Are Squarespace Websites Fast?
Squarespace websites are pretty fast. The average Squarespace site page load speed is 1.22s, which is well within the 1-2 second recommendation for page load speed.
How Fast is the Average Squarespace Site?
I tested a total of 35 websites created with Squarespace - all varying on the amount of custom code and page size - using the Performance Insights in DevTools, and on average, the page load speed was 1.22s, with most of them taking around 1 second to load. This is well within the universal 1-2 seconds recommendation for page load speed.
The various page load speeds ranged from 0.78s-1.95s.
What Variables Can Affect the Speed of Your Squarespace Site?
In the above section, I mentioned that the range of page load speeds tested was 0.78s-1.95s. The variation of speeds most likely had to do with a few different factors: the page size, whether you’re using a lot of large images, and the type of images your site is using.
Squarespace Support offers these recommendations when trying to speed up a Squarespace site:
Reduce your page size
Make images load more quickly by compressing large images
Don’t overload one page with too many galleries
Use .jpg image files instead of .png image files
All of these are important to remember, but I took the extra effort of displaying one of the more measurable fixes - reducing your page size - in a line chart below so that you can see just how much these tips could potentially help your site.
Page load time depending on page size in kilobytes
How to Test Your Site’s Speed & Size Using Chrome DevTools
You can test the speed and size of your website pages using the Network tab in Chrome DevTools. Open DevTools by right-clicking the web page and selecting “Inspect.” Then, select the “Network” tab.
View the top image to see how you can view all resources including stylesheets, JavaScript files, images, and more, and get the total size of your page.
View the bottom image to see how you can view the base HTML of your web page, which is just the content on the page minus all of the stylesheets, JavaScript files, and everything else. It is a much simpler way of gauging how much content your page contains, since the HTML content is what we have the most control over changing.
Size of the document content, and nothing else.
Size of everything, including document, stylesheets, JavaScript files, plugins, images, videos, etc.
How to Speed Up Custom Code on a Squarespace Site
If you use a lot of custom CSS, HTML, JS, and third-party plugins on your site like myself, you might benefit from reading my article 8 Proven Ways to Clean Up and Speed Up Custom Code - Squarespace, where I outline some very helpful ways to keep a tidy and speedy Squarespace code backend. The 2 most important tips listed in that article are as follows:
