HOW TO OPTIMIZE A SQUARESPACE WEBSITE FOR SITE SPEED Leave a comment

If you have done any research into SEO practices, you will understand that site speed is really significant.

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

The solution is, not complete controller, however you still have options to maximize site speed page web.

Here’s what you can do:

Get our checklist variant here: Things to do to Accelerate your Squarespace site

Search engine optimization is important in terms of your site 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 which takes too long to load. Can you hang around and wait?

Most people won’t hang about. This study shows they will depart the site if it does not load within 3 seconds. This looks like a short time, but with improvements in internet speeds over time, we’ve been conditioned to expect that things must get the job done fast. Otherwise, there’s guaranteed to be a rival site to test out instead.

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

Evaluation your Site first

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

There are a few distinct tools available to help and many will also create a report highlighting problem areas. This helps so you are not left to guess.

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

Click on the Network tab.

Refresh the page to show the Load time.

They state that this is prone to error because it is intended for programmers who code their sites from scratch and can return false negatives for Squarespace websites that are constructed on a custom CMS. That means if you use it and register a mistake, that doesn’t necessarily imply there’s anything wrong with page speed on your site.

Ways to accelerate a Squarespace website

Listed below are a Couple of areas where you may Have the Ability to Decrease load rate of your site and of individual pages:

This is a fundamental that we’d expect most designers to be familiar with, yet large picture files continue to be frequently the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know – you’re trying to strike the right balance with picture quality and keep that sharp look onscreen, however you do not need print quality images to attain this.

Some key things to remember are:

Use JPG over PNG many of this time (some vector images do not look so great in JPG).

Maintain the picture width low. Squarespace recommends that you don’t go past 1500 – 2000 pixels in width, 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 insert directly through Squarespace are often large. To make them you can download them in the page you’ve put them and use a picture resizing tool to reduce file size.

There are numerous free picture resizing tools.

A type of”quick win” using Squarespace website speed is to make sure that you’re using the SSL option. Why? Since your site will be delivered via the quicker HTTP/2 protocol.

You could also consider switching to the HSTS option, which has been found to improve security and SEO.

Switching on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Internet Pages) can considerably improve page speed for blog articles, particularly on mobile devices. It is pretty important to keep in mind mobile when you’re looking at page speed because a lot of 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 obtained through a Google search.

AMP works by stripping out”non-essential” programming by a page and using smart caching to load pages quickly. It is worth reading up on it first as it simplifies quite a few standard Squarespace cubes, such as type cubes and code blocks. Check out the advice on AMP and test it out before choosing to run with it.

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

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

The other thing we’d suggest is being quite selective in the first place about which third-party plugins you let. A general rule would be to go for reliable, well-reviewed tools that have a very clear history of regular updates by the proprietor. Plugins that aren’t kept updated can really drag a site down.

DON’T GO TOO FONT-CRAZY!

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

You will find a couple of typefaces that are considered “web safe” with nominal impact on website speed, but of course those are the boring ones, such as Times New Roman or Arial. Most individuals do opt to utilize some form of internet fonts to spice up the look of the page.

Here are some things to consider:

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

Try to stick with just one web font. If you move too”font-crazy,” it’s likely to slow your website down.

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

There are two or three reasons for this: firstly, without the custom thumbnail, Squarespace might need to look up articles and load it from whichever site that the video is uploaded too (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo). This occurs even when the visitor doesn’t click on the movie and may cause a lag if large files are being loaded.

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

If you are running Squarespace 7.0, specific templates allow 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 total load time for people.

Final thoughts

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

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