Front Matter Recently, I got a job that required me to debug a Squarespace site to see why it was loading so slow. I figured I'd share w...
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Jared on November 28, 2019
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Hi Jared, I'm curious whether you've tried Cloudinary for image hosting? We have lots of ways to optimize images for faster loading without losing visual quality, with very little effort involved. And for smaller sites, chances are you won't end up paying anything for the service.
Here's a good place to start: cloudinary.com/blog/the_holy_grail...
I am a fan of Cloudinary,but not really an option with Squarespace. As i mentioned in the article, they handle how the images are delivered
OK, I think I misunderstood you earlier. I will point out that you can probably squeeze out some better performance on the images using Cloudinary's transformations in the manner described in medium.com/@alon7/how-to-make-an-a... - essentially do an upload,
q_autodown to a smaller size, then download and reupload to Squarespace.Not as simple as it usually is to use Cloudinary unfortunately 😞but still might be worth your time if increasing speed is super valuable.
What Squarespace does for images (support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/a...) is definitely better than nothing, but they don't seem to do the more advanced stuff - reducing size for the same image without perceptibly degrading visual quality.
I'd recommend trying with an image or two, and seeing if you can drop down that 2.7MB by a few hundred kB at least.
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the tip!
Hi, great article thank you. I've spent days trying to reduce the loading speed of my site, especially on mobile. Improvements that were in my control included: reducing all image sizes to less than 250KB, combining text boxes, so titles and paragraphs were together wherever possible, streamlining content so there's less sections on the page.
Awesome, thanks for sharing !
I'm wondering how did you proceed to remove all the render-blocking scripts ?
Thanks
Thank you! In this case, I just removed all the scripts I could from the head section and moved them to the footer. This allows the page to load first, before running scripts. Hope this helps!
It would be great if I could shave 2s off of my current 6.7s site load time. Google also tells me to eliminate render-blocking resources. Could do the same for my site at a fee? or would you be willing to teach me step by step in squarespace? Thanks for your time!