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.
