Does the autolinker affect my site's performance?

Many of our publishers are rightly concerned with the performance of their websites. A slow loading site means a visitor may bounce before they even see any content, or be penalized by search engines.

Kutoku takes performance extremely seriously and our network is designed from the ground up to be as fast and efficient as possible.

So — does Kutoku's autolinker have a performance effect on your site's load time?

The Short Answer is...

Of course — All code running on your site has some performance impact.

Regardless of how small or well-written someone's code is, it always takes a non-zero amount of time to execute. There's always a trade-off, and finding the right balance is crucial. However, the impact of Kutoku's autolinker really is negligible, and we'll explain why right here.

How Kutoku addresses Autolinker performance

When the autolinker script tag is installed correctly (just before the closing tag), it has a negligible effect on load times. This is because Kutoku needs the page to load first so that we can check for any links to Kutoku merchants on that page. Therefore, we defer the loading of our script until after the page has rendered. The page can be viewed by the visitor before Kutoku's script executes.

Our script size is exceptionally small (6.2 kB Brotli compressed, 20.1 kB uncompressed), and in our tests, it loads in approximately 30ms from one of our CDN partner's 310 locations worldwide. The script is loaded from the closest geographical location to your website's visitor.

When the script executes, it gathers external links on the page (excluding common ones like Amazon or social media) and sends the remaining links to Kutoku. If any of these links belong to Kutoku merchants, we'll return and replace them with an affiliate link. This process requires a single HTTP request to our server.

95% of these HTTP requests are completed within 50ms, and 99% are completed within 100ms. This process occurs asynchronously, meaning 'behind the scenes,' and is entirely invisible to the visitor. The application responsible for processing these requests is hosted on Google Cloud's Virginia datacenter and utilizes an in-memory database for optimal performance.

Try for Yourself

We think we've already created one of best performing affiliate network technologies and are committed to our roadmap to improve that even further. We encourage you to perform your own assessment of Kutoku's performance and you're welcome to ask us any questions you like.