If you've done any research into SEO practices, you'll understand that site speed is really important.

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

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

Here's what you can do:

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



Search engine optimization is important concerning your website getting found organically in search results, however, that is not the only motive to prioritize site rank. Think of what you do if you land on a web site that takes too long to load. Or do you give up quickly?

Most people won't hang around. This analysis shows they will depart the site if it does not load within three seconds. This looks like a brief time, but with improvements in internet speeds through the years, we have been prepared to expect that things must get the job done quickly. If not, there is bound to be a rival website to check out instead.

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

Test your Site first

You may test your website rank .

There are a few distinct 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 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 Load time.

One instrument Squarespace doesn't recommend is Google's Pagespeed Insights. 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 that are built on a custom CMS. That means in the event that you use it and enroll an error, that doesn't necessarily imply there is anything wrong with webpage rank on your website.

Methods to accelerate a Squarespace Site

Here are a Couple of places where you may Have the Ability to Decrease 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 image files are still often the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know - you are trying to strike the ideal balance with picture quality and retain that sharp look onscreen, but you do not require print quality images to achieve this.

Some key things to consider are:

Use JPG over PNG most of the time (some vector images don't look so good in JPG).

Keep the picture width low. Squarespace advises that you don't go past 1500 - 2000 pixels in width, although in some cases, you could be able to make them smaller.

The Getty stock images or free Unsplash images you can download and insert directly via Squarespace are usually large. To make them you could download them from the webpage you have put them and utilize a picture resizing tool to decrease file size.

There are several free picture resizing tools.



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

You can also look at switching on the HSTS alternative, which has been proven to improve security and SEO.



Shifting on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Internet Pages) can significantly improve page rank for blog posts, especially on mobile devices. It is pretty important to keep in mind mobile when you're taking a look at page rate because so much surfing action happens on cellular devices.

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

AMP works by stripping out"non-essential" programming by a page and using clever caching to load pages immediately. It's well worth reading up on it first as it simplifies a number of standard Squarespace cubes, such as form cubes and code blocks. Check out the information on AMP and check it out before choosing to run with it.



There are all types of third-party scripts you may be working on a Squarespace website, such as those connected with plugins you decide to add. As a rule of thumb, only add those which are absolutely necessary to achieve the functionality you want on your site - extras can slow you down.

If you have had your site going for a while and you're not certain what impact third party scripts are having on site speed, it is well worth doing an audit. The site speed tools we discussed previously can tell you which are slowing your site down.

Another thing we'd suggest is being quite selective in the first area about which third party plugins you allow. A general rule would be to go for reliable, well-reviewed tools that have a clear history of regular updates by the proprietor. Plugins that are not kept updated can drag a website down.



We all know. Some fonts are so trendy, you have to have them on your own site. Web fonts really can make the appearance of a site, but the problem is they can also drag load speed.

There are a set of typefaces that are considered "web safe" with nominal impact on site speed, but naturally those are the boring ones, such as Times New Roman or Arial. The majority of individuals do opt to utilize some form of web fonts to spice up the look of the webpage.

Here are some items to consider:

There's some evidence to indicate that Google Fonts load more quickly than Typekit fonts. (Both of which are available in Squarespace's net font library).

Try to stick with just one web font. Should you go too"font-crazy," it is likely to slow your site down.


USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS


Have you got embedded videos in your Squarespace site? If this is the case, selecting the custom thumbnail option for video embeds can help to improve speed.

There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, without the custom thumbnail, Squarespace will need to look up articles and load it out of any site the video is uploaded too (e.g. YouTube or even Vimeo). This happens even when the visitor does not click on the video and may cause a lag if large files are being loaded.

Secondly, doing without a habit thumbnail leaves you open to third-party biscuits being run in your site - yet another speed bump.


ENABLE AJAX LOADING


This implies it can tell browsers to load your site one page at a time, speeding the overall load time for people.

Final thoughts

Squarespace recommends that wherever possible, limiting your pages into below 5mb in size. This should keep you near optimal performance speed-wise.

The tips listed above should keep your pages under that 5mb threshold. We would also add that it is important to prevent a lot of embeds on a single page. These can otherwise encourage third-party scripts to run and may inhibit your own speed.