thread Re: Slow web performance on Square Online in Online Store

Slow web performance on Square Online

allan21 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:59:28 GMT

Hi - I recently moved my ecommerce site from Shopify to Square Online/Weebly, and while there's many improvements the actual page speed is much worse.

Shoppers have very little patience for slow ecommerce shops, and will just give up on sluggish ones.
Worse, Google ranks slow sites lower in their search results - so a slow mobile site is a killer for business!

On all the 4 Square Online-hosted sites I looked at (1 being mine), Google's PageSpeed measurements consistently show awful scores (see table below). Lots of time is wasted on unused JavaScript and images that are fatter than they need to be.

I did some digging and found plenty of opportunity for Square Online to make all our sites faster, and our stores more successful...

Unused/inefficient JavaScript

Google PageSpeed tells the story here (2,910ms is 2.91 seconds for the uninitiated).

Here's Google's main recommendations - quite consistent across the 4 Square Online shops I looked at. The values in seconds (s) are potential time savings.

Score (out of 100)	Unused JS	Initial response	Inefficient images	Shop
3	5.16s	2.09s	2.4s	https://www.thelondonteamerchant.com/
14	3.37s	1.78s	2.85s	https://www.homestylecharlie.com/
6	5.62s	2.04s		https://www.pessosices.com/
5	3.03s	2.01s	0.3s	https://www.lahosky.com/

Also looking in the Chrome console I found many JavaScript load timeouts (e.g. below) on the home page. Are these just wasting more time/bandwidth after the initial load?

Inefficient image serving

I've already covered the need to serve smaller images in this post.
Short version is while Square Online uses the modern 'WebP' format sometimes, it's not everywhere. And it's wasting time serving the same images 3x over on the same page.

@londontea , @HC_Charlie , @pessosices - thanks for sharing your sites in other posts so I could do this comparison.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

pessosices — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:11:33 GMT

Hey @allan21

Well that's super interesting and not so great.

Thanks so much for diving deep into this and doing all the legwork. Hopefully this is something that Square can improve, and quickly.

Any insights @Helen @kellyj ?

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

Helen — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:29:44 GMT

Hello! Thank you for sharing this @allan2 and for the tag @pessosices. We're taking a look and we'll post here as soon as we can.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

pessosices — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:30:24 GMT

Sweeeet, thanks so much @Helen !

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

allan21 — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 06:36:05 GMT

Thanks @Helen. Also tagging @tranguyen who said they'd look into the WebP images in my earlier post.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

tranguyen — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 16:01:57 GMT

Hi everyone! I Just stepping in for Helen here.

I've shared this post with our ECOM team and from chatting with them, improving Square Online site performance is something that's very much top of mind for the team. There have been a lot of work in the background to improve some of the things raised in this post. I will try my best to highlight them!

Image optimisation: the team have started making WebP the default for our images. This is now the cases for logos and other hosts of images but the work is still ongoing so I don't have the full scope of this yet.
Removing unnecessary and redundant data on the site
Removing unused icons
Improving website's rendering

There are still a lot more to be done and the team are continuing to tackle this work, so I'll be sure to follow up again when I have more to share! The team are definitely looking at reducing the size of JavaScript on published site, continuing to improve the loading speed and more.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

allan21 — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 18:40:57 GMT

Thanks @tranguyen - looking forward to seeing those improvements soon!

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

allan21 — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 19:10:16 GMT

In terms of timing, please note:

Faster sites will rank higher on Google Search starting in May 2021

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

organico — Sun, 16 May 2021 11:19:13 GMT

Hey Tra,

Any word on timeline of when this will be better? I've just built out the site and want to switch over from current provider but the slowness (especially on the ordering page) is truly too much. It doesn't react quick enough when you click the button that many customers will just assume the site isn't working. Its very rare to have to wait 10 full seconds for a page to load w/o any notice that its working or not. Do you expect some sort of fix within 1 month, 6 months, or more?

Thank you,

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

tranguyen — Mon, 17 May 2021 11:43:36 GMT

Hi @organico, thank you for letting us know. This is something I'll be able to feed back to the team as well.

Improving the speed and performance of Square Online site is always ongoing in the background. There is no set date as the team continue to work on different parts of the website to ensure they are performing as they should, especially on mobile. From the latest report, the team are doing a lot of cleanup in the back-end and check plugins for the site as these can slow down performances.

As the team continue their work on this, I'll keep an eye out for anything that may be of interests and share in this thread as well.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

Cesar123 — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 05:57:44 GMT

Any updates?

