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. 

[dehner-sisters]

I know this post is from last year, but I'm also here to share the same experience. I was getting frustrated alone just trying to test the site out. Even the basic builder uses a lot of resources, and Safari was recommending I close it while I was in the process of creating my site because it was so bad. The addition of items themselves is also awful, when you hit save it seems to take a few minutes to even do that. After saving a few items, I went to test the site out. The amount of time it takes for the actual item page to show up after clicking on the item is excessive. As someone who also likes to shop online, I would probably be extremely frustrated as a buyer on my own site. This is a huge problem that will drive customers away for sure. I have been looking into alternative site builders, but Square was one we already had access to and it just made sense. They also offer more variation possibilities, which I definitely need for my decal business, but this makes it very hard.

[MUDE]

I have zero knowledge of coding and designing a site but from a user perspective it is extremely user friendly that i have nearly managed to put a really good site together but the performance of the site is so rubbish. This thread was opened over 2 years ago, if nothings changed yet, i dont think it will. Disappointing after having put so much time and effort in to get my products online. https://mde-105661.square.site

[Breffni]

Thank you to everyone who has commented and shared their experiences on this thread. Our Square Online engineering team are aware of the issue and the feedback raised here. 

Improving Square Online's performance and speed is something that the team are working on addressing in the long run. As much as we want to there is no quick easy fix and we need to ensure that every change or improvement made will not affect any other feature on Square Online sites. The updates and troubleshooting steps that we have been able to provide so are all that have been shared with us by our Square Online team. 

We really appreciate your patience and your sticking with us. We will be sure to follow up here as soon as we have more to share. If you are consistently running into issues with images or sites not loading, please share a link to your site with us and we can definitely ask the team to look into it further on a case-by-case basis.

[SarahCrocker]

Personally, I think Square are putting too many users on each server, resulting in slowing down everyone's websites.

I would have paid more to have a faster site but this option doesn't appear to be available.

My website has no bearing on the slow speeds, as suggested by the Square team.

The same site would run fine with alternative providers.

As this issue has persisted for so long I'm looking for alternatives as soon as I have the time.

[MUDE]

Wish i did before getting this far, as getting all my content to another provider is going to be very time consuming. 

[Greytoofast]

Im thinking to move over to shopify.  I believe there is a way to transfer all stock and so forth over to them.  Its a shame as i really like the POS and invoicing feature of square but their web service is rubbish for not letting you adjust code of the site.  Not looking forward to the work necessary in doing the change but it will be for the better i reckon.

[JayAshton]

I'll see you there.

[Breffni]

Hi @JayAshton, if you would like to share to site here, we'd be happy to take a look to see if there's anything that may be causing a slow load time. 

[Anonymous]

any updates on this? My site is loading so slowly - I've done everything I can do make it faster on my end and it's still getting an extremely low-performance score on web and mobile. 

I'm considering moving to another host. 

Can I get an update on Square/Weebly's plans? 

Cheers 

[MUDE]

If you look at the date of when the thread started to where we are today, i wouldn't count on much besides the continuous generic responses, shocking to say we are in an Era where everything is moving online and Squares websites are running as though we are still using a Dial up connection.

[Breffni]

Hi @Anonymous, thanks for your post. 

When you can, please have a look at my most recent comment on this thread from Tuesday 6th. 

"If you are consistently running into issues with images or sites not loading, please share a link to your site with us and we can definitely ask the team to look into it further on a case-by-case basis or get in contact with our Customer Support team directly." 

Thanks. 

[Greytoofast]

Ok check out my site :   https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mrbacon.jp%2F&strategy=de...

Site loads extremely slowly.  Server speed.  Performance.  Javascript.  The same that its been for a long time..

[Breffni]

Hi Greytoofast, thank you for that. That result does look poor, I can't find a link to your direct site via the report, can you share it here? Thanks! 

[Greytoofast]

Are you joking.... ?  If you are the tech, then surely you can get the link to the direct site from looking at the lighthouse URL.  Additionally, if you actually let the lighthouse report page load properly, you would see that there is third party code that is loading prior to the page.  This results in 662ms of delay.  Additionally the server response time is 1.52 seconds from here.  Take a look at the link thoroughly and then try answering again

[Breffni]

Appreciate your frustration here @Greytoofast. The Seller Community team are able to help with general troubleshooting steps for all of the Square products but we will always need to escalate to product specialists for more complex issues, such as this. The Lighthouse link you share will undoubtedly be useful as additional information for our ECOM specialists team. 

For the future, if you share the direct link to your website here, it’ll help us with troubleshooting your side ourselves first much quicker and complete a preliminary investigation before escalating further if needed.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please take some time to review our Community Etiquette Guidelines, to ensure we're maintaining a productive conversation. I can understand it can be annoying having to repeat information but as we don’t have access to account-specific details on the Seller Community, we do want to make sure we are double-checking all the information provided so we can help troubleshoot correctly and be able to escalate issues right to specialist teams.

I did ask the ECOM team to help look into the link you shared — before they start digging in, can you confirm the URL is mrbacon.jp? I’ll keep an eye out for your reply.

[JayAshton]

Hello there,

So I've just spent weeks building my store with the MANY frustrations that I've had with Square. I pot committed to this platform to work with Square for Retail in my bricks and mortar establishment.

Having got to a point yesterday where I was confident to make live and have a few people take a look, everyone has reported it is virtually unusable on their mobile device. Particularly images taking a long time to load (if at all). The grey squares just sit there flashing at you, teasing you that they're loading.

I hadn't heard of website speed testing before and I'm shocked at the results.

Can you imagine how I feel? Can you also imagine my annoyance having seen this thread? That so many people have been saying the same thing for such a long period of time? I share the sentiments of those I've read - especially the recent users who, like me have seen this run and run.

I shall no doubt meet them in the Shopify forums because in the new year, that's exactly where I'll be heading.

I currently pay fees to Square for Retail & what I take in the shop. I currently feel like invoicing them for all my time lost!!

[Greytoofast]

Use chrome:lighthouse to check your stats. Heres mine and the stats are atrocious.

You can then post here.  Here are my stats for web & mobile using google chromes Lighthouse (analyzer).  I resized all images to smaller sizes.  Jpeg optimization as well using JpegMini. 

[JayAshton]

Hello. Yes, I only learned about it yesterday. It's useful to give Square some scientific evidence, but at the same time, user experience told me that something was wrong.

I was surprised to learn that my performance was a high as 20!

[Greytoofast]

Finally the images attached above

[printybanana]

I’m relieved to read other sellers are having this issue and that above shows this is at the development stage vs customer.

The response I have had from Square repeatedly is ‘we cannot replicate the issue’. 

I love the square in-store experience and have held out off from swapping to another provider for a year. I have stopped promoting our site as it is not fit for purpose.

While I appreciate the work in the background is ‘ongoing’ - an acknowledgment of the issue and a timeline would help everyone to remain loyal and perhaps ease frustration? I would love us to stay with Square and honestly, I also dread the wasted hours if we have to switch.

So please team Square, prioritise the improvement of website performance, in particular loading time and make a tangible commitment to your supporters. We WANT to stay with you!

[Greytoofast]

I am in the same boat as you.   Moved to shopify and performance and sales on my site have increased about 300%.