Looking for any input on how to increase square online website speed/perfomance?

[Thebutcher]

We are a long time brick and mortar business that has been using Square POS successfully for many years.  We love it.  We would love to move our e-commerce side of the business from Shopify to Square Online to simplify everything by being on one platform (customer database, loyalty, sales reporting, inventory, marketing, pricing, etc).  However it has been one road block after another trying to figure out how to get the site speed to an acceptable level.  Online speed test rank our square online site close to the lowest score possible.  Our customers that have been kind enough to test our Square Online site have all had the same input...too slow.  Any input from the community on whether you have had this issue and whether you've been able to resolve it would be much appreciated.  We are in the process of opening additional locations and are in dire need of getting this figured out so we can operate more efficiently.  Would love any feedback from the community.  Thank you!

[Minion]

Hi @Thebutcher 

What is your website address? 

 I don't personally use square for my website hosting, so my knowledge is pretty limited on what you can and cannot do with it.  I believe though there isn't much that you can do though being that its a template based website builder, and on  shared hosting most likely you won't be able to remove or defer things like JavaScript or CSS.  Other than optimizing images, I think i will weigh heavily on how many products that you have as well. 

One thing you *may* be able to look into is signing up for a free account on Cloudflare (no need to buy one of the paid ones) and that should increase some speed if you are able to change DNS settings.  

[Thebutcher]

Thank you for that input.  I will definitely look into cloudfare to see if that will help speed things up.  The beta website is currently hosted at theobexpress.com.  Thanks!

[Minion]

No problem, I did check out your site, and what a nice looking site you have got going for you.  Nothing says you are now hungry like a Salmon right in your face!   

I ran your site in Gtmetrix, and the images were pulling up not being sized properly either.  Is there a way in the back end of Square to resize them all or to force max dimensions?  Cloudflare though , It should help out significantly if you are able to use it.  , Here is a guide to help you (I frequent that site often for my wordpress site).

[Thebutcher]

Just added that pic!  Thanks!  There doesn't appear to be any type of option to alter or limit pic sizes.  There is only an option to change the aspect ratio but not sure that helps.  It's currently set to 3:2 but can be set to 1:1.  Appreciate all your help.  Good to know it's the pic sizes that is contributing to the slow site speed.  Just need to figure out how fix them all in a timely manner!

[Minion]

Hm, I would try to set them to 1:1 and then be sure to run a test before and after and see if that improves the performance at all , at least speeds up loading a bit. @Thebutcher