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

MJD — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 15:57:30 GMT

Hi there @Cesar123!

All updates to square online are noted in the latest release of the square online update log. You can find the update log for the UK here: https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Square-UK-Product-Updates/Square-Online-release-notes-June-9-2021/ba-p/279570

As far as my knowledge goes, there are minimal changes to this yet, but square are working on it! I'll tag @tranguyen who could possibly give you a little extra info, if such is available.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

RHgifts — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 14:00:59 GMT

@tranguyen Is there any update on this yet?? I am having the same issues with horrendous load speeds! For an e-commerce partnership this is not acceptable at all! It is becoming so frustrating to the point that I am now looking into starting afresh with a new provider that can offer mug more flexibility and better load speeds. Which lets face it isn't difficult when my site is currently rated at 1/100 for mobile and 25/100 for desktop! The suggestions from google in improving this points to weebly...

Understandably customers are abandoning their carts as it is completely unacceptable to have to wait up to 12 seconds for a page to load.

For a small business, this is devastating!

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

tranguyen — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 09:18:20 GMT

I can appreciate your frustration @RHgifts and apology for al the inconvenience caused by this.

Our team are continuously working on different elements to help improve Square Online site performance and loading speed is an ongoing effort. Since the last update, the team have provided a recent update in July on what they've been working on:

Upgrading our backend tools and code to help sites work on more browsers and perform better, as well as optimised how we sized assets (images, etc.).
Optimising our dependencies on other-parties infrastructure and upgrading our cache performances.

While there has been reduction and improvements in some areas, with some page styles performing better, there hasn't been any major changes to the loading speed as of now. This is an area the team will continue to focus and work on in the next few months.

I'll continue updating the thread as I find more information on the work our team are doing.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

MichaelNewtown — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 05:10:02 GMT

Hi @tranguyen,

is there any further word on this? I just tried to search my online catalogue and the browser was grinding just trying to display the characters as i typed! Firefox specifically says its my square site that is slowing the browser. Would be great to know what improvements of those recommended by Google have been made and what is planned.

Also am I right that improvements will be rolled out in all countries? I think this is the UK forum but I'm in Australia

thanks

Michael

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

tranguyen — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:48:49 GMT

Hey @MichaelNewtown, thank you for your post!

Improvements are applied to all Square Online sites and are rolled out to all countries. In this instance, the team are working on a number of initiatives to help improve website's speed in the background. I don't have any further specifics at the moment (aside from what have been shared previously) but I'm keeping my eyes out for further reports and will share them as I know more.

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

Jsta — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 14:19:59 GMT

Hello community, @allan21 @MichaelNewtown @RHgifts @MJD @tranguyen @Emma_ @pessosices @Helen @organico @Cesar123 @kellyj

Like everyone here, the loading speed of my websites created with Square Online are too slow. I see that this problem has been around for more than 8 months. Do you have any information regarding how to resolve this issue please?

I don't see any improvement in Square Online product updates regarding the resolution of slow performance issues. We can't use your features with such slow performance. At this point, loading speed is a higher priority than any other features.

On the page of all products, randomly some descriptions do not appear even after the page has fully loaded, especially on mobile.

Could you help us solve these important performance issues?

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

MJD — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 14:18:28 GMT

Hello @Jsta!

Please do not mass tag users like this, they end up with masses of notifications from something that has minimal relevance to them - you can tag staff if you feel you've been missed for replies but usually you wont need to tag anyone as there's always someone looking at recent discussions.

In regards to this, is the website actually slow or is Google's report claiming it is? Google look for very specific things and often their reports end up being irrelevant for this reason as they miss out a lot of the truth behind how well the site works.

It would also be useful if you share a link to the site here in order for us to see what is actually happening and if there are real errors on Square's side of things.

Thanks in advance for your response!

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

allan21 — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 14:28:01 GMT

Hi @MJD - true that Google's timing reports don't always tell the whole story.

But... Google Search uses Google Page Speed to help rank search hits. So if you want your shop to be found in the world's largest search engine, you have to make Google happy 🙄

Re: Slow web performance on Square Online

Jsta — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 15:33:22 GMT

Hello @MJD and thanks for your help.
I'm not used to writing on forums, I understand your rules and just wanted to bring people together on the subject, sorry for the inconvenience.

Regarding the website link, it's just an example site on which I'm testing Square's functionality.
Here is the link: www.pizza83.square.site