Core Web Vitals

I have the same CLS issue in Google Search Console for 46 URLs.  It does not appear to be something I can change so over to Squarespace.

It does appear to be starting to impact search results so I am concerned Squarespace sites are going to be marked down in SERP.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en

Hello! Any update from Squarespace on this? It's been about a month. My site is suffering and I am not sure what to do. I've read the documentation but it's a little too technical for me. That's why I use Squarespace. Thank you!

Hopefully they fix this soon.

Page experience has now turned up in Google Search Console and our SQSP site now has this to contend with:

Your site has no URLs with a good page experience

This appears to be a combination of LCP and CLS issues although I am testing whether the announcement bar is causing the CLS issues.
 

The good news is that Google announced that it is postponing the rollout of the page experience update, specifically the ranking change, from May 2021 to be a gradual rollout that won’t start until mid-June 2021 and won’t be fully rolled out until the end of August.

Yup, similar issue here. Mobile has LCP issue, Desktop CLS according to Google Search Console Vitals. 

Yes just found the "Page Experience" section in our Google Search Console, here is what it looks like for us. Things we have no control over we are being penalized for in Google.

I am experiencing the same problem and, like all of you, am very concerned. This needs to be fixed.

Publishing three sites with SS now, one is 7.0 and two are 7.1 and knowing about Core Web Vitals since last fall, I was told then that it was an experiment and to pay it no mind and all Squarespace ranks poorly on Google crawlers so I wasn't alone.

Now it is no longer a trial and my sites ALL fall in the red, as in 0-49 level, and my urls are poor, still after working tirelessly adjusting images and shortening urls for almost 8 months now.

I think Squarespace Developers can come up with a solution. They usually do, but I want to see them address it and help us with it, outside of forums. This is a concern, even with my 7.1 sites!

So far nothing I have done on the surface of the site from image shrinking to changing url directions, has brought my score up. If anyone has any ideas I'm following!

On 3/25/2021 at 6:45 PM, finidush said:

After sending a panicky message to SS support I received the below message. Finally they have recognised that this is an issue and it is being treated as a priority.

I'm still extremely nervous that CWV is going to tank my business from May onwards. My competitors websites are all performing better than mine so SS need to pull something pretty special out of the bag.

 

Thank you for sharing this message. Squarespace is usually on it, so far nothing I've done surface level has worked yet. Fingers crossed the HTML wizards holier than I can figure it out in time!

You can get a SS website to deliver on all the CoreWebVitals but it needs some really advanced code optimization. We have a 943ms load-time and a cumulative layout shift of 0.05 now, using advanced code injection and pre-connect and preload headers, combined with serving things like Jquery through non-google CDNs has shown that we can tick nearly all the boxes on this latest hoop jumper.

Here's a helper:
https://web.dev/preconnect-and-dns-prefetch/

I am actually pretty sure that SS has been doing some stuff already because there were a lot of Unusued Javascripts that were loading in my theme by default but some of these no longer seem to be loading - still quite  few that are though - at least on homepage. I would not expect SquareSpace to do an announcement on this, because it would be like saying "hi everyone, we've optimised our code delivery and fixed the fact that we were loading a whole lot of unnecessary javascript libraries that our programmers didn't catch" I mean what company would issue that press-release.

Hope that helps.

On 4/21/2021 at 1:41 PM, primallanguageproductions said:

Publishing three sites with SS now, one is 7.0 and two are 7.1 and knowing about Core Web Vitals since last fall, I was told then that it was an experiment and to pay it no mind and all Squarespace ranks poorly on Google crawlers so I wasn't alone.

Now it is no longer a trial and my sites ALL fall in the red, as in 0-49 level, and my urls are poor, still after working tirelessly adjusting images and shortening urls for almost 8 months now.

 

I think Squarespace Developers can come up with a solution. They usually do, but I want to see them address it and help us with it, outside of forums. This is a concern, even with my 7.1 sites!

So far nothing I have done on the surface of the site from image shrinking to changing url directions, has brought my score up. If anyone has any ideas I'm following!

Thanks for the feedback primal, sounds like you've put in the work to try and clean things up to dial in your core web vitals and still getting the same results...good to know.

Here is squarespaces response my google search console question - "First I wanted to start by clarifying that Google Search Console, while it is a great resource to use for your site, is not necessarily optimized for analyzing sites built on a CMS (Content Management System) like Squarespace. It's algorithm for detecting inaccuracies that it thinks is incorrect, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a genuine issue on our platform. They use a set formula to apply to a wide variety of different CMS systems. Alas, they don't have a specific algorithm for detecting Squarespace-specific issues. This shouldn't affect your ranking, as it's more about alerting you of ways to improve your site. They're ultimately providing a blanket diagnosis. I'd also like to note that because Google Search Console is a third party tool, it would also be outside of our scope of support to interpret emails like this from Google Search Console. With that said, we do have a guide here that covers some of the errors and emails that you may see: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543207-Understanding-Google-SEO-emails-and-console-errors"

Hi all. Keeping an eye out on this as well. Most of my clients are WP but I can confirm that the 5 that are on SS are all hitting low scores for CWV especially when it comes to LCP. Hopefully SS will take this seriously. 

