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

Website or page speed is a rank factor used by Google, providing websites with faster speeds precedent in search results. It is all part of providing better outcomes to their users as the fact is, people don’t need to hang around for slow-loading websites.

The solution is, not complete control, but you still have options to optimize website speed.

Here’s what you can do:

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

Site speed: It matters

SEO is important concerning your website becoming found in search results, however, that is not the only motive to prioritize site speed. Think about what you do when you land on a website that takes a long time to load. Can you hang around and wait?

Most people won’t hang about. This analysis shows they will depart the site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This seems like a brief time, but with improvements in internet speeds over time, we have been prepared to expect that things must get the job done fast. If not, there’s bound to be a rival site to check out instead.

So while SEO is an issue, there’s one more thing that ought to be a bigger concern: consumer experience. Improving site speed delivers a much better user experience and ensures your website visitors are more inclined to stick around a little longer.

Evaluation your Site first

How will you know if your site requires less than three seconds to load, or if any modifications you make have made any difference to rate? You can test your website rank first.

There are a couple 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 use their built-in tools, or a tool such as Pingdom to make certain you’re getting accurate results. If you are using the Google Chrome browser, then you can follow those steps:

Click on the Network tab.

Refresh the page to show the Load time.

They say this is prone to error because it is designed for developers who code their sites from scratch and can return false negatives for Squarespace sites which are constructed on a custom CMS. That means if you use it and register a mistake, that does not necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with page speed loading site on your website.

Ways to accelerate a Squarespace website

Listed below are a few areas where you may be able to reduce load rate of your site and of individual pages:

This is a basic that we would expect most designers to be familiar with, yet large picture files continue to be frequently the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know – you are trying to hit the right 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 most of this time (some vector images do not seem so great in JPG).

Maintain the image width low. Squarespace advises that you don’t go beyond 1500 – 2000 pixels in width, although in some cases, you may have the ability to make them smaller.

The Getty stock images or free Unsplash pictures you can download and insert directly through Squarespace are usually large. To make them smaller, you could download them in the page you have put them on and use a picture resizing tool to reduce file size.

There are numerous free picture resizing tools. For example: PicResize, ResizeImage and Tiny PNG.

TURN ON SSL

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

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

Switching on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Web Pages) can significantly improve page rank for blog articles, especially on mobile devices. It is pretty important to remember mobile once you’re taking a look at page speed because a lot of surfing activity happens on cellular devices.

When AMP is switched on it will deliver very fast-loading blog pages to mobile users, provided that people have been accessed through a Google search.

AMP works by stripping out”non-essential” programming by a page and utilizing smart caching to load pages immediately. It’s worth reading up on it as it disables quite a few standard Squarespace blocks, such as type blocks and code blocks.

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

If you’ve had your website going for a while and you are not sure what impact third-party scripts are having on web site speed, it’s worth doing an audit. The website speed tools we discussed previously can inform you which are slowing your website down.

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

DON’T GO TOO FONT-CRAZY!

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

There are a set of typefaces that are considered “web safe” with minimal effect on website speed, but of course these are the boring ones, like Times New Roman or Arial. Most people do opt to use some type of internet fonts to spice up the look of the webpage.

Here are some items to think about:

There’s some evidence to suggest that Google Fonts load more rapidly than Typekit fonts. (Both of which can be found in Squarespace’s web font library).

Try to stay with just one internet font. Should you go too”font-crazy,” it’s going to slow your site down.

Have you got embedded videos in your own Squarespace site? If so, selecting the custom thumbnail alternative for video embeds can help improve speed.

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

Secondly, doing without a custom thumbnail leaves you open to third-party cookies being run on your site – yet another speed bump.

This means it can tell browsers to load your website page at a time, speeding up the overall load time for people.

Last thoughts

Squarespace recommends that where possible, limiting your pages to below 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’d also add that it is important to avoid a lot of embeds on one page. These can otherwise invite third-party scripts to operate and can inhibit your speed.