Core Web Vitals

I've seen a big drop in SEO ranking due to this... really need it fixed.. just adding my voice with all the others.

Hi everyone -

I just want to add to this. My site is down 47% in organic traffic year to year - which is 60,000 visitors. 47%!!!! And my rankings on keywords where I was #1 is dropping to 8 - 10 or worse. 

I did the Google Search Console thing, and, like all of you, not one of my URLs is showing as "good" anymore - 100% of them are showing as poor.

I've reached out to Squarespace support, but this is obviously concerning that all of us are having such a significant drop in organic traffic, especially with how hard it is to get those high search rankings in the first place.

I will update with any fix I get. 

4 hours ago, flowgirl said:

Hi everyone -

I just want to add to this. My site is down 47% in organic traffic year to year - which is 60,000 visitors. 47%!!!! And my rankings on keywords where I was #1 is dropping to 8 - 10 or worse. 

I did the Google Search Console thing, and, like all of you, not one of my URLs is showing as "good" anymore - 100% of them are showing as poor.

I've reached out to Squarespace support, but this is obviously concerning that all of us are having such a significant drop in organic traffic, especially with how hard it is to get those high search rankings in the first place.

I will update with any fix I get. 

Please keep us all posted as this is a major ongoing issue and we have not received any feedback from Squarespace on any fixes or even where it is in the pipeline. It may have been put out to pasture in the too hard basket, hard to know.
Great to some recent feedback 🙂

I'm in  the process of migrating my website from Squarespace. I've had enough with the cold shoulder from the SS team. They suck at communicating with their customers, nor do they inform us about what they are working on to improve their platform. 

All they communicate is useless bullshit for circle members.

Squarespace is not a long-term choice for me.

Resurrecting this thread as all of these issues still apply and have not been fixed.

How is Squarespace expecting to attract/ retain people with this glacially slow, antiquated set up. My "contact" page even gets a red rating on Pagespeed Insights and it is just a small block of text.

I contacted SS customer service a few days ago and they were acting mystified by the whole issue. Does anyone have any updates? Does moving to 7.1 help with speeds at all? If I have to completely rebuild my website, perhaps I am better off going to a completely different service...

Anyone? No updates or interest or outrage over this? I am surprised as we are all paying good money for a pretty poorly performing service here. Squarespace has known about this for at least two years and have seemingly done nothing to rectify it. Google is most certainly punishing our collective SEOs.

5 hours ago, bayrumblues said:

Anyone? No updates or interest or outrage over this? I am surprised as we are all paying good money for a pretty poorly performing service here. Squarespace has known about this for at least two years and have seemingly done nothing to rectify it. Google is most certainly punishing our collective SEOs.

I am extremely interested in any site improvements we can get.
I have mentioned it a few times in the past but it does not seem to go past this level within Circle as far as I am aware. 

I am also unaware of any sort of Squarespace public roadmap so I am unsure if this is being looked into by the development team or not.  

Anyone else got any updates?

My 7.0 website: every single page (desktop) fails. Even pages with minimal text and no photos.

Does anyone know if 7.1 is any better?

7 hours ago, Naomi_ said:

My 7.0 website: every single page (desktop) fails. Even pages with minimal text and no photos.

Does anyone know if 7.1 is any better?

Hmmm it is a little bit better I believe but definitely not impressive. Desktop will do ok but mobile always fails.

Agreed Brent. My 7.0 desktop site does ok but the mobile always fails. For as far back as this thread goes its obvious this is not a squarespace priority...As paul2009 reminds us, we all need to contact squarespace to voice our concerns on this topic as squarespace rarely checks the forums

Yep, it's been two years, and the problem only got worse... I've seen my website drop from first page on Google to 6th. I've been questioning my SEO skills but it seems it's not really all my fault. Can we get some insight on what has been done to improve the Core Web Vital issues? @Squarespace Guru

Hey all,

We just moved our site from WordPress to SquareSpace. To say I was a little shocked is an understatement. I legit copied my one page word for word and did not change the hyperlink at all, however a ton of my keywords were lost.  

Has anyone come across any solutions to help with this?

On 8/16/2022 at 6:13 AM, PSW said:

Hey all,

We just moved our site from WordPress to SquareSpace. To say I was a little shocked is an understatement. I legit copied my one page word for word and did not change the hyperlink at all, however a ton of my keywords were lost.  

Has anyone come across any solutions to help with this?

What do you mean by lost? Was there some meta data in the page text or missing image file names and titles?

Site URL: https://blackcatdesign.co.th/

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblackcatdesign.co.th%2F

And I feel like it's very slower than a few week ago.

Wix are taking this subject VERY seriously with some good looking solutions: https://www.wix.com/performance

I like how you get a Site Speed dashboard.

This Google tool is useful for technology comparisons: https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280-aa0b-5f3f0cd3d2be/page/M6ZPC?s=lIkQgAX3SIs&params={"df35":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80GTE%EE%80%80","df18":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80PT%EE%80%80CMS","df48":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80IN%EE%80%80Wix","df44":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80IN%EE%80%80Squarespace%EE%80%80Wix%EE%80%80Webflow","df33":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80IN%EE%80%80United%20States%20of%20America"}

Shows some good improvement by Squarespace 🙂

Rather than make a new thread, I will update this one

My website is built on Squarespace.

We are having the same issues with web core vitals for mobiles.

