Squarespace Website Loading Slowly? This is why…
Page speed is the amount of time it takes your webpage to load. This time is determined by several different factors such as the server, page size, image size, and script size.
Google has indicated that page loading time is one of the qualities taken into consideration by the algorithm to determine your pages rank. In addition, page speed is also super important for a good user experience. Pages that take a long time to load have a great chance of the user clicking back to the search engine, which increase your bounce rate and decreases the average time a user stays on your page. All of this will harm your Search Engine Ranking (SEO).
So how fast should my page be loading?
Google recommends that your overall Load Time be 2 seconds or less for ecommerce websites. However, in my experience this is a tricky number to reach. The average load time of the top ranking websites in Google is between 3 to 6 seconds.
Click here for more information on Load Time.
Okay, my website is slower than that. What is slowing it down?
There are a ton of websites and tools out there that will provide metrics on your page’s speed and suggest a bunch of things you need to do to speed it up. However, a lot of these pages mention strategies that require a developer or are simply up to the Squarespace Platform and are therefore out of our control.
Does this mean Squarespace is bad for SEO? Does this mean I cannot have a fast website with Squarespace. Absolutely not! It just means that some of these tweaks must be done at the server level. There are plenty of high ranking websites that use Squarespace because they focus on optimizing the strategies that they can control and let Squarespace take care of the rest.
So what can I control?
If your Squarespace website is loading slowly, it is generally because your page is too large or you are pulling information from multiple servers. The more you add to your website, the more things it needs to load, so the longer it will take. Plus, if the website needs to pull information from other places such as YouTube, Vimeo, Google Ads, etc. it needs to wait until that server responds before it can load the information.
Overall, keep your pages to less than 5MB in size.
The biggest culprit is images. Wherever possible use jpeg images instead of png. For images that will be used as banners or backgrounds, I make the longest side 1500px. Then I compress this image so that it is less than 500KB before I upload it to my Squarespace Website.
The next culprit is usually script such as added Javascript or CSS. Make sure you are continually cleaning up the code you use on your site and delete any code that is not longer in use. It is also a good idea to avoid adding extra Javascript libraries such as jQuery when possible.
In addition, if you are pulling information from other places such as YouTube or Vimeo, it is a good idea to provide a custom thumbnail. That way your website can load the image and wait to pull the information from the YouTube or Vimeo Servers until the user clicks on the video.
Resources Mentioned:
Squarespace SEO
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