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. 

[SJIllustrates]

The load times are absolutely shocking

@MJD it look 9 seconds to load your home page when I opened your site just now, I don't think that's as quick as you think it is. I don't have slow internet - only Square sites are this slow.

I followed all of Google's Page Speed Insights - including removing my Instagram connection and compressing images and still it takes 9 seconds to load because of the huge amounts of unused javascript. 

For this to be a problem nearly a year after this thread started (and the issue didn't just start when this thread opened) is pretty shocking on Square's side.

I could save 9.9 (!!!!!!!) seconds of load time if Square would fix their javascript junk.

[tamsinchatfield]

Hello everyone, my site speed hasn't got any better. A report has come back at 11 seconds. When I go onto my website to check something it frustrates me let alone a customer. I'm having more people look at the site but then click off. 

So I'm working so hard in promoting my website then they get there and give up. I love the ordering side of things and being able to send my customers payment links. 

As a website I am losing customers. They message me to order instead of going through my website. 

I am losing customers, I am thinking of looking at other platforms. 

[SarahCrocker]

Hi

As has been mentioned, the speeds on square