If you’ve done some research into SEO practices, you will understand that site speed is pretty important.
Website or page speed is a rank variable used by Google, giving sites with faster rates precedent in search results. It is all part of providing better outcomes to their users because the fact is, people do not want to hang around for slow-loading sites.
The solution is, not complete control, however you still have options to maximize site speed.
Here’s what you can do:
Get our checklist variant here: What to do to speed up your Squarespace site
Website speed: It matters
SEO is important in terms of your website getting found organically in search results, however, that is not the only motive to prioritize site rank. Think of what you do when you land on a website that takes too long to load. Can you hang around and waitfor? Or do you give up fast?
Most individuals won’t hang around. This study shows they will abandon the site if it does not load within three seconds. This looks like a brief time, but with improvements in internet speeds over the years, we’ve been prepared to expect that things must work quickly. If not, there is guaranteed to be a rival site to test out instead.
So while SEO is an issue, there is another thing that should be a larger concern: consumer experience. Improving website speed delivers a much better user experience and means that your website visitors are more inclined to stick around a little longer.
Evaluation your Site first
How can you know if your site requires less than three seconds to load, or if any changes you’ve made any difference to rate? You may examine your website rank first.
There are a few different tools available to help and most will also generate a report highlighting problem areas. This helps so you are not left to guess.
Squarespace recommends that you either use their built in tools, or even a tool such as Pingdom to make certain you’re receiving accurate results. If you’re using the Google Chrome browser, then you can follow those steps:
Open Developer Tools.
Click on the Network tab.
Refresh the page to display the loading time.
They state this is prone to error because it is designed for developers who code their websites from scratch and may yield 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 imply there is anything wrong with page rank on your website.
Methods to accelerate a Squarespace Site
Here are a few places where you may be able to Decrease load rate of your Website and of individual pages:
This is a fundamental that we would expect most designers to know, yet large picture files are still often the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know – you’re attempting to hit the ideal balance with picture quality and keep that sharp look onscreen, but you don’t require print quality pictures to attain this.
Some key things to consider are:
Use JPG over PNG most of the time (some vector images do not seem so great in JPG).
Maintain the image width low. Squarespace recommends that you don’t go past 1500 – 2000 pixels in diameter, but in some cases, you may have the ability to make them even smaller.
The Getty stock images or free Unsplash pictures you can download and add directly through Squarespace are often large. To make them you can download them from the webpage you have put them on and use an image resizing tool to decrease file size.
There are several free image resizing tools.
TURN ON SSL
A type of»quick win» using Squarespace website speed is to be certain you’re using the SSL option. Why? Since your site is going to be delivered via the quicker HTTP/2 protocol.
You could also consider switching to the HSTS option, that has been found to improve security and SEO. Both of these are located under Settings > Advanced > SEO and some other changes can take up to 72 hours to become active.
Shifting on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Web Pages) can considerably improve page rank for blog articles, particularly on mobile devices. It’s pretty important to keep in mind mobile when you’re taking a look at page rate because so much browsing action happens on mobile devices.
When AMP is switched on it is going to deliver very fast-loading site pages to mobile users, provided that those have been accessed through a Google search.
AMP works by stripping out»non-essential» coding from a page and using clever caching to load webpages immediately. It is worth reading up on it as it disables quite a few standard Squarespace cubes, such as type cubes and code blocks.
WATCH THIRD-PARTY SCRIPTS
There are all sorts of third party scripts you may be running on a Squarespace site, including those associated with plugins you decide to add. As a rule of thumb, only add those that are absolutely necessary to accomplish the performance you want on your site – extras can 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 web site speed, it’s well worth doing an audit. The site speed tools we discussed earlier can tell you that are slowing your site down.
Another thing we’d suggest is being quite discerning in the first area about which third-party plugins you allow. A general rule is to go for reliable, well-reviewed tools which have a clear history of regular upgrades by the proprietor. Plugins that aren’t kept updated can drag a website down.
DON’T GO TOO FONT-CRAZY!
We all know. Some fonts are just so trendy, you have to get them on your own site. Web fonts really can produce the appearance of a site, however the problem is that they can also drag load rate.
You will find a couple of typefaces which are considered «web safe» with minimal impact on website speed, but of course those are the dull ones, such as Times New Roman or Arial. Most people do opt to use some form of internet fonts to spice up the appearance of the page.
Here are some things to consider:
There’s some evidence to indicate that Google Fonts load more rapidly than Typekit fonts. (The two of which can be found in Squarespace’s web font library).
Try to stick with just one web font. Should you go too»font-crazy,» it’s going to slow your website down.
USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS
Do you have embedded videos in your Squarespace website? If this is the case, choosing 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 will have to look up articles and load it out of any website that the video is uploaded too (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo). This occurs even if the visitor doesn’t click on the movie and may cause a lag if big files are being loaded.
Secondly, doing with no habit thumbnail leaves you open to third-party biscuits being run in your site – yet another speed site check [youtube.com] bump.
If you’re running Squarespace 7.0, certain templates permit you to enable Ajax loading (asynchronous Javascript and XML). This implies it can tell browsers to load your website one page at a time, speeding up the overall load time for people.
Final 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 tips listed above should keep your pages below that 5mb threshold. We’d also add that it’s important to prevent too many embeds on a single page. These can otherwise encourage third-party scripts to operate and may inhibit your own speed.
