Load Your Ads Last

Nobody likes ads but we can all agree they are a necessary component of doing business online. I recently had some experience dealing with adify, a aggregating ad platform which pipes in banners from a multitude of sources some with questionable practices in regards to loading performance. I had just launched a beatifully crafted website that employed all the tricks in the book for quick page loads and it was snappy… until we embedded the ad code. I like to load my images asynchronously and I like to execute javascript only once the document has finished loading so imagine the pain of patiently watching little animated gif spinners swirling away for as long as 6-30 seconds because the browser is choking on javascript from the banner ads in the middle of the page. Normally the solution would be to fix the javascript, but being a third party ad network, the embedded code was far beyond my control, so clearly this needed rethinking. I needed to figure out how to load the ads asynchronously as well.