Biggest killer of Page Speed ... and no it’s not your code.
There are many factors that affect how long it takes your webpage to load. such as your server, page size, image size, and script size. We know that page speed is important because Google has indicated that page loading time is one of the things they take into consideration when determining your pages rank. Pages that take a long time to load provide a bad user experience which will increase your bounce rate and harm your Search Engine Ranking (SEO).
There are a ton of tools out there that can help you determine how fast it is taking your pages to load. However, a lot of these provide too much information for the average website designer or suggest strategies that are up to Squarespace and therefore are out of our control.
But all is not lost!
My favourite tool for testing page speed is Pingdom Tools and in this video I show you how to use Pingdom Tools to determine what is slowing down your site and what to do about it. Psst…. 99% of the time it is your images! So, in this video, I will also go over how to prepare your images properly so that there is a smaller chance they will slow down your pages.
#1) Test Your Page Using Pingdom Tools
Go to Pingdom Tools and provide your page urls. A good goal to keep in mind is that you want your page size to be less than 5MB with a loading time of under 3 seconds.
#2) See What is Causing Your Site to Be Too Big/Slow
The biggest culprit is generally your images. Try to use JPEG images instead of PNGs as they are much smaller. I really only use PNGs when I need the image to have a transparent background or if it is a small icon.
#3) Prepare Your Images Before You Upload Them
The first thing you need to do is to adjust their size. For images that will be used as banners or backgrounds, I make the longest side between 1500px and 2500px. Most images do not need to be bigger than that.
Then use CompressJPEG to compress the image so that it is less than 500KB.
Finally, I rename the image with some keywords before I upload it to Squarespace.
Resources Mentioned:
Squarespace SEO
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