Do you have issues with your Squarespace website taking so long to load? Are your visitors and potential customers leaving because your site just takes a little too long to load? You’re not alone. It is difficult to imagine a more significant issue for users and business processes than a slow website.
Approximately 53% of mobile users will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. For e-commerce sites, this could likely result in their loss—it’s as simple as that. But wait, there is a fix for that, too.
Website loading time is important, as is evident from the ever-increasing speed at which the world operates on the Internet. Every page needs to load within a second; anything that takes more is seen as painfully slow. However, it must be noted that Squarespace speed optimization is an important ranking signal.
Every second counts for your visitors, and a slow-loading website can cost you dear: your search engine ranking, potential leads, or sales. By applying a few primary tweaks, my site’s loading time was cut down to half. In simple terms, the speed was doubled, which meant better user satisfaction, higher rankings, and more conversions.
This post will tell you how I made my Squarespace site load faster. Let’s get started
Key Takeaways:
- A slow site usually adversely affects your SEO while contributing to high bounce rates.
- A quick loading time is something visitors expect and if you can shave off a couple of seconds, your conversion rate goes up.
- Features like optimizing images, lazy loading, and a CDN can dramatically improve the site’s speed.
- Scheduled site speed testing is crucial in ensuring that the site remains fast and can be easily navigated.
Before discussing tips, learn about load time and how it affects your site.
When a website performs slowly, not only does a visitor have to wait, but they are actually driven away. Google studies indicate that 53% of Internet users will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load. Of course, that means that if your Squarespace site is slow to load, you will likely lose over 50% of your potential audience before they get to read any of your posts.
But it is not a question of losing visitors only. Slow loading could also negatively affect your Google position. According to the latest rules for websites, site speed is an important factor in Google’s ranking, so having a slow site might hamper your rankings.
It’s not all bad news. Fortunately, making your site faster is not as complicated as one might first presume. This means that even small changes are achievable, which can lead to massive enhancements. With a few modifications aimed at improving the performance, I was able to decrease the loading time of my Squarespace site to half. And you can do the same.
Steps I Took to Cut Load Time by 50% on Squarespace
1. Optimizing Images
Images are often the primary culprit behind slow loading websites. An effective set of pictures and illustrations is essential for the good looking site but the large size of images may cause high loading time of the pages.
Here’s how I tackled this:
Resize images before uploading: I wanted to avoid large images, so I resized them appropriately. For instance, I maintained the 100-200 KB file size for normal images while minimizing the size of hero images—the large banners or featured images—to about 500 KB.
Use efficient file formats: I replaced image files with WebP where possible since this file format can provide quite high compression while maintaining high quality. This format can literally squeeze the image size down to a fraction of the original large size while retaining incredible detail.
Lazy loading images: Lazy loading is a technique that means images are only loaded when they come to the viewpoint of the user. Squarespace does this natively, and I was able to enable this which was a breath of fresh air. It did shave off some time since not all images had to be downloaded at the same time the page was loading.
2. Reducing the Use of Custom Code and Scripts
I had some custom code and third-party integrations running on my site, and these were slowing down page load. Every script added to the page also increases the total load time; otherwise, it may not be optimized.
Here’s what I did:
- I removed unwanted scripts and coding. For instance, if the third-party widget was no longer used on the site, I deleted it.
- I cut down and merged JS files for a lower request rate on the server. This means that when there are few requests being processed, the amount of time taken loading a page will be short.
- For the scripts that are not strictly required in the initial loading, such as tracking scripts, I ensured that they are set to load asynchronously. This way, they did not hinder the page from loading quickly.
3. Leverage Browser Caching
Caching is one of the simplest techniques for improving a website’s performance. I enabled browser caching, which means visitors’ browsers cache parts of my site, such as images, JavaScript, and CSS files, meaning they do not need to be downloaded each time somebody visits my site.
With Squarespace, browser caching is enabled by default. However, for optimization purposes, I adjusted the cache expiration of static files. This implied that any visitor who came back to a specific page would not have to load the resources again, thus reducing the time even more.
4. Use of a Content Delivery Network
Squarespace employs a CDN to ensure that content is delivered faster,, but I properly cached all my static assets,, including images, Java scripts, and CSS. A CDN is a set of servers dispersed globally to ensure that when users request content, the closest server fulfills the request. This makes your site take less time to load, especially for visitors who are far off from your main server base.
Squarespace in fact utilizes CDN for most assets but to ensure the best performance, I made sure that all the files I uploaded were optimized and cached correctly.
5. Reducing the Number of HTTP Requests
All elements on the page – the images, stylesheets, scripts, etc.- need to make a request to the server. Hence, the more requests your site makes, the more time it will take to load. Minimizing the number of HTTP requests made it easy for me to make my site faster.
To achieve this, I:
- Prevented more than one image from being on one page and applied CSS to elements that could be styled that way.
- Minimized the number of requests by consolidating multiple JavaScript and CSS files into fewer files.
6. Test and Monitor Regularly
After making all these changes, I thought this was not enough and that I could do more. I regularly checked my website speed using the Website Speedy Tool. This tool allowed me to track performance and understand aspects that needed further improvement. This way, I could be sure that my site remained fast even with more content added.
Why Speed is Important in E-Commerce
The effects of slow loading times are worse if your website is an e-commerce site. A one-second delay in loading time is likely to decrease conversion rates by 7%. This can be a serious loss, especially for a business that relies on sales through the internet. Cutting down the load time has a positive impact on conversions, user experience, and search engine rankings of the website.
FAQs
Q: How do I check my Squarespace site’s speed?
A: To check and to optimize the loading speed of your site you can use Website Speedy, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom. The above tools will also help you gain a view of how best to approach the improvement of performance.
Q: How much faster should my Squarespace site be?
A: Make it your goal to ensure that your site takes no longer than 3 seconds to load. Anything beyond that duration will make visitors bounce plus cause your ranking to go south.
Q: Can I speed up my site without any coding experience?
A: Absolutely! Most optimizations such as reduction of the images size, turn on of lazy loading, and use of CDN can be done without coding skills. However, for other higher level optimizations, you should probably have some code assistance.
Q: How often should I monitor my site’s performance?
A: To optimize your site’s speed, it may be useful to check its performance on a regular basis and that is why its is advised to check the site speed at least once a month.