This is gonna be a short post about my experience using CloudFlare Full Page Caching and Ezoic Ads in two of my websites.
I wanted to use Full Page Caching with Ezoic because I am rebel and I never do what I am told.
This is how things went down.
Table of Contents
Deactivating Ezoic Cloud Caching
I don’t use Ezoic Leap since I don’t need 98% of what LEAP can do for websites
I use WP Rocket, Swift Performance Lite or Autoptimize instead to take care of Scripts and Style Sheets
I cleared Ezoic Cloud Caching and then I deactivated it. Then I wrote three page rules to enable CloudFlare Full Page Caching.
I thought everything was gonna be fine despite I got a message on my dashboard saying that I shouldn’t use CloudFlare Full Page Caching
I didn’t give a crap about that warning and continued with the experiment.
Everything was doing great until I noticed these two issues:
- Ezoic analytics were not registering all visitors to the site
- Ezoic ads meant for desktop were being shown on mobile devices and vice versa.
First Problem: Ezoic Analytics
I don’t really care about Ezoic analytics because I have Google Analytics but I knew this was gonna make a mess in the analytics Reports.
This problem would inflate my EPMV. Only 7.9 Thousands visitors were registered and I usually get like 17 Thousand visitors on Mondays.
I know
I would be swimming in dollars if most of the traffic to the site was from First world countries
Second Problem: Ads
I thought everything was fine with the ads but there were issues in some posts. Not all of them
Some ads who were not supposed to be sticky were now sticky and some ad sizes meant for mobile were being shown to desktop users.
I think the main issue was the desktop ads being displayed to mobile users. That’s a mess.
A 728×90 ad doesn’t work well on mobile now matter how open you are to that fool idea that people expect to see ads.
So I decided to go back to Ezoic Cloud Caching. I didn’t have a choice.
Possible Solutions
I ran tests with Swift Performance Lite to rule out that WP Rocket 3.9 was guilty for this mess but I got the same issues so it is not a caching plugin problem.
CloudFlare APO is a different type of technology, it might work or it might not. who knows?
