It's no secret that publishers and website owners live and die by their metrics. Numbers like traffic, revenue, or engagement all tell a different side of the story on how your overall performance is going and thereby should rightfully be under constant supervision. 

But beyond the more obvious KPIs, there’s a hidden layer of site maintenance and strategic tuning that many pros tend overlook. These are three strategic “health checks” you should be running every month, the kind of checkups that prevent slow bleed of revenue and set the stage for sustainable growth.

1. Session Depth & Revenue-Per-Session Review

Instead of combing through bad ads (which Nitro already filters out), spend time each month reviewing your site’s session depth and revenue per session (RPS) metrics. Many publishers fixate on per-page revenue (RPM), but RPS reveals how much value each entire visit generates. By examining how many pages or minutes each user session involves and correlating that with ad earnings, you gain strategic insight into engagement-driven revenue that one-off page metrics might miss.

Even with a monetization partner maximizing yield per impression, publishers still control how long and deeply visitors engage with content. The more pages a user visits or the longer they stay, the more ads they can encounter, ultimately meaning higher total revenue from that session. If your average user only views one page per visit, you’re likely leaving money on the table. Converting those one-page sessions into multipage sessions through compelling content and smart navigation can dramatically boost per-visitor income. A monthly check on session depth trends will alert you to drops in user engagement or opportunities to improve it so you can respond before revenue is affected.

For example, you might notice that during a traffic surge, your overall RPS declined. Digging into the data could reveal an influx of superficial visits from social media, readers who bounce after one page, whereas your core direct visitors read multiple pages and generate 2 to 3 times higher RPS on average. With that insight, you could adjust your page layouts or add enticing internal links on those popular entry pages to encourage an extra click. In general, guiding users to explore more, such as through a “Related Articles” widget or in-content links, will naturally increase pages per session and consequently RPS. This is a side of monetization that Nitro cannot handle for you. It stems from content strategy and site UX decisions.

 2. UX Performance Check-up 

In gaming and entertainment, where attention spans are short and expectations high, slow-loading or unstable pages are a silent killer. This monthly check is about giving your site a real-world performance audit and catching friction before it turns into churn.

A UX Performance Check-up involves reviewing how fast and stable your site is across key templates and user paths. Sites naturally accumulate clutter over time. Maybe your team added a new analytics script, an embedded stream, or a reactive widget. These elements often stack up without anyone noticing until they begin to drag your load times down. If you are not actively watching performance trends each month, you are likely missing early warnings that affect both user satisfaction and monetization.

Google reports that 53% of mobile users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That is more than half your potential audience gone before your first ad or headline appears. Search engines reward speed as well. The top 10 results on Google consistently average under 2 seconds load time. If your pages are lagging, you are quietly losing SEO share to faster competitors without even realizing it.

This check should include testing a mix of your top entry pages and templates using tools like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse. Monitor Core Web Vitals, especially Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Look for patterns. Are LCP scores worse on article pages than game hubs? Did CLS jump after you added a sticky video player? If a score drops month over month, do not ignore it. Find the root cause now rather than 6 months from now when traffic and earnings have already taken a hit.

Beyond being a UX concern, performance impacts revenue directly. The faster your site loads, the more ads are viewable, the more impressions get counted, and the more clicks you capture. Delayed loads or layout shifts can interrupt ad rendering, costing you real money. This is especially critical on mobile, where most of your gaming audience likely lives. If your mobile experience is sluggish or buried under heavy scripts, you are losing both monetization opportunities and returning users.

3. Content & SEO Hygiene Audit

Your content is your moat. It drives discovery, keeps users on-site, and generates the sessions that fuel monetization. But while its important to  focus on what to create next, its equally as important to look back at what already exists. That is where this monthly check becomes critical. A Content and SEO Hygiene Audit is about protecting and strengthening the foundation you have already built. It is where you find and fix the small issues that quietly chip away at your organic visibility and user experience.

Over time it is common for links to break, references get outdated, and search intent evolves. That game guide you published last year might still be getting visits, but if half the outbound links lead to 404 errors and the strategies are outdated after multiple patches, it is not helping your brand or your rankings. A poor user experience in that aspect frustrates readers and tells search engines your site is not well maintained. Even a small number of broken internal links can waste crawl budget and drag down your SEO equity.

This monthly audit should start with a crawl of your site or a review of Search Console reports to identify new 404 errors, redirect chains, or broken links. Update or remove dead links and add 301 redirects where necessary. This protects both user flow and search performance. Next, evaluate your top traffic-driving pages. Is the information still accurate? Is the title still relevant? Content that has aged but still ranks well can often be refreshed with minimal effort for significant returns. 

Take the audit a step further by reviewing formatting and usability. Make sure key pages load quickly, render well on mobile, and have no broken visual assets. Long-form guides benefit from clear navigation aids such as table-of-content links that improve the reading experience and keep users engaged. Also pay attention to missed opportunities. Analytics might show that an older post is still getting steady traffic but barely aligns with current search demand. In those cases, update the content to reflect fresh relevance and strengthen internal linking to guide readers deeper into related material. These simple adjustments help extend the lifespan of your best work and keep it aligned with what users and search engines expect today.

The Infrastructure Behind Your Monthly Wins

Behind every successful publishing operation is a well-maintained system that balances revenue growth with a high-quality user experience. As a site scales, the pressure to sustain performance across content, monetization, and technical health only increases. The difference between short-term wins and long-term momentum often comes down to how consistently publishers can operationalize smart habits like the monthly checks outlined above. But having the right habits is only part of the equation. To turn insight into real outcomes, publishers also need infrastructure they can rely on and visibility that helps them move fast.

From the moment a session begins, Nitro helps publishers capture more value by intelligently maximizing each visit. Its high-efficiency bidding engine and smart ad refresh logic work together to ensure that longer sessions translate into higher revenue. Publishers can monitor key metrics such as revenue per session and impressions per session in real time, making it easier to spot trends, connect content engagement with earnings, and take action with confidence.

Performance is just as critical as yield, and Nitro’s ad delivery technology is designed to move at the pace of today’s users. Ads load quickly and reliably, adapting to each visitor’s device and bandwidth without disrupting the content experience. That speed translates directly to reduced bounce rates, better ad viewability, and more time on site. Monetization works in tandem with user experience rather than pulling against it.

Trust and consistency are also protected through rigorous ad quality controls. Every creative is scanned and filtered before appearing on your site, eliminating intrusive formats such as pop-ups or redirects. If an issue slips through, users can flag it for immediate removal across the network. This protects your audience and contributes to a faster, more stable site. These factors play an important role in supporting strong organic search performance over time.

Supporting all of this is an operational model built around publisher needs. With net 7 payouts, Nitro provides faster revenue cycles that allow for timely reinvestment. When support is needed, the team is responsive and focused on resolving issues quickly before they affect performance.

By strengthening everything from revenue efficiency to site speed and ad quality, Nitro helps publishers turn monthly health checks into high-impact growth strategies. With the right infrastructure and insight in place, small optimizations start delivering bigger outcomes.

Nitro is dedicated to reinventing website monetization for the gaming industry. Our ad tech platform combines uncompromised user experience and nitro-speed revenue and service with Net 7 Payouts, same-day support and the industry’s fastest ad loading.