results with different hosting providers, site setups, etc? Not really. Ezoic’s Site Speed Accelerator is the only speed-enhancing tool that uses machine learning to continuously optimize your website speed over time and accounts for things, like ads. As I explained in above, you could implement these best practices with a combination of multiple different speed plug-ins, or learn to code and troubleshoot these practices yourself.
Even then, you would be missing out on the power of machine learning and unlikely to get it right without a lot of heartache.
Ezoic learns how visitors behave and can actually get faster for different visitors over time. This element of the Site Speed Accelerator would be close to impossible to achieve on your own. Fortunately, you can implement this on your site with the press of a button.
