Google PageSpeed Insights, I'm ranking at a 2 - help!

Hey Guys! 

Google Search Console updated its metrics for Site Speed this last week, and after months on the rise, my website views are now on the downfall. It's not a critical tank, but you can see that it's slowly going down and down. 

I've reached out to SS support, and they said my site is excellent and running smoothly on their end, but my Google Search Console is filled with Page Speed errors and that combined with the tanking viewership, the data shows otherwise. 

I've read through every SS document, removed as much custom code as I can find and do without, simplified my text to be web-friendly fonts only, updating everything I can see, and SS support suggested post here for support. 

Before I implemented all the suggestions in the SS documents, my website was ranking a ONE (1) for Google site speed on mobile and a NINETEEN (19) on desktop PageSpeed Insights, these are out of 100. 

After I made all these updates, I am now ranking a TWO (2) and a TWENTY THREE (23), for site speed. 

I'm part of a forum that is mostly Wordpress users, and they are ranking 83-100 on average. The few other SS website owners have reached out to me in this group, and we are all racking our brains. Google is 80% of my page views, Pinterest next then Facebook, so this does matter to me considerably. Other website owners I know have reached out in tears and mental exhaustion since all these changes started rolling out in September. I am trying to hold my resolve. 

All these error codes keep coming up on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/, too - most of them are assests.squarespace or Typekit related, some third party code on Mobile which I'm trying to figure out. 

So far I've - 

Reduced advertising

Removed unnecessary third party code

Changed my font to be web friendly

I checked with SS, and they said all my images are in proper sizes, but lots of the errors on my PageSpeed Insights shows to be image related. 

Does anyone have any suggestions?

SS Customer Support Suggested I post here. 

I send every blessing your way. 

The thing is that Google Page Insights are more for developers who have access to the websites underlying code and structure. Unfortunately Squarespace doesn't offer such access and there for Google Page Insights isn't really the best tool to use when looking at the speed of your website.

In general all Squarespace websites rank low however I have just switched to version 7.1 of Squarespace and am achieving a score of 50 for mobile and 89 for desktop. So this is something that Squarespace is working on but I imagine that their efforts will be focusing on version 7.1 not 7.0.

As for a better tool to use, I would recommend Pingdom. See how quickly your website loads, what is slowing it down. Pingdom will highlight things you can actively change like making sure that your images are properly compressed. Also make sure that you are using a single font throughout your website as this can also slow things down if multiple fonts are being loaded.

https://tools.pingdom.com

Hi Alm

I am the same as you.  Im told by SS, my site is fast.  It isnt is scores betweeen 1 and 4.  My views hae dropped like a stone, in the last 2 weeks or so.

Ive used https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/  and SE ranking is a very good site audit.   https://gtmetrix.com/ This is good too for extra info.

Andy

Hey ThomsonWebDesign, 

I'm looking at 7.1 now (https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027708412-About-Squarespace-version-7-1) and didn't even know they had a new version. That's amazing and thank you! You're probably right and I wonder if it's possible for me to switch templates... 

20 hours ago, ThompsonWebDesign said:

The thing is that Google Page Insights are more for developers who have access to the websites underlying code and structure. Unfortunately Squarespace doesn't offer such access and there for Google Page Insights isn't really the best tool to use when looking at the speed of your website.

In general all Squarespace websites rank low however I have just switched to version 7.1 of Squarespace and am achieving a score of 50 for mobile and 89 for desktop. So this is something that Squarespace is working on but I imagine that their efforts will be focusing on version 7.1 not 7.0.

As for a better tool to use, I would recommend Pingdom. See how quickly your website loads, what is slowing it down. Pingdom will highlight things you can actively change like making sure that your images are properly compressed. Also make sure that you are using a single font throughout your website as this can also slow things down if multiple fonts are being loaded.

https://tools.pingdom.com

17 hours ago, andy123 said:

Hi Alm

I am the same as you.  Im told by SS, my site is fast.  It isnt is scores betweeen 1 and 4.  My views hae dropped like a stone, in the last 2 weeks or so.

Ive used https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/  and SE ranking is a very good site audit.   https://gtmetrix.com/ This is good too for extra info.

Andy

 

Okay, great. Thank you! I'm going to look into that. Ours our dropping too, but there was another Google update on Friday, and I'm going through the Google Search Quality Evaluator Rating Guidelines to see if I can make any updates to improve the site outside of Speed, too. - Amanda

Thomspon 

20 hours ago, ThompsonWebDesign said:

The thing is that Google Page Insights are more for developers who have access to the websites underlying code and structure. Unfortunately Squarespace doesn't offer such access and there for Google Page Insights isn't really the best tool to use when looking at the speed of your website.

In general all Squarespace websites rank low however I have just switched to version 7.1 of Squarespace and am achieving a score of 50 for mobile and 89 for desktop. So this is something that Squarespace is working on but I imagine that their efforts will be focusing on version 7.1 not 7.0.

As for a better tool to use, I would recommend Pingdom. See how quickly your website loads, what is slowing it down. Pingdom will highlight things you can actively change like making sure that your images are properly compressed. Also make sure that you are using a single font throughout your website as this can also slow things down if multiple fonts are being loaded.

https://tools.pingdom.com

So far we narrowed it down to two fonts, and I'm not sure how to compress images just yet! Do you have a tool you like? 

Even two fonts seems a bit excessive. There are very few situations where using more than one font makes sense from both a speed and user experience perspective.  

There are many free services online that will compress your images for you. Just Google images compress. I have linked to an example below. 
https://tinyjpg.com/

Unfortunately if you would like to switch to 7.1 then you will need to rebuild your website as there is no migration tool at present. 

On 11/11/2019 at 9:49 AM, ThompsonWebDesign said:

Even two fonts seems a bit excessive. There are very few situations where using more than one font makes sense from both a speed and user experience perspective.  

There are many free services online that will compress your images for you. Just Google images compress. I have linked to an example below. 
https://tinyjpg.com/

Unfortunately if you would like to switch to 7.1 then you will need to rebuild your website as there is no migration tool at present. 

Okay, thank you. I'll check into the font thing and the image compressing I will do. Hopefully soon or one day there will be a way to migrate.