Is your Squarespace website loading slowly?

If you are having issues with slow loading web pages in Squarespace, we recommend that you follow the following steps:

Check the status of your website on: status.squarespace.com

To see if a site loading problem is a technical issue with the platform, check the Squarespace Support Status page. You can also follow the Squarespace Help twitter account: https://twitter.com/SquarespaceHelp to stay on top of any ongoing issues.

Page File Size

Ensure your page remains under 5MB in size. Larger files will always slow down loading speed. When a browser first loads a page, it downloads all of the page's content. This can seriously affect load times if your page has a large amount of content. Pingdom will provide you with the page size of any page within your website to get you up and running.

Compress banner images.

This is an optional step that can make a considerable difference if you are having issues with slow loading websites. Compressor.io is a free online resource that will allow you to drastically reduce (in many cases) the file size of large images on your website.

Check your URL redirects

Too many URL redirects can cause page speed issues. You can check URL redirects in the Squarespace admin by going to settings > advanced > url redirects.

Google's PageSpeed Insights errors

If you are using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the load speed of your website and are alarmed by the results, I wouldn’t panic just yet.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a tool for developers who code their sites from scratch and can return false negatives for Squarespace sites which are built on a custom CMS. If you see an error while using this test, it often doesn’t mean there is a load speed issue with your website.

Squarespace recommends Pingdom as a more accurate page load speed testing tool. Keep an eye out for the page size and overall load time (in seconds).