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If you've done some research into SEO practices, you will understand that website speed is pretty significant.

(Image: https://burst.shopifycdn.com/photos/commuter-train-speeds-past-in-city.jpg?width=746&format=pjpg&exif=0&iptc=0)Website or site rate is a ranking factor employed by Google, providing sites with faster speeds precedent in search results. It's all part of delivering better outcomes to their users because the truth is, people don't need to hang around for slow-loading websites.

The answer is, not complete controller, but you still have options to optimize website speed.

Here Is What you can do:

Get our record version here: What to do to speed up your Squarespace site

SEO is important in terms of your website getting found in search results, but that is only one reason to prioritize site rank. Think about what you do when you land on a website that takes too long to load.

Most people won't hang around. This study shows they'll depart the site if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. This looks like a short time, but with improvements in internet speeds over the years, we have been conditioned to expect that things must work quickly. Otherwise, there's guaranteed to be a rival website to test out instead.

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

Evaluation your website first

You may test your website rank .

There are a couple different tools available to assist and many 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 ensure you're receiving accurate results. If you're using the Google Chrome browser, you can follow these steps:

Click on the Network tab.

Refresh the page to display the Load time.

One tool Squarespace does not advocate is Google's Pagespeed Insights. They say that this is prone to error as it's intended for developers who code their websites from scratch and may yield false negatives for Squarespace sites which are built on a custom CMS. That means in the event that you use it and enroll a mistake, that doesn't necessarily mean there is anything wrong with webpage rank on your website.

Ways to speed up a Squarespace website

Here are a Couple of places where you may Have the Ability to reduce load speed of your site and of individual pages:

This is a fundamental that we'd anticipate most designers to know, yet large image files continue to be often the culprit behind slow-loading pages. We know - you are trying to strike the right balance with picture quality and retain that sharp appearance onscreen, however you do not require print quality images to achieve this.

Some key things to remember are:

Use JPG over PNG most of the time (a few vector images do not look so good 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 be able to make them smaller.

The Getty stock pictures or free Unsplash pictures you can download and insert directly through Squarespace are usually large. To make them you could download them in the page you've put them on and utilize an image resizing tool to decrease file size.

There are several free image resizing tools. For example: PicResize, ResizeImage and Tiny PNG.

TURN ON SSL

A type of“quick win” using Squarespace site speed is to make sure that you're using the SSL option. Why? Because your website is going to be delivered via the faster HTTP/2 protocol.

You can also look at switching on the HSTS option, that has been proven to improve security and SEO. Both of these are found 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 significantly improve php page is loading - youtube.com - rank for blog posts, particularly on mobile devices. It's pretty important to keep in mind mobile when you're taking a look at page rate because a lot of surfing action happens on mobile devices.

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

AMP works by stripping out“non-essential” coding from a page and using smart 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 type blocks and code blocks.

There are all sorts of third-party scripts you may be working on a Squarespace website, including those associated with plugins you choose to add. As a general rule, only add the ones which are absolutely vital to achieve the functionality you want on your site - extras can slow you down.

If you've had your website going for a while and you are not certain 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 website down.

Another thing we would suggest is being quite discerning in the first area about which third party plugins you allow. A general rule is to go for reputable, well-reviewed tools which have a very clear history of regular upgrades by the owner. Plugins that aren't kept updated can drag a site down.

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

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

Here are some things to think about:

There is 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 stick with only 1 web font. Should you go too“font-crazy,” it is going to slow your site down.

USE CUSTOM VIDEO THUMBNAILS

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

There are two or three reasons for this: firstly, with no custom thumbnail, Squarespace might need to look up articles and load it out of any site that the video is uploaded also (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo). This occurs even when the visitor does not click on the movie and may cause a lag if large files are being loaded.

Second, doing with no habit thumbnail leaves you open to third-party biscuits being run in your site - yet another speed bump.

ENABLE AJAX LOADING

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

The hints listed above should continue to 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 operate and can inhibit your own speed.