The Way to OPTIMIZE A SQUARESPACE WEBSITE FOR SITE SPEED

If you have done some research into SEO practices, you will know that website speed is pretty important.

Site or page speed is a ranking variable employed by Google, providing sites with faster speeds precedent in search results. It is all part of providing better results to their users as the fact is, people do not need to hang around for slow-loading websites.

The solution is, not complete controller, but you still have options to optimize site speed.

Here’s what you can do:

Get our checklist version here: What to do to speed up your Squarespace website

SEO is important in terms of your website becoming found organically in search results, but that’s not the only motive to prioritize site speed. Think about what you do if you land on a web site that takes a long time to load.

Most people won’t hang about. This study shows they will abandon the site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This seems like a brief time, but with improvements in internet speeds through the years, we have been prepared to expect that things must get the job done quickly. Otherwise, there is bound to be a competing website to test out instead.

So while SEO is a concern, there is another thing which ought to be a larger concern: consumer experience. Improving site speed delivers a much better user experience and means that your site visitors are more likely to stick around a bit longer.

Evaluation your website first

You may test your site rank first.

There are a few different tools available to assist and most will also create a report highlighting problem areas. This is helpful so you’re not left to guess.

Squarespace recommends that you use their built-in tools, or even a tool like Pingdom to make certain you’re receiving accurate results. If you are using the Google Chrome browser, you can follow those steps:

Click on the Network tab.

Refresh the page to display the Load time.

One instrument Squarespace does not recommend is Google’s Pagespeed Insights. They say this is prone to error because it is designed for developers who code their websites from scratch and may yield false negatives for Squarespace websites that are constructed on a custom CMS. That means in the event that you use it and enroll an error, that doesn’t necessarily imply there’s anything wrong with webpage speed on your site.

Methods to accelerate a Squarespace Site

Here are a few places where you may be able 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 continue to be frequently the culprit behind slow-loading page javascript (www.youtube.com) pages. We know – you are trying to strike the ideal balance with image quality and retain that sharp look onscreen, but you do not require print quality pictures to achieve this.

Some key items to remember are:

Use JPG over PNG many of this time (a few vector images do not seem so good in JPG).

Keep the image width low. Squarespace recommends that you don’t go beyond 1500 – 2000 pixels in width, but in some cases, you could have the ability to make them smaller.

The Getty stock images or free Unsplash pictures you can download and insert directly through Squarespace are often large. To make them you could download them from the page you have put them and utilize an image resizing tool to reduce file size.

There are numerous free picture resizing tools.

A type of”quick win” with Squarespace site speed is to be certain you’re using the SSL option. Why? Because your website will be delivered via the faster HTTP/2 protocol.

You could also consider switching to the HSTS alternative, that has been proven to improve security and SEO. These two are found under Settings > Advanced > SEO and some other changes can take up to 72 hours to become active.

CONSIDER AMP FOR BLOG POSTS

Switching on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Internet Pages) can considerably improve page rank for blog articles, especially on mobile devices. It’s pretty important to keep in mind mobile when you’re taking a look at page speed because so much browsing action happens on cellular devices.

When AMP is switched on it will deliver very fast-loading site pages to mobile users, as long as people have been obtained through a Google search.

AMP operates by stripping out”non-essential” coding from a page and using smart caching to load webpages immediately. It is well worth reading up on it as it disables quite a few standard Squarespace cubes, such as form blocks and code blocks.

WATCH THIRD-PARTY SCRIPTS

There are all types of third party scripts you may be working on a Squarespace site, including those associated with plugins you choose to add. As a rule of thumb, only add those which are absolutely vital to accomplish the functionality you need on your website – extras may slow you down.

If you have had your site going for some time and you’re not certain what impact third-party scripts are getting on site speed, it’s well worth doing an audit. The site speed tools we discussed previously can inform you which are slowing your site down.

Another thing we would 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 updates by the proprietor. Plugins that aren’t kept updated can drag a site down.

We all know. Some fonts are just so trendy, you need to get them on your website. Web fonts can really produce the appearance of a website, however the problem is they can also drag down load speed.

There are a set of typefaces which are considered “web safe” with nominal effect on website speed, but naturally those are your boring ones, like Times New Roman or Arial. The majority of individuals do opt to use some form of web fonts to spice up the look of the webpage.

Here are some things to think about:

There is some evidence to indicate that Google Fonts load more rapidly than Typekit fonts. (The two of which are available in Squarespace’s web font library).

Try to stick with only 1 web font. Should you go too”font-crazy,” it’s likely to slow your site down.

USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS

Do you have embedded videos on your own Squarespace website? If this is the case, choosing the custom thumbnail alternative for video embeds can help to improve speed.

There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, with no custom thumbnail, Squarespace might need to look up articles and load it out of whichever website that the video is uploaded too (e.g. YouTube or even Vimeo). This happens even if the visitor does not click on the video and could cause a lag if big files are being loaded.

Second, doing without a habit thumbnail leaves you open to third-party biscuits being run on your site – yet another speed bump.

This implies it can tell browsers to load your website one page at a time, speeding the total load time for visitors.

Last thoughts

Squarespace recommends that where possible, limiting your pages into under 5mb in size. This should keep you close to optimal performance speed-wise.

The hints listed above should continue to keep your pages below that 5mb threshold. We’d also add that it is important to prevent too many embeds on one page. These can otherwise encourage third-party scripts to run and may inhibit your speed.