How much emphasis is on website speed?

[Jim Street]

I have a Squarespace website. The site speed seems fine to me in real world use.

The Google site speed test says its slow, very much so with mobile versions, but other speed test results say its reasonable.

Given Google is the dictator here - how much should I look into this? I am told Squarespace is very limited and improving speed will require moving to a different platform entirely?

Thoughts?

 

[Darren_Ssc]

You should take notice since your site needs to download some very heavy resources before it fully loads. This is going to result in users giving up and going elsewhere since everyone expects everything to be instant these days.

In terms of speed affecting your rankings it's going to be minor and all depends what other signals you have. Some popular sites perform terribly in such speed tests but they have lots of external signal to make this irrelevant.

At the end of the day though, it's one of the few factors you can directly influence. So, for this reason only, yes start fixing it.

 

[fisicx]

@Jim Street - if you want a fast site don’t use square space. If you get most of your leads from Google you need a fast site.

And as was pointed out on another of your threads, the site has a whole long list of problems.

And all those links in your signature look spammy to Google, even if they are all no-follow.

 

[Mattysmith]

I have a Squarespace website. The site speed seems fine to me in real world use.

The Google site speed test says its slow, very much so with mobile versions, but other speed test results say its reasonable.

Given Google is the dictator here - how much should I look into this? I am told Squarespace is very limited and improving speed will require moving to a different platform entirely?

Thoughts?

Could affect your google ranking the faster the better experience

 

[Darren_Ssc]

That picture is doing you no favours either.

 

[Tin]

I have a Squarespace website. The site speed seems fine to me in real world use.

The Google site speed test says its slow, very much so with mobile versions, but other speed test results say its reasonable.

Given Google is the dictator here - how much should I look into this? I am told Squarespace is very limited and improving speed will require moving to a different platform entirely?

Thoughts?

Judging by the number of links in your signature I'm guessing that you care about your business. So, if that's the case my comments would be...

1: You said that "site speed seems fine to me", it mustn't be because Google you say said "its slow" - I'd take Google at its word on that and I'd make sure that I'd crank the speed up as much as possible.

2: You said "very much so with mobile versions" - well you too might well have had a notification from Google within the last 18 months to say that your site was going 'Mobile First' so that makes it more important that site speed is up to the mark.

3: Squarespace, have a look at what others say here.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?sou...hUKEwjv5ryBjLDlAhXCJlAKHb84C6UQ4dUDCAg&uact=5

It's your business so your choice but I wouldn't be hanging around wondering whether to speed matters up.

 

[fisicx]

@Jim Street - you were advised back in October to move away from SquareSpace but you persisted on sticking with what you had. Your web guy hasn’t done you any favours. The longer you stick with what you have the harder it will be to move. Get rid of you current developer and find someone who knows what they are doing.

 

[zigojacko]

This is the problem with ANY DIY site builder platforms. They are all crap and very slow - for all sorts of reasons which have become very mundane to keep repeating to be honest.

 

[Haimen]

Website speed matters and it is a main factor in SEO. Your website should be at least 75% faster in both Desktop and Mobile version.

 

[fisicx]

Your website should be at least 75% faster in both Desktop and Mobile version.

Why aim so low? Getting 90%+ isn't difficult

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Common sense is the key to home page regardless of the speed reported

You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of potential readers, yet many fill this space with large pictures, complicated menu's and no simple to read information about what the site does or offers the reader

Images can tell someone far more in 5 seconds than words. there is no reason why you need to have all the information on the home page, just try and keep it like, say a advert in a national paper, Space is precious and you need to get your message across to get sales, let the images lead you to the relevent section for the detail

 

[zigojacko]

Website speed matters and it is a main factor in SEO. Your website should be at least 75% faster in both Desktop and Mobile version.

Why aim so low? Getting 90%+ isn't difficult

I was wondering what it had to be 75% faster than...

 

[iTechnoLabs]

Your visitors don’t care what your Google PageSpeed Insights score is. They just want to be able to view your content as quickly as possible.

The real purpose of testing your site’s performance with Google PageSpeed Insights isn’t to achieve a high score. Instead, it’s to find problem spots on your site, so that you can optimize them and decrease both your actual and perceived loading times.

Google takes into consideration more than just the number in the circle at the top of your PageSpeed results. Hitting a 100/100 won’t guarantee you a top spot on the SERPs.

 

[gpietersz]

Your web guy hasn’t done you any favours. The longer you stick with what you have the harder it will be to move. Get rid of you current developer and find someone who knows what they are doing.

I am having trouble trying to reconcile:

1. He is using Squarespace.
2. He is paying a developer.

Surely the only advantage of a DIY site builder is that it is DIY so you do not need to pay a developer?

 

[Nityen Prakash]

Website Speed matters a lot. It has a major impact on SEO rankings on desktop and mobile.
If the Speed of the website is low will have a low number of conversions, a high bounce rate, and a low number of pages per visit.

