Test your website's page loading speed
Before you apply for a Google Ad Grant, check that the website's pages load fast enough, especially the home page. A slow website can cause your application to be rejected. Your Ad Grant account can even get temporarily suspended later on if the pages slow down.
This isn't just a Google Ads or Ad Grants issue; a slow-loading website can adversely affect your site's performance in search engines, as speed is a ranking factor in organic search.
Google's PageSpeed Insights tool
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool: pagespeed.web.dev to test individual pages. There are options for testing on mobile or desktop: always choose mobile, since that is how most people browse websites.
There is no officially specified score that you need to reach, but I've observed that websites scoring 50/100 and above for performance tend to be accepted for an Ad Grant, but those in the red get rejected.
Common causes of slow page loading speed
- Over-sized images are usually easy to fix with some routine image optimization, regardless of what tool you use to build your website.
- If redundant JavaScript code is being loaded, depending on how your website is built, that might be easy to fix or impossible depending on your CMS.
- Embedded third party code (Twitter timeline, Facebook embed) might slow down a website, in which case you need to decide how essential it really is.
- A trickier problem to solve, is a long Time To First Byte (TTFB). Is there a long delay before your website even starts to load? That could be a problem on the server, or in the website code.
- What if the tool says it can't even reach your website? That could indicate various problems and is important to fix, since if Google Ads can't reach your page it might disapprove ads using that landing page.
Share this report with your web developer
Whatever the reasons for the pages loading slowly, send the PageSpeed Insights report to your web developer and instruct them to read its recommendations to help diagnose and fix the problems. Once that's done, re-test the speed and see if it's improved.
If the developer replies by saying nothing's wrong, and maybe they show you that a different testing tool scores the website highly, remind them that this is the tool that Google uses.
The screenshot below shows a website that passes the mobile speed test with a good score:
Using Lighthouse in the Chrome browser
You can use a tool called Lighthouse to run the same tests from within the Chrome browser.
- In the Chrome browser, navigate to your website's home page
- Press F12 to bring up the Developer tools.
- Click the tab for Lighthouse.
- Check the option for "mobile".
- Click Analyze page load.
You may need to wait for a minute or two for the results while Lighthouse audits the page.
Choose your CMS wisely
The Content Management System (CMS) is the tool you use to build your website and edit its content. They are not all equal in terms of page loading speed.
WordPress is a good option. Almost all of the code it produces is under your control, and there are many plugins available to help you speed up your pages using techniques such as caching and minification. Even if your site is currently slow, it almost certainly doesn't have to be.
I regularly see nonprofits using Wix get rejected for Google Ad Grants. When I run speed tests (using PageSpeed Insights) to find out whether that's the cause, it almost always comes back under 50/100. The recommendations in the report are always about redundant script and other code issues. Reliably so. If they were using a better CMS they'd be able to fix coding issues, but on Wix there's little they can do.
I've several times tried running ad campaigns pointed at Wix sites. The usual outcome is that Google Ads flags the landing pages as having a poor experience, leading to poor keyword quality scores, leading to few ads shown.
Please never use Wix to build your nonprofit's website. It's only suitable for the smallest local nonprofit that doesn't intend to use Google Ads and isn't worried about search engine performance.
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