How to speed up a Squarespace website

Run the page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab and note two things: how long the main content takes to appear, and the total size of the page. Our guide to checking your website speed explains the report.

Squarespace recommends images of 500 KB or less. Resize and compress each image before uploading it. A photograph from a phone is usually several megabytes, and nothing on a web page needs that.

Squarespace advises no more than two background videos on a page. On a slow page, the better number is none: use a still image, and place the video lower down as something a visitor chooses to play.

Squarespace’s limit is 60 blocks on a page, and its advice is that a page covering more than one subject should become more than one page. Shorter pages load faster, and each one can be found for its own subject.

Squarespace recommends no more than 50 images in a gallery. Show the strongest few, and link to the rest.

Squarespace recommends no more than two fonts. Each further one is another file for the visitor’s browser to fetch before the text settles.

Squarespace warns that custom code may slow a site, and it names third-party embeds, code injection and custom CSS. Review everything that has been pasted in over the years: old tracking tags, feeds, pop-up tools and widgets nobody uses.

Run the same test and compare. The page’s total size should now be under Squarespace’s 5 MB limit, and ideally close to the 1 MB that Squarespace calls safest for mobile connections.

A page that is inside every limit and still slow beside its competitors has reached what the platform gives. Our guide to why a Squarespace site is slow covers what the owner cannot change, and redesigning a website without losing rankings covers what to protect if you rebuild.