Page speed also known as “page load time” is the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page. Page loading time is an important part of any escort website’s user experience especially now that a significant number of visitors will view your escort website on a mobile device. Many times we’ll let it slide to accommodate better aesthetic design (ex. header slider) or a new nifty functionality (ex. video background). Unfortunately, website visitors tend to care more about speed than all the bells and whistles we want to add to our escort website. If your website pages load slowly, visitors will get frustrated and click the back button and be on to the next escort website.
Further, page loading time is becoming a more important factor when it comes to search engine rankings. In late 2010, Google publicly announced that site speed was a new signal introduced into their organic search-ranking algorithm (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html). In general, slow loading pages suffer from low user engagement due to increased bounce rates and low average time on page. Slow loading pages can also have a direct negative impact on indexation. If the Googlebot cannot quickly access a page, it will give up on that page and therefore not be included.
What can affect your page speed?
Your host: You get what you paid for. If your website is running on a crowded “shared” server, it may be in contention with all the other websites which will yield slow performance.
Too large images: images which are too heavy to load can really lower your page speed. It is often due to extra data included in the comments or to a lack of compression. Prefer PNG for images that do not require high details like logos and JPEG for photos.
External embedded media: external media like videos are highly valuable, but can largely lower you load time. To gain some load time, host the videos on your own server.
Unoptimized browser, plugins and app: you should test your website on all browsers since they do not load your site in the same way. Moreover, apps like Flash can seriously lower your page speed.
Too many ads: more than just bothering your visitors, lots of ads have the drawback to slow down your page speed.
Your theme: some highly designed themes containing a lot of effects can penalized your load page.
Widgets: some social buttons or comment areas can have an impact of your page speed.
How to improve page speed
There are several great services available FREE that will analyze your website and provide a speed report and offer recommendations for improvements. My favorite tools include https://gtmetrix.com/ and http://pagespeedgrader.com. Improving a site’s page loading time can be a rather laborious task and may require your webmaster. That said, there are a few things you can easily fix.
Web Host – Make sure your website is not hosted on an overloaded or outdated server. Server performance is one of the most critical aspects of determining the health of a website or web application. If the hardware hosting the application is not performing optimally, the site performance will be impacted. You can check server speed hand health here for free https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx.
Optimize Photos and Graphics – Be sure that your images are no larger than they need to be, that they are in the right file format (PNGs are generally better for graphics with fewer than 16 colors while JPEGs are generally better for photographs) and that they are compressed for the web. There are several FREE image compression apps (http://compressjpeg.com/)
Why It Should Matter to You
Even if you don’t think that page load affects your Google rankings enough to matter, you should be concerned about it from the user experience side of things. Particularly, studies have shown that:
A one-second delay in page-load time leads a drop in page views (11 percent), conversions (7 percent), and customer satisfaction (16 percent), according to the Aberdeen Group.
Econsultancy research found that 47 percent of consumers expect to wait no longer than two seconds for a web page to load. Additionally, 88 percent of people who experience a dissatisfying visit due to page load times are less likely to shop from that site and more than a third will tell their friends about the bad experience.
According to KISSmetrics, 18 percent of mobile users will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in less than five seconds. If it takes more than 10 seconds to load, 30 percent will abandon the site.
These are the real reasons why you need to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible. Even if you have the number one ranking in search results for your target keyword, you are wasting all of your marketing efforts if your visitors are leaving due to slow loading times.
If you enjoyed this article, please share it with others. If you would like help optimizing your website speed, feel free to contact me.
