Slow web performance on Square Online

[allan21]

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.

[#2]

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. 

[SarahCrocker]

I'm thinking of doing the same thing when I have time. 

Shopify might be slightly more expensive but it's got to be worth it.  Especially seeing as Square have no intention in fixing this situation, which has been going on for years.

[sociusbjj]

I just made the switch.

it was taking me 10 seconds just to load the 'site items' page in the console..

[sociusbjj]

Also noticing EXTREME slow down while working in the console in updating items and the online site.  Very disruptive and making my work 10 times harder/longer.

[Breffni]

Hi @sociusbjj, thanks for flagging this. 

Sorry to hear this, how many items do you have in your library roughly? 

[sociusbjj]

16 total.

2 which i deleted but are still showing for some reason (when you click those is goes 404 errror)

retail.sociusbjj.com

[Breffni]

Thank you for the link @sociusbjj, the items that have images loaded without any trouble for me.

I ran a speed test here and the result was in the 90s.  

If you haven't done so already, please ensure you're using a supported browser such as Chrome and clear cache & cookies if possible. 

[sociusbjj]

https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl=https://retail.sociusbjj.com

14/100 for performance.  and i only have 16 items total on the default site.

[GenEngelhardt]

I'm actually at the point of wanting to put in a complaint to the ACC (https://www.accc.gov.au/). The speed of the Square sites is a HUGE issue and has severe negative implications for SEO. This is solely the responsibility of the Square web development team, not the user. So this should be fixed by the Square development team.

Currently, the page load speed for my website is 8 out of 100 on mobile and 15 out of 100 on desktop, which is deplorable (see screen shot attached). This is from https://pagespeed.web.dev/ which is GOOGLE's page speed analyzer. This is the truest representation of these kinds of analytics as Google is the most used web search function. 

SO, when is this going to be fixed?! This thread was started over TWO YEARS ago! I've paid for a year, so will deal with it till either YOU fix it or I go back to Shopify at the end of the year.

Google Page Speed 

[Greytoofast]

Moved over to Shop##y and have never looked back.

[allan21]

While it's absolutely ridiculous that Square hasn't fixed its Online performance issues years after this thread started...

I switched to Square from Shopify mainly because Shopify ceased crediting back transaction fees on refunds/cancelled orders back in March 2020 (see this long thread there). If you sell high-value items you can lose serious money if customers change their minds.

[allan21]

Hah! Just 2 weeks after I gave Square a compliment in saying that their transaction fee policy was better than Shopify's, I get this email from them:

"...effective as of 2nd May 2023... Processing fees will no longer be refunded to your account when you issue full or partial refunds to your customers."

---

...so now Square has terrible website performance and the same evil fee policy on refunds as Shopify. Thus no reason to stay with Square!

[SarahCrocker]

These past two weeks square website performance has been an utter joke, and that's saying something. 

I have made no changes to my website but it has slowed down considerably. 

I can no longer select multiple product items and delete.  Some product items will refuse to show on the site. 

I'm not interested in square representatives attempting to pass the blame on to me for the slow running site, as usually appears to be the case on these forums.  My partner is a computer engineer and has a lot of experiences writing website code.  Even he thinks this situation is a joke.

I'm just hoping that Square will improve our websites to an acceptable speed before they loose all their customers to rivals.

[k_atie]

Hey @SarahCrocker, thank you for flagging this. Appreciate the frustration here. 

When you have a second, please share a link to your website here so we can take a look on our end. 

Alternatively, you can call our customer service team who can further investigate this too. Our number is 0800 098 8008. We’re available by phone from Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
 

[Mc6]

Please check mine it’s frustratingly slow and isn’t worth the $$$

https://indigo-scents.square.site/

[Greytoofast]

I made the switch away from Squares online page and havent looked back.  The POS is the best and still using it though.

[printybanana]

Hi, we love the POS too, but the site is digital sales prevention. 

Who did you move to and was it compatible with the POS?

[SarahCrocker]

After 18 months of excuses from Square we finally made the switch to one of their major competitors. 

For our new website, using Pagespeed Insight, our mobile performance has gone from 18 up to 70.

Our desktop performance is even higher.

We're not paying that much more neither.  Wish I'd switched sooner.

[printybanana]

We’ve finally done the same. Really wanted to support Square, but we need a working website! And now … it does. 

[Mc6]

Me too I thought it was my internet but have had numerous customers tell me they are having trouble loading my site and I’m now not receiving any orders due to site being soooooo slow 😩

[UKAndyM]

Any updates from Square on page speed results? The optimisation for this is out of sellers control so we really need Square to step up please.

[Greytoofast]

Moved over to Shop##y for my online store and have never looked back.