 

[fisicx]

Website Speed matters a lot. It has a major impact on SEO rankings on desktop and mobile.
If the Speed of the website is low will have a low number of conversions, a high bounce rate, and a low number of pages per visit.

Complete twaddle.

 

[Alexander Denholm]

In one of Backlinko's recent articles, Brain Dean found "no correlation between page loading speed (as measured by Alexa) and first page Google rankings"

I can't contribute a link just yet but search for "backlink search engine ranking" in Google and it'll be the post with/"search-engine-ranking" at the end of the URL.

Food for thought.

 

[Guy Willett]

Morning @Jim Street

The issue with Squarespace sites is like many other ready-built template sites (eg Wix, Shopify etc) they look great but come with a lot of resources that you just can't remove. For instance, your Home page is pulling 1.87MB which may seem odd given it's not particularly intensive on imagery or any particular advanced functionality. What you can't see is all the bloatware behind the scenes that is next to impossible to remove due to the very limited changes you can make in Squarespace. This makes it easy for Squarespace to manage since there is less that you can break but it also means there's less that you can fine-tune.

In fairness to Squarespace, it has one of the better load times average than many of these sites. Alex Denholm mentioned in one of your replies Brian Dean. One of the studies that he conducted (look on Backlino site for Page Speed Stats) found.

'When comparing major CMSs against one another, Squarespace and Weebly have the best overall mobile page speed performance. Wix and WordPress ranked near the bottom.'

So from this perspective things sound good with Squarespace. The difficulty is that unlike a Wordpress site can be made to perform faster than a Squarespace site by removing plugins, optimising images, getting more responsive themes and generally tinkering around with the settings this is much more limited in Squarespace.


However, given your position, I think site speed should be only a small part of your considerations from moving away from Squarespace. I can see that you aren't ranking on page one for hardly any terms that you're trying to rank for and there is some considerable scope to optimise your site regardless of whether you choose to migrate or not. I also note that you're using Adwords considerably so maybe it would be worthwhile moving your marketing budget away from PPC over to new website development or considering affordable SEO services.


PS Alex mentions the Brian Dean article about the relation to ranking and site speed (look on Backlinko for Search Engine Ranking). In it he found no correlation to site ranking and site speed. I've contacted Brain and suggested maybe further research might be in order, particularly regarding mobile site speed usage and rankings. However, even if Brian's astounding claim is true surely delivering pages to your audience as fast as possible makes for a better user experience, regardless of ranking considerations?

 

[Darren_Ssc]

The elephant in the room is that these alternatives, such as WordPress, that can be optimised often aren't. Or if they are, not very well.

 

[gpietersz]

The elephant in the room is that these alternatives, such as WordPress, that can be optimised often aren't. Or if they are, not very well.

You can though, if you care. Even choosing the right theme will make a Wordpress site a lot better than one done with a site builder.

There are a lot of alternatives, and some are fast and light out of the box (although many of those have other disadvantages - pros and cons).

I cannot think of any CMS that cannot be easily set up (config and minimal design) to be faster than a site builder.

 

[Darren_Ssc]

You can though, if you care. Even choosing the right theme will make a Wordpress site a lot better than one done with a site builder.

In theory yes, But, what can happen is Jo Blogs sets up a WordPress site, installs 86 plug-ins (at least one of which is certain to be some kind of 'seo' plug in too), changes the theme 27 times and runs it on 2.99 a month hosting.

Yes, an extreme example but sometimes a fool-proof platform is better to start with?

 

[gpietersz]

Alex mentions the Brian Dean article about the relation to ranking and site speed (look on Backlinko for Search Engine Ranking). In it he found no correlation to site ranking and site speed.

They find that there is no correlation between speed and ranking but they also find that first page results load in an average of 1.65 seconds, whereas the average page loads in 10 seconds.

I think what they mean is that most first page results are of fast loading pages so minor differences between them are unimportant, but really slow pages rank a lot worse than fast pages. This is consistent with what Google has said.

https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking

 

[gpietersz]

In theory yes, But, what can happen is Jo Blogs sets up a WordPress site, installs 86 plug-ins, changes the theme 27 times and runs it on 2.99 a month hosting.

I agree, in general.

In this case the OP now knows he should not do that, and we can give him further advice here if he wants it.

Personally, I think he should probably just hire someone good to do his site - the business does not look like a cash strapped one man band, so he is better of running the business and paying someone to do the site (unless he has lots of free time to learn in thanks to lockdown).

 

[Darren_Ssc]

Personally, I think he should probably just hire someone good to do his site - the business does not look like a cash strapped one man band, so he is better of running the business and paying someone to do the site (unless he has lots of free time to learn in thanks to lockdown).

Here comes another elephant...

Are there any competent developers looking for this kind of gig?