HOW TO OPTIMIZE A SQUARESPACE WEBSITE FOR SITE SPEED

If you have done any research into SEO practices, you'll know that website speed is really important.

Website or site rate is a ranking factor used by Google, providing websites with faster speeds precedent in search results. It's all part of delivering better results to their users as the fact is, people don't want to hang around for slow-loading websites.

Together with Squarespace being a hosted platform, we often wonder how much control they have over site speed. The answer is, not complete control, but you still have options to optimize site speed.

Here Is What you can do:

Get our checklist variant here: Things to do to speed up your Squarespace website



SEO is important concerning your website getting found in search results, but that is only one reason to prioritize site rank. Think about what you do if you land on a website that takes too long to load. Can you hang around and wait? Or do you give up fast?

Most individuals won't hang around. This analysis shows they'll depart the site if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. This seems like a short time, but with improvements in online speeds through time, we've been prepared to expect that things must get the job done fast. Otherwise, there is guaranteed to be a competing website to check page loading javascript (https://www.youtube.com/) out instead.

So while SEO is an issue, there's one more thing which ought to be a bigger concern: user experience. Improving website speed provides a much better user experience and means your site visitors are more likely to stick around a little longer.

Test your Site first

How will you know if your site takes less than three seconds to load, or when any modifications you've made any difference to speed? You may examine your site rank first.

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

Squarespace recommends that you either use their built in tools, or even a tool such as Pingdom to ensure you're receiving accurate results. If you are using the Google Chrome browser, then you can follow these steps:



Click the Network tab.

Refresh the page to display the loading time.

1 tool Squarespace does not advocate is Google's Pagespeed Insights. They say that this is prone to error because it is intended for developers who code their websites from scratch and may return false negatives for Squarespace websites which are built on a custom CMS. That means in the event that you use it and enroll an error, that doesn't necessarily mean there is anything wrong with page rank on your site.

Methods to speed up a Squarespace Site

Here are a few areas where you may Have the Ability to reduce load rate of your Website and of individual pages:


REDUCE IMAGE SIZES


This is a fundamental that we would anticipate most designers to be familiar with, yet large picture files are still frequently the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know - you're attempting to strike the ideal balance with picture quality and keep that sharp appearance onscreen, but you do not require print quality images to attain this.

Some key items to remember are:

Use JPG over PNG many of this time (a few vector images don't seem so good in JPG).

Maintain the picture width low. Squarespace advises that you don't go past 1500 - 2000 pixels in width, but sometimes, you may have the ability to make them smaller.

The Getty stock pictures or free Unsplash pictures you can download and insert directly via Squarespace are usually large. To make them smaller, you can download them from the webpage you've put them and use an image resizing tool to reduce file size.

There are several free image resizing tools. For example: PicResize, ResizeImage and Tiny PNG.



A sort of"quick win" with Squarespace site speed is to be certain that you're using the SSL option. Why? Since your site is going to be delivered through the faster HTTP/2 protocol.

You can also look at switching on the HSTS option, which has been found to improve security and SEO. These two are located under Settings > Advanced > SEO and any changes may take up to 72 hours to become active.


CONSIDER AMP FOR BLOG POSTS


Shifting on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Internet Pages) can significantly improve page rank for blog posts, especially on mobile devices. It's pretty important to remember mobile when you're looking at page speed because so much surfing action happens on cellular devices.

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

AMP works by stripping out"non-essential" programming by a page and using clever caching to load webpages quickly. It is well worth reading up on it as it disables quite a few standard Squarespace cubes, such as form cubes and code blocks.


WATCH THIRD-PARTY SCRIPTS


There are all sorts of third party scripts you may be running on a Squarespace site, such as those associated with plugins you decide to add. As a general rule, only add those which are absolutely necessary to achieve the functionality you want on your site - extras may slow you down.

If you've had your website going for a while and you're not sure what impact third party scripts are having on site speed, it is well worth doing an audit. The website speed tools we discussed earlier can inform you that are slowing your site down.

Another thing we would suggest is being rather selective in the first place about which third-party plugins you let. A general rule is to select reliable, well-reviewed tools which have a very clear history of regular updates by the owner. Plugins that aren't kept updated can drag a website down.



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

You will find a couple of typefaces which are considered "web safe" with nominal impact on site speed, but of course those are the boring ones, such as Times New Roman or Arial. Most individuals do opt to use some type of internet fonts to spice up the appearance of the webpage.

Here are some items to consider:

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 stay with just one web font. If you go too"font-crazy," it's likely to slow your site down.


USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS


Do you have embedded videos in your Squarespace website? If so, selecting the custom thumbnail alternative for video embeds can help to improve speed.

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

Second, doing with no habit thumbnail leaves you open to third-party biscuits being run on your website - another speed bump.


ENABLE AJAX LOADING


If you're running Squarespace 7.0, certain templates allow you to enable Ajax loading (asynchronous Javascript and XML). This means it may tell browsers to load your website page at a time, speeding up the total load time for people.

Final thoughts

Squarespace recommends that where possible, limiting your pages to under 5mb in size. This ought to keep you close to optimal 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 prevent a lot of embeds on one page. These can otherwise encourage third-party scripts to operate and can inhibit your own speed.