Why your Squarespace site is so slow, and what to do about it

Enter the page in Google’s PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab. Note how long the main content takes to appear and how large the page is in total. Our guide to checking your website speed explains the figures.

Test the pages that matter most, not only the home page: a gallery or a shop page is often the heaviest on the site.

Squarespace’s help centre gives figures, and they make a useful checklist.

• A page of 5 MB or less, with 1 MB the safest size for mobile connections.
• Images of 500 KB or less.
• No more than 60 blocks on a page.
• No more than 50 images in a gallery.
• No more than two background videos on a page.

Squarespace also warns that embedded video from other services adds to loading time, most of all on phones.

Start with the heaviest things.

1. Resize and compress images before uploading them. A photograph straight from a camera or phone is many times the recommended size.
2. Replace background video with a still image.
3. Split a long page into several. Squarespace’s own advice is that a page with more than one subject should be more than one page.
4. Shorten galleries, and link to a full gallery page from a short one.
5. Remove embeds that are not earning their place: feeds, maps and video players.

Then test again and compare.

The owner of a Squarespace site controls its content and chooses its template. The code that assembles each page and the servers that deliver it belong to the platform. A site that has been trimmed to Squarespace’s own limits and is still slow beside its competitors has reached what the platform gives.

At that point the choice is the same as on any website builder: accept the difference, or rebuild on a platform where the pages can be made as light as the content allows. Our guide to redesigning a website without losing rankings covers what to protect in the move.