Slow site loading - please help

Site URL: https://altustraffic.squarespace.com/

Hi all,

I ran my site through Pingdom and it has flagged the following:

Forgive my ignorance - how do I fix these?

Thanks!

Daniel

adding expire headers isn’t necessary 

but to improve your score I’d recommend you to compress all your images and/or reduce amount of pictures on your webpages. Keep 1 or 2 fonts consistent.

hopefully this helps 🙂

Site URL: https://www.caroledianecoaching.co.uk

Hi everyone.

So I'm trying to speed up my website as it's been pointed out to me that it can take up to 15 seconds to become interactive when running website grader tools or site speed checks. Pingdom has highlighted issues with DNS lookups, HTTP requests, Expires headers and file compression (as you can see in the screenshot I've attached). 

Could you help me understand what I can do to address these?

I don't know how to reduce the number of HTTP requests - any advice anyone? I haven't got much custom code at all on my site after having removed most of it as it was unused so I don't know where to look for this.

I have a similar issue with the DNS lookups. How can I look at reducing these?

I've looked into it and I can't add Expires headers or Cache-control because with Squarespace I don't have access to the file that these would go into. (I did try to put Cache-control into the site coding but obviously it made no difference.)

For file compression, I have reduced the sizes of my images and could further reduce them if it could help. My youtube video has a custom thumbnail which is a small jpg file so my understanding is that that shouldn't be a problem. I have looked into gzip but I am not particularly well versed on things like this and it seems that I would need access to a file that I just don't because of how Squarespace works...

I found Squarespace sooo helpful for getting everything set up but now I'm running into problems trying to optimise it, I'm beginning to wonder if I made the right trade-off lol. 

Hi Carole – honestly I don't think you have much to worry about here. You've already done a good job compressing your images and limiting how many fonts you're loading .... most of the remaining performance-related issues are things you can't control. As a fully-hosted platform, Squarespace doesn't let us individual users work to improve things like caching and how efficiently external resources are loaded. I think of it as part of the trade-off for being on a more fully-managed platform, in comparison to Wordpress where you can improve those things but you also have to manage security and updates in a much more active way.

If you're looking for further website improvements at this point I'd focus on content and SEO over trying to squeeze more technical improvements out of Squarespace 🙂

Hope that helps,

- Ed

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