Thank you for sharing this! I will look through the FAQ doc you sent.

I've found that third party SEO Tools, in addition to Console, shows many errors I can't fix, so I will just repair what I can, and keep it moving. It seems if I want to stay on SS, I will have to live with an imperfect report from all outside search tools.

On 4/15/2021 at 10:14 AM, whoisdanfonseca said:

Hello! Any update from Squarespace on this? It's been about a month. My site is suffering and I am not sure what to do. I've read the documentation but it's a little too technical for me. That's why I use Squarespace. Thank you!

Here's a document they posted on the recent updates shortly after you wrote in, it was shared w/me on another thread about same - 

https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543207-Understanding-Google-SEO-emails-and-console-errors?_ga=2.135233396.477403077.1620692389-1829148435.1618525029

After 8 weeks of optimizing and testing my website it appears CLS and first contentfull paint is affecting my search rankings. 
 

My rankings are extremely volatile as  each crawl produces different results. One week I’m number 2 on page 1 and the next I’m on page 2. Then I recrawl and bounce around and if I’m lucky in a crawl, I’ll go back up to the top of page 1, just to be pushed down again after a recrawl. I’m using theme version 7.0 (I think). Not the newest one. The last version.
 

In addition, I’m getting so many url (SRC) errors inside of Google search console. Every image on my website is doing it.

Please help Squarespace!

After 8 weeks of optimizing and testing my website it appears CLS and first contentfull paint is indeed affecting my search rankings. 

My rankings are extremely volatile as  each crawl produces different results. One week I’m number 2 on page 1 and the next I’m on page 2. Then I recrawl and bounce around and if I’m lucky in a crawl, I’ll go back up to the top of page 1, just to be pushed down again after a recrawl. I’m using theme version 7.0 (I think). Not the newest one. The last version.
 

In addition, I’m getting so many url (SRC) errors inside of Google search console. Every image on my website is doing it.

Please help Squarespace!

22 hours ago, IamLovely said:

After 8 weeks of optimizing and testing my website it appears CLS and first contentfull paint is indeed affecting my search rankings.

This shouldn't be affecting your rankings yet... The update isn't supposed to roll out until Mid-June.
In Google Search Console does your site have poor page experience URLS?
I shared a few of my findings on some clients sites in this video if your interested.

Same issue and it's greatly affecting my rankings. The only feedback I received bringing this up with customer support in March already is "we've noted this for our Design and Engineering teams to review, and they'll use this feedback when implementing fixes and improvements in future releases." Perhaps time to take my website elsewhere :((

Site URL: https://www.akrogoniaios.com/

Hi,

I am auditing my website to improve SEO. In all the audits using diffferent tools (Lighthouse, SEO Optimizer, SEMRush, it keeps saying that my website performance is slow.

But, SS is a bespoke SaaS product. 

Do you have any idea how to do this?

We are (not so patiently) waiting for Squarespace to give us a timeline/update on when they are going to speed the backend up. They have said they are working on it, but Google is dropping a big update in just a few short weeks. In this update pagespeed is going to be a larger ranking factor then before so....

Pretty much all you can do is optimize images and video uploads, remove any JavaScript that you added, and everything is is untouchable by us. 

Personally this is very frustrating for me and my clients!

Thanks. I haven't added any javascripts (except Google analytics) and so, I guess the only thing to do is to wait on SS. Yes, it's frustrating 😞 They need to keep up with the search engines.

It appears tha javascript used with SS is the most heaviest. In my audit (SEOOptimizer), the js came as the culprit slowing down the pages (I don't use any custom js except for accordation).

Best tools for doing this type of analysis are

• GTMETRIX - because they offer good suggestions and easy to follow
• Lighthouse extension for Google Chrome - It's Google, it's local to your browser so more reliable than cloud.
• Web.dev - to tick all the boxes....pre-connect etc...

There is also a GTM hack that will pull LCP values from core web vitals into Google Analytics for you, https://www.simoahava.com/custom-templates/core-web-vitals/.

JS in SS is heavy, some templates don't need all the assets it but I think they are working on it. I would be really surprised if SS didn't offer some support on this but the rollout of this is between mid June and August if memory serves me correctly.  Also, I do recommend that any third-party codes are removed from your website when doing performance checks, at least that way you can see if the problem is a poor third-party CDN.

Hope this helps

G.