7 Quick Steps To Optimize Your Site in 7 Minutes or Less

There are literally countless ways to optimize your site, and lots of those ways depend on countless other variables: make your content shorter/longer, publish more/less often, optimize your content more for SEO, etc.

But there are plenty of concrete, proven ways to optimize your site that simply work. Here are 7 quick steps you can take to quickly optimize your site in the next 7 minutes or less.

1. Increase Your Placeholders

Ezoic placeholders are not ads; they’re simply more testing locations the Ezoic AI can use. Increasing your site’s number of placeholders gives the Ezoic AI more data to work with to create the best balance between high-quality user experiences and optimal site revenue.

Increased placeholders also have a strong correlation of increased revenue. In the last 30 days, all Ezoic sites that had less than 50 placeholders averaged $1.22/month, while those with more than 50 placeholders averaged $291/month!

Of course, simply turning on more placeholders doesn’t guarantee massive revenue jumps; there are countless variables that factor in like content, SEO, etc. But the numbers prove that more placeholders has been strongly correlated with components for increased revenue like improved site quality, better content, and optimized SEO.

Click here to increase your maximum number of placeholders.

2. Integrate Your Site to Cloud Integration 

When you integrate with Ezoic via name servers or Cloudflare, Ezoic will act as a proxy between your site and your users. You are able to integrate by connecting your site to Ezoic’s CDN — this is achieved through changing your name servers.

There are several major benefits to integrating with Ezoic:

1. It’s completely free (and earns you more revenue)
2. It gives you access to a plethora of Ezoic features:

• Ezoic’s Amazon Cloud Servers (AWS) — with 10 data centers around the world to ensure your site can be delivered to your users lightning-fast via the fastest geographic center.
• Ezoic’s exclusive Chrome Extension
• Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics which allows you to track visitor behavior and user intent on your website, you can use this to see how things like word count impacts revenue or page engagement
• Ezoic’s Mediation App to link up your existing ad networks to Ezoic
• Ezoic’s Layout Tester Tool
• Ezoic’s Ad Tester Tool
• CloudFlare site speed improvements.Because Ezoic is an official CloudFlare partner, if you integrate using CloudFlare you can access their CDN and other site speed features.

3. You keep total control (you can adjust these settings at any time)

4. You can test without making any changes to your original setup

5. You can continue to update your content as normal

This quick optimization leads to a plethora of site benefits that will greatly impact your site’s potential, user experience, and advertisement revenue.

To complete the integration, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Log into your Ezoic account and click on ‘Integrate Your Site’

Step 2: Select the Cloud Integration option

Step 3: You will see a simple table with your current name servers on the left and the custom Ezoic name servers we’ve generated for your site on the right. Update your site’s name servers to the Ezoic ones at your registrar or host (wherever they are managed)

Changing name servers allows Ezoic to act like a proxy. It does not impact your host or interfere with how you update your site normally.

3. Turn on Caching

As we’ve said before, one of the most impactful things publishers can use to improve their website’s speed is caching. Caching essentially stores your content and makes it much faster to access. This greatly improves site speed and creates a positive impact on SEO (Google has made it known that site speed has a significant impact on SEO and how they judge a website).

This helps with returning users (your site’s content is more easily stored for them, loading quickly and providing them with a better user experience) as well as with increased ad revenue from the better experience you’re providing to your users. 

Cloud Caching (done through Ezoic) allows users to optimize site speed. Setting rules and configuring the caching settings correctly could mean that you see significant improvements in site speed, as Ezoic is able to store and pull in cached versions of your site to serve it quicker. 

As we explain here, Ezoic’s caching app will only override your current caching rules if you set it to. To override your current caching rules and to use Ezoic’s caching, do the following:

Step 1: Go to your dashboard and click Leap

Step 2: Click on Caching:

Step 3: Click ‘Edit’ next to ‘Override Cache Control Headers’

Step 4: Select ‘ON’ from the drop down menu on the right hand side:

Step 5: Save your changes

And that’s it! Turning on caching is a quick, easy optimization that can greatly benefit your site.

