Dug

I wouldn't say the topic is that confusing, there is a lot that could be done on squarespace side, and they should do more as you are paying for SAAS. Its just as a consumer of their product your hands are tied, and your options are accept it or change platform.
For the record our site also loads extremely slowly, into the minutes for pages to render on a slow connection. As mentioned you can reduce image size and quality, but that's about it. 

Hi there,
I have similar performance problems, I downsized my images etc. I got poor ratings on performance and sadly the pages are not appearing smoothly on my mobile. A big disappointment. I have only five pages, no animations. How is this possible, is my only help to switch platform?

Okay, but I am still getting a "poor" rating from Page Speed Insights on pages without any pictures, background images, or gifs, with only a few text boxes, all with the same font. My logo is around 100KB. And it says JavaScript and render-blocking are almost solely responsible for my slow speed.
Is it possible to contact Squarespace and ask them to fix this? Or at the very least does Google not punish Squarespace sites for loading a couple seconds longer? 
I'm not too worried about the customers who already want to buy from me (I do art commissions), but I am worried that my SEOs will go down the tank because Google recently started getting stricter with load times and what sites are prioritized.

Dear Paul, I have similar performance problems with my page. I'm using analysing platforms such as Sistrix or PageSpeedInsights, and they all say the same: Reduce unused JavaScripr or try to bundle the Script applications. I'm a bit fed up when Squarespace is saying there can't be done anything. We're paying money for the service!

So basically what are you saying is switch platforms if you want a website that performs better. 🙂

I would tend to ignore this error. Google is not perfect. Most of these reporting services are useless in that they don't go into how they came to make their bold claims about the brokenness of your site/pages. OK I get it these services can point out some things that may cause an issue with ranking. But take everything with a grain of salt.
Now to what Google may be indicating with the too wide claim. It is possible that elements of the site are indeed wider than the screen but that fact can be hidden by the CSS overflow property. So while the report may be factually correct that doesn't correlate to an issue with the site scrolling from side to side.

I'm getting this error and resubmitting isn't working. The errors keep coming. I did manage to fix one of the errors, links too close to each other, by running lighthouse from the google developers tool console, available in chrome (view, developer, developer tools on a mac). This showed that some words I was using as a link were too small - they were 4 letters long which was too small a link. I expanded the link to cover more words and the error disappeared. Note when running the live check from the google search console, even before fixing this error - it said my site was fine. So I think we have a number of issues, the two biggest being that the live mobile checker doesn't find all the issues - as lighthouse detected the small link error but the search console live checker didn't. And that something else is causing failures that doesn't appear in lighthouse or the google search console live checker. For me it is content too wide. Inspect the returned file: click on mobile usability, then the failed URL in the list, then the panel to the right should show 'inspect' at the bottom right. You can then see the file the google spider looks at to determine the errors. You can also see other things, such as the Squarespace CDN for images not being available to it, and various robots.txt errors. Note I have had pages with font errors and robots.txt errors in here that have passed every time - so these errors aren't important. The image ones I think are, so I am removing my images one by one and running tests to pin down exactly what is causing it to fail. I will keep you posted. Andrew

The structure in the screenshot is correct. The <html> element is the top-level element of an HTML document and should contain all other elements including the <head> and <body> elements.
However, you shouldn't need to worry about technical details like this when building a site on Squarespace, which is why you cannot edit these details.