If you have done any research into SEO practices, you’ll understand that website speed is really important.
Website or page speed is a ranking factor employed by Google, giving sites with faster speeds precedent in search results. It is all part of delivering better outcomes to their users because the truth is, people don’t need to hang around for slow-loading sites.
Together with Squarespace being a hosted platform, people often wonder just how much control they have over site speed. The solution is, not complete control, but you still have options to maximize website speed.
Here Is What you can do:
Get our checklist variant here: What to do to Accelerate your Squarespace website
Site speed: It matters
SEO is important concerning your site becoming found in search results, but that is only one motive to prioritize site speed. Think about what you do when you land on a website which takes too long to load. Do you hang around and wait?
Most people won’t hang around. This study shows they will depart the site if it does not load within three seconds. This seems like a short time, but with improvements in internet speeds through the years, we have been conditioned to expect that things should work fast. If not, there is guaranteed to be a rival site to check out instead.
So while SEO is an issue, there’s one more thing which ought to be a bigger concern: consumer experience. Improving website speed provides a much better user experience and means that your site visitors are more inclined to stick around a bit longer.
Test your website first
You can test your site rank .
There are a couple distinct tools available to help and many will also create a report highlighting problem areas. This is helpful so you’re not left to guess.
Squarespace urges that you either use their built-in tools, or even a tool like Pingdom to ensure you’re getting accurate results. If you’re using the Google Chrome browser, then you can follow those steps:
Click on the Network tab.
Refresh the page to display the game loading page time.
They say this is prone to error as it’s designed for developers who code their sites from scratch and may return false negatives for Squarespace websites which are constructed on a custom CMS. That means if you use it and register an error, that does not necessarily imply there is anything wrong with page rank on your site.
Ways to accelerate a Squarespace website
Here are a few places where you may Have the Ability to Decrease load speed of your site and of individual pages:
This is a basic that we’d anticipate most designers to be familiar with, yet large image files are still often the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know – you are trying to hit the ideal balance with image quality and retain that sharp look onscreen, however you do not need print quality images to attain this.
Some key things to consider are:
Use JPG over PNG most of this time (some vector images don’t seem so good in JPG).
Maintain the picture width low. Squarespace advises that you don’t go beyond 1500 – 2000 pixels in diameter, but sometimes, you may have the ability to make them smaller.
The Getty stock images or free Unsplash images you can download and insert directly via Squarespace are usually large. To make them you could download them in the webpage you’ve put them and use a picture resizing tool to decrease file size.
There are numerous free picture resizing tools.
TURN ON SSL
A type of”quick win” with Squarespace website speed is to make sure that you’re using the SSL option. Why? Because your website will be delivered via the quicker HTTP/2 protocol.
You could also consider switching to the HSTS alternative, which has been proven to improve security and SEO.
Shifting on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Internet Pages) can considerably improve page speed for blog posts, particularly on mobile devices. It’s pretty important to remember mobile when you’re taking a look at page rate because a lot of surfing action happens on cellular devices.
When AMP is switched on it is going to deliver very fast-loading site pages to mobile users, provided that those have been accessed through a Google search.
AMP operates by stripping out”non-essential” coding from a page and using clever caching to load pages quickly. It’s well worth reading up on it first as it disables a number of standard Squarespace blocks, such as form cubes and code blocks. Check out the information on AMP and check it out before choosing to run with it.
WATCH THIRD-PARTY SCRIPTS
There are all sorts of third party scripts you might be working on a Squarespace site, including those connected with plugins you decide to add. As a rule of thumb, only add those which are absolutely vital to accomplish the performance you need on your site – extras may slow you down.
If you have had your website going for a while and you’re not sure what impact third party scripts are getting on site rate, it is worth doing an audit. The website speed tools we discussed earlier can tell you which are slowing your site down.
The other thing we’d suggest is being quite selective in the first place about which third-party plugins you let. A general rule would be to go for reputable, well-reviewed tools which have a very clear history of regular upgrades by the proprietor. Plugins that aren’t kept updated can really drag a site down.
DON’T GO TOO FONT-CRAZY!
We know. Some fonts are just so stylish, you need to get them on your site. Web fonts really can produce the look of a site, but the problem is they can also drag down load rate.
There are a set of typefaces which are considered “web safe” with minimal impact on website speed, but of course those are the dull ones, such as Times New Roman or Arial. The majority of people do opt to utilize some type of internet fonts to spice up the look of the webpage.
Here are some things to consider:
There’s some evidence to indicate that Google Fonts load more quickly than Typekit fonts. (Both of which are available in Squarespace’s web font library).
Try to stay with only one internet font. Should you go too”font-crazy,” it is going to slow your site down.
USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS
Have you got embedded videos on your Squarespace site? If so, selecting the custom thumbnail alternative for video embeds can help to improve speed.
There are two or three reasons for this: firstly, without the custom thumbnail, Squarespace might have to look up articles and load it from whichever site the video is uploaded also (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo). This happens even if the visitor doesn’t click on the movie and could lead to a lag if big files are being loaded.
Second, doing with no custom thumbnail leaves you open to third-party biscuits being run in your website – yet another speed bump.
This means it may tell browsers to load your site one page at a time, speeding the total load time for people.
Last thoughts
Squarespace recommends that wherever possible, limiting your pages to below 5mb in size. This should keep you close to optimum performance speed-wise.
The tips listed above should continue to keep your pages below that 5mb threshold. We would also add that it’s important to avoid too many embeds on a single page. These can otherwise encourage third-party scripts to operate and may inhibit your speed.