4. Set Your Traffic to 100% Ezoic

By setting your traffic to less than 100% Ezoic traffic, the Ezoic AI has less data/information to work with; this means it will have a harder time (and take longer) to give your users the best site experience possible.

Sites that provide the Ezoic AI with more data (i.e. 100% of possible traffic data) have a strong correlation with increased revenue and user experience. It’s easy to see why: since the AI has more data to work with, it can find a balance of user experience and revenue faster, creating a higher-quality site in less time.

You can adjust this setting immediately right here. Giving the Ezoic AI more traffic means it has more data to work with, and can make better decisions that find the best balance between user experience and site revenue.

Click here to turn your traffic to 100% Ezoic to allow the AI more data to make your site better, faster.

5. Enable Ad Tester

As we’ve mentioned before, not every ad placeholder is made equal. If you simply shove as many ads as possible on your site, you may earn more in the short term, but burn your audience and cause them to ditch your site entirely in the long run.

But easily the highest-earning advertisement by a wide margin, anchor ads come in both bottom and top of page, waiting to load until the user scrolls past content so the ad doesn’t obscure any content. This ad stays on the users screen until they manually close it, meaning it has enormous visibility and extended accessibility for any visitors.

If you turn on the “Maximize Your Site’s Revenue” button, Ezoic’s AI will ensure these anchor ads appear the maximum number of times to increase your ad revenue while maintaining great user experience. In any case, anchor ads are an absolute must-have for publishers looking to earn the most ad revenue on their site.

6. Link Ad Mediation

Linking an AdSense account allows Ezoic to use your existing AdSense — ensuring your site earns more than it could using either solution on its own — as a competition with thousands of ad networks already included in Ezoic. Sites keep 100% of any revenue produced from AdSense linked to Ezoic.

Why are we promoting features that earn us no revenue? Because it’s the smartest option for our publishers, and that’s always what Ezoic is trying to do. This is just the best option for your site; more advertiser bidders means higher competition, and thus higher revenue. 

Furthermore, AdSense advertisers heavily prioritize cost-per-click (CPC) ads, while advertisers through Ezoic typically prioritize cost-per-impression (CPM) ads. By linking ad mediation, you’re allowing more diverse advertisers to bid on more diverse types of ads, some of which favor CPC or CPM ads over the other. 

Link ad mediation to ensure you’re reaping the benefits of this increased competition!

Click here to link your ad mediation.

7. Install the Cloudflare App

Similar to caching, installing the Cloudflare app helps with site speed. As this Ezoic publisher mentioned, “To understand the complete delivery process from the user’s request of an ezoic-enabled website, until it is displayed in their browser, have a look at this complex flow:

Source: Pall.As

In short, Cloudflare, a leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) allows for a significant improvement in site speed and user experience. Nearly every website has (or the potential to have) a global audience, and if your entire site is hosted on one server somewhere in the world, it will naturally take longer (sometimes much longer) to deliver content. For instance, if your website’s server is located in California, audiences in Europe or Asia are geographically farther away, leading to slower load times for global audiences.

By using Cloudflare, you ensure your content is always as “close” to your global audience as possible; it has 285 global servers in over 100 countries.

As we mentioned earlier, Google has revealed they take site speed into account for SEO purposes, including it as a judging criteria when assessing a site’s quality. Install the Cloudflare app for your site to ensure your site speed is as fast as possible.

To activate the app, simply go to your dashboard, then navigate to settings, connections, and select Cloudflare. From there, click on the ‘activate’ button.

You can also search for “Cloudflare” within your dashboard.

In Conclusion

There are countless ways to optimize your site, and savvy site owners will always be updating, tweaking, and fixing up their site to make it as smooth and fast as possible.

These 7 optimization tips can each be done in 7 minutes or less, and can have an enormously positive impact on your site’s speed, content, and online setup.