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. 

[CM2Balloons]

is there any update? getting lots of customers saying pages are just not loading which I thought was weird, gone to google page speed test and the results are shocking and upon reading all the other people's messages, this has been going on for ages, not good at all.

[Cesar123]

Most of us have already left for Shopify; I suggest doing the same. This is a very low priority for Square, so it seems.

[SpeedIndex]

i've been reading this and it started back in 2021 and no update until now 2023. No changes at all, and if an answer for a solutions took this long (2 years) and still no results, don't expect the website speed to change in a blink of an eye. lol

[Wildsage1]

This is a huge issue for me.  I can't get the performance above 5 on mobile and 14 on desktop.    Its hindering business.  Tried to move to shopify this weekend but to download the inventory and move it across is just beyond me at the minute.   THere must be a better solution and it needs done fast.   

[Girlvic]

I'm looking at moving to Shopify as well, but with over 1,000 items it's going to be a big job! I'm currently running a sale on items I only have 1 left of to try and reduce that number. But it took 4 days to get the sale prices showing!!! Too many issues. 😭 

I have 2 bug events in October and November and I do prefer my Square POS so I'll wait until after that, then during my quiet period sometime in December/January I'll get to work! 

[doc_choc]

We have similar challenges, under pressure from both our creative and marketing teams to make some changes...I'm trying my best to deflect as there are some many good aspects of Square!

[doc_choc]

Not sure my mobile score of 13 is much cause for celebration but I suppose, 5 it could always be worse. Hopefully they are working on this and will bring news of great performance improvements soon 😊

[Wildsage1]

I think I too am getting to the end of my rope on this one.   I've done everything conceivable and spent countless hours but nothing can fix the fact that it is the square platform holding my website speed back.   So frustrating.

These issues have been going on now for far too long

[doc_choc]

I have had poor core web vitals for some time score 13-16 out of 100, looking at the threads I could be doing worse but it really isn't good enough!

The coding does seem to impacting this and as this is coded in and un-editable there is very little we can do to improve this. We have checked all the image files and they are are minimized in size, removed anything that is likely to be slowing things down like videos (which is a shame as it impacts the visual, creative appeal of the site). The third party Cookiebot by Usercentrics really does seem to be impacting the speed too, if this could be looked at by the ECOM team (Cookiebot it would be nice if this was something Square offered so it could be formatted to fit in with the site design). I can understand the frustrations here as Shopify does seem to be leaving Square in the dust. 

[allan21]

Considering that I opened this thread in March 2021... it's now September 2025 and Square seems to have done nothing to fix these problems, it's pretty clear they don't care.

[doc_choc]

I can't deny that is a slow response. It would be interesting to see if the performance is UK related or of a global concern. I would imagine Square run off different servers around the world so it could be localized to the UK. 

@tranguyen do you know if there are any updates on this?

Many thanks Richard

[Girlvic]

Nope, I have the same issue in Australia. 😞 

[doc_choc]

Good to know but not so good if you know what I mean, hopefully they can turn the juice up....more thrust Captain 😊