Do ads slow down your website?

If you are an internet publisher and running ads on your website, one thing you should consider is how fast your website responds to your visitors. There are a lot of things that can slow down user experience on our site and one of them is adverts.

Adverts are good as it helps bring in some money in. For some web owners, ads are a major part of their online revenue but where do we draw the line between using too many ads and just the right number? I think one way you can find that out is by checking out your bounce rate and speed of your website.

Another thing you should consider os if your users are mostly on broadband or dial up internet connections as dialups may not be as fast to load your ads as broadband may be. On the other hand, even for faster internet connections, some ads tend to still hange your site if there are several external sources and the servers are not responding. A slower site tends to push off visitors and leave a bad reputation for your online business. A site that also has many ads pasted on it tends to make it look unattractive and unappealing.

If your visitors are unsatisfied with the way your site looks and loads, they will most likely not want to return and may even leave before your site loads.

I have seen a couple of sites which have a lot of good content but takes a lot of time to load and this is frustrating. Apart from that, most of them still use pop-ups and this doesn't help them. When I want to return to such sites, if I have to, I just disable javascript for it specifically.

Ads can slow down a website and most especially so if there are many ads. If you must use more than 2 or 3 ad units on a web page, it will do you well if it is from a single source. If loading from multiple external sources, it will slow down your site but if your must use lots of ads, it is much better if it is the type you can load from your site or server such as affiliate links and banners already loaded on your site.
A lot of advert networks tend to provide javascript code to their publishers and if you are using such codes and don't want to slow down your website, it if best if your just use o2 or 3 units.

The bottom line is the lesser the amount of ads you use on your site, the faster your site will load and the more loyal your visitors would probably be.

Why then do website owners tend to use ads on their site if it really slows it down?
I guess because it brings in some good money and can make the site look appealing and also provide services to viewers.

Questions you should consider in order to improve user experience on your site