If you have done any research into SEO practices, you will understand that site speed is pretty significant.  
  
Site or page speed is a ranking variable used by Google, providing websites with faster speeds precedent in search results. It's all part of delivering better results to their users as the fact is, people don't need to hang around for slow-loading websites.  
  
With Squarespace being a hosted platform, people often wonder just how much control they have over site speed. The solution is, not complete control, but you still have options to maximize website speed.  
  
Here's what you can do:  
  
Get our record version here: What to do to Accelerate your Squarespace website   
  
Website speed: It matters  
  
SEO is important concerning your website becoming found in search results, however, that is not the only motive to prioritize site rank. Think about what you do if you land on a website that takes a long time to load. Or do you give up fast?  
  
Most individuals won't hang about. This study shows they'll depart the site if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. This looks like a brief time, but with improvements in online speeds through the years, we have been conditioned to expect that things must get the job done fast. Otherwise, there's bound to be a rival site to check out instead.  
  
So while SEO is an issue, there's one more thing that should be a larger concern: consumer experience. Improving website speed provides a much better user experience and ensures that your website visitors are more likely to stick around a bit longer.  
  
Evaluation your website first  
  
You may test your site speed .  
  
There are a few different tools available to help and many will also generate a report highlighting problem areas. This is helpful so you're not left to guess.  
  
Squarespace urges that you either use their built in tools, or even a tool like Pingdom to make certain you're getting accurate results. If you're using the Google Chrome browser, you can follow these steps:  
  
  
  
Open Developer Tools.  
  
  
Click the Network tab.  
  
Refresh the page to display the loading time.  
  
They state that this is prone to error as it's intended for programmers who code their sites from scratch and can yield false negatives for Squarespace websites that are constructed on a custom CMS. That means in the event that you use it and register a mistake, that doesn't necessarily imply there's anything wrong with page rank on your website.  
  
Methods to accelerate a Squarespace website  
  
Here are a Couple of places where you may Have the Ability to Decrease load rate of your Website and of individual pages:  
  
  
  
This is a basic that we would expect most designers to know, yet large picture files continue to be often the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know - you're attempting to hit the ideal balance with image quality and keep that sharp appearance onscreen, however you do not require print quality pictures to attain this.  
  
Some key items to remember are:  
  
Use JPG over PNG most of this time (a few vector images do not look so great in JPG).  
  
Maintain the picture width low. Squarespace recommends that you don't go beyond 1500 - 2000 pixels in diameter, but in some cases, you may have the ability to make them smaller.  
  
The Getty stock pictures or free Unsplash pictures you can download and insert directly via Squarespace are usually large. To make them smaller, you could download them from the page you have put them on and use an image resizing tool to decrease file size.  
  
There are numerous free image resizing tools.   
  
  
  
A type of"quick win" using Squarespace site speed is to make sure you're using the SSL option. Why? Since your site is going to be delivered through the faster HTTP/2 protocol.  
  
You can also consider switching to the HSTS option, which has been found to improve security and SEO. These two are located under Settings > Advanced > SEO and any changes may take up to 72 hours to become active.  
  
  
  
Shifting on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Internet Pages) can significantly improve page rank for blog articles, especially on mobile devices. It is pretty important to remember mobile when you're taking a look at page speed because a lot of surfing action happens on cellular 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" coding from a page and utilizing clever caching to load webpages quickly. It's worth reading up on it first as it simplifies quite a few standard Squarespace blocks, such as form blocks and code blocks.   
  
  
  
There are all types of third-party scripts you might be running on a Squarespace website, such as those connected with plugins you decide to add. As a general rule, only add those which are absolutely necessary to accomplish the functionality you need on your site - extras can slow you down.  
  
If you've had your site going for a while and you're not certain what impact third-party scripts are getting on web site speed, it is well worth doing an audit. The site speed tools we mentioned earlier can tell you which are slowing your website down.  
  
The other thing we would suggest is being rather selective 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 owner. Plugins that aren't kept updated can really drag a site down.  
  
  
DON'T GO TOO FONT-CRAZY!  
  
  
We know. Some fonts are so trendy, you have 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.  
  
You will find a couple of typefaces which are considered "web safe" with nominal effect on site speed, but of course these are your boring ones, such as Times New Roman or Arial. The majority of people do opt to utilize 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. (The two of which are available in Squarespace's net font library).  
  
Try to stay with only one internet font. Should you go too"font-crazy," it is likely to slow your website down.  
  
  
USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS  
  
  
Do you have embedded videos on your 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, with no custom thumbnail, Squarespace might need to look up content and load it out of whichever site the video is uploaded also (e.g. YouTube or even Vimeo). This happens even when the visitor does not click on the movie and may lead to 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 website - yet another speed bump.  
  
  
  
If you're running Squarespace 7.0, specific templates allow you to enable Ajax php loading page (asynchronous Javascript and XML). This implies it may tell browsers to load your website one page at a time, speeding up the overall load time for people.  
  
Last thoughts  
  
Squarespace recommends that wherever possible, limiting your pages to under 5mb in size. This should keep you close to optimum performance speed-wise.  
  
The hints listed above should keep your pages under that 5mb threshold. We'd also add that it's important to prevent a lot of embeds on a single page. These can otherwise encourage third-party scripts to run and can inhibit your speed.