The Google search console is giving me the following errors:
CLS issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)
LCP issue: longer than 4s (mobile)

I've reached out to Squarespace support and they've been less than helpful, basically telling me to ignore it and that Google tools don't apply to Squarespace. Unfortunately we are behest to Google's control.

Has anyone got any solutions? I'm technically minded but I do not understand websites unfortunately. 

2 hours ago, xjay1337 said:

The Google search console is giving me the following errors:
CLS issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)
LCP issue: longer than 4s (mobile)

Has anyone got any solutions?

This is something that Squarespace's performance teams control, so you'll need to rely on them to keep improving the overall CWVs for the Squarespace platform, as they have been doing since June 2021 when these ranking signals were first introduced.

You cannot change the core web vitals for an individual Squarespace website.

Hi Paul

Thanks for your response.

I have tried to have this discussion with support staff, I asked if it was possible to raise a fault ticket or something but was told not.

The main things are below.

unfortunately it seems nothing I can do

I'm not a web dev but I've added some of the preconnect bits to the code injection on the header pages but unfortunately made no difference

(Maybe it failed due to my error or no improvements to be made, I am not to know).

When speaking to Squarespace support they seemed genuinely not bothered by the Google ranking efforts and like many others it is becoming a possibility I may need to move web-site hosters to work around this..

Reduce unused JavaScript

3.6 s

Eliminate render-blocking resources

1.77 s

Serve images in next-gen formats

0.6 s

Reduce initial server response time

0.51 s

Reduce unused CSS

0.45 s

Properly size images

0.3 s

7 minutes ago, xjay1337 said:

I have tried to have this discussion with support staff, I asked if it was possible to raise a fault ticket or something but was told not. When speaking to Squarespace support they seemed genuinely not bothered by the Google ranking efforts

There isn't anything that anyone can do to improve the CMVs of an individual Squarespace site but rest assured there are teams in Squarespace who are dedicated to improving the platform's performance. There have been many incremental improvements and more will come. And as the platform is managed centrally, you won't need to make any changes to see these improvements; they'll filter through automatically.

Really hope Squarespace can fix this sooner than later. Google SEO has more weight on page experience now and most clients we engaged are aware of the importance of SEO. If they know SS cannot tick the "page experience" box of Google SEO, they will be very reluctant to choose SS although it has tons of other benefits.

It's a huge task for SS tech team since it may require SS to fundamentally change the whole platform code and architecture design. A very talented product leader is needed here, but it's very hard to find as always. 

The first step may be to enable WebP and AVIF image format...

How can i fix core web vitals of my amansala website?

On 9/28/2022 at 8:46 AM, paul2009 said:

This is something that Squarespace's performance teams control, so you'll need to rely on them to keep improving the overall CWVs for the Squarespace platform

Hey Paul,

Does this "Squarespace Performance Team" produce release notes when they makes these incremental improvements that globally impact CWVs? Is there a list of enhancements that are currently being targeted?

We too are pretty concerned about our site's performance and ability to rank, but don't want to go through the incredible labor of migrating to another platform if substantial improvements are right-around-the-corner, so to speak. 

I'm confident that any transparent plan-of-work regarding performance improvements would go a long way towards alleviating the concerns of others in this forum thread.  

Thanks in advance for your reply,

Justin

Our site's performance analyzed by Google PageSpeed Insights is pretty bad (scoring 12). The main issues are:

17 hours ago, paradise_dds said:

Most of the slow components seem to refer to the unused java-scripts from Squarespace. Should I use another template that has less unused code? Is there a smaller/faster template?

These tools are useful to the teams at Squarespace who have control over the "backend" configuration and are working to improve the performance of Squarespace websites. Great work is being done by Squarespace to make it perform even better, but this may not be obvious from reports like this because they can provide misleading information to site owners and designers. Messages like "reduce unused JavaScript" are unhelpful when this is not a factor that you can influence yourself.

Rather than worrying about the suggestions in technical reports like this, I recommend you check how your site performs in the "real world", by actually visiting it from a private/incognito browser (whilst not logged on). Most Squarespace sites are incredibly performant so, if it loads slowly, check the filesize of images you have added and check any code you added to code injection. These are usually the main culprits for poor performing websites.

In addition, you may want to look at these Squarespace support guides:

• SEO checklist
• Increasing your site’s visibility to search engines

Regarding the suggestions in the PageSpeed Insights report, you'll need to rely on the work that Squarespace are doing centrally to improve performance across all sites.

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Yes, Squarespace doesn't have good core web vitals, and a lot of work needs to be done to ensure a Squarespace website is fully SEO-friendly (both from Squarespace and Squarespace users).

This doesn't mean a Squarespace website cannot rank well on Google, rank above websites built on WordPress/Wix/Webflow etc. and generate a serious amount of organic traffic.

Core web vitals and page loading speed are just one ranking factor; there are many others that Google considers, such as backlinks, keyword optimization, internal linking, time spent on pages by users etc.

If you like the Squarespace UX and love how anyone can get started on a SS site (which can't be said for many of the other platforms!), then this is just a compromise for now - hopefully, the messages above show that Squarespace is doing something about this.

Our Squarespace SEO plugin also has a lot on our roadmap to help here - WordPress has Yoast/EWWW image optimizer/Jetpack/WP Cache, which help users at a basic level which we will expand far beyond.