There are many different ad networks you can join to earn money from displaying advertising links/banners on your website, one of which is Ezoic. Please note that we are neutral on the subject of ad networks and don’t recommend using or avoiding any particular company.
As of writing this article, there are two different ways to add Ezoic ads to your website:
- By using their CDN (either via Ezoic's name servers or by changing to Ezoic's DNS records within Cloudflare); or,
- By installing their plugin.
Option 1: Name Servers/CDN
If you are hosted with us, it’s vital to be aware that our anti-bot protection is incompatible with Ezoic’s name servers.
This is because we check the IP address of any request that claims to be Googlebot against a list of known Google IPs (as it’s quite common for malicious bots to pretend to be Googlebot). If the IP isn't a Google IP, it is automatically blocked for security. As any connections that come through Ezoic's CDN appear to come from Amazon AWS IPs rather than Google’s IPs, this means that genuine attempts by Googlebot to crawl a site hosted with us get blocked by default.
This means that, for websites hosted with us, switching to Ezoic’s name servers means Google can’t access your website, so it can no longer discover new posts and pages on your site and will eventually completely remove it from their search engine. For this reason, we strongly advise against choosing this option.
This setup isn’t exclusive to us, so if you are not hosted with us, you will need to check with your host if this is also likely to happen with them.
Option 2: Plugin
Therefore, if you’d like to use Ezoic on your website, we’d recommend option 2 (installing their plugin), which doesn’t cause this problem. Google will still be able to access your website.
However, it’s important to note that due to the way their plugin sets cookies, our tests and customers' experiences show that it breaks our caching and all other caching plugins we’ve tested (even ones on their approved list).
While this isn’t the end of the world, it means that your site is highly likely to be slower. Depending on your site, this may not have much noticeable impact, or it may add several seconds to your page load. If site speed is important to you, you may want to test how the Ezoic plugin impacts your website before committing to using Ezoic as your ad provider.
