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Site Speed

Mediavine is obsessed with site speed. Our ad tech is centered around it. We lazy load our ads to keep your site as fast as possible.

Heather Tullos avatar
Written by Heather Tullos
Updated this week

There are MANY components to site speed! It's why we have so many resources to help you navigate it. Working towards the goal of a fast, optimized site is an ongoing effort. This article is a good overview of site speed details as they relate to your Mediavine ads. 

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

This is a good place to start!
There are generally two major ways you can run ads:

  • synchronous 

  • asynchronous 

Synchronously is how traditional ads are run;  they stop the entire page from loading as the advertisement loads. These are mostly outdated, but used to be the default that most ad networks and managers would run. 

Now,  most of the internet runs asynchronous ads. That means that the ads load at the same time as the the rest of the site. Your full page can load - images, etc included, at the same time as the ads. No more waiting for the ads to go first. Mediavine adopted asynchronous ads early on, and then continued our obsession with all things site speed. 

Lazy Loading

There's a reason that Mediavine ads are more than 200 times faster than our competition. Lazy Loading is IT! 

The concept of lazy loading ads is relatively simple. When someone first goes to a page on a Mediavine publisher's site, we only load the advertisements that are in the first screen view, or what’s visible in your web browser, before you start to scroll.

As you begin to scroll, and we know you’re approaching a new advertisement, our script wrapper automatically detects this ahead of time and loads that ad in time before you browse to it. We do that via what we call an offset, or enough of a buffer to give the ad time to load before it appears on screen.

We have also recently added settings to further improve site speed for Mediavine publishers. 

Optimize for Pagespeed

These settings are found in the Ad Settings tab in your dashboard.

Optimize Ads for Mobile Pagespeed

This is a highly recommended setting! Enabling this feature will prioritize your first screen view on mobile, and optimize for Google PageSpeed Insights metrics such as Time to Interactive.

By design, this feature removes ads from the first screen view on mobile to optimize your mobile page speed. It's not only great for user experience, but also is excellent for viewability and CPM's.

Optimize Ads for Desktop Pagespeed

Much like the Optimize Ads for Mobile Pagespeed setting, this feature prioritizes page speed by taking ads out of the first screenview.

This can include your first sidebar unit, as well as the leaderboard unit if you are running it. If you rely on those two units as a significant part of your desktop strategy, this setting can impact earnings. While we absolutely recommend this setting, we recommend using caution when activating this feature.

PRO TIP! 

To enable Optimize for Desktop Pagespeed AND prevent the loss of impressions, you can make sure that you are not serving any ads in the first screenview. 

To do this, you would want to take a look at your sidebar and the elements you have there. The goal is to add enough to push that first ad down and out of the first screenview so that it is loading "below the fold", while keeping your sidebar short enough to have at least 2 "sticky" impressions per session for site health. 

Not sure or need help? Email us at publishers@mediavine.com and we'll take care of things for you. Changes to your sidebar often require that we retarget ads anyway, so it's best to reach out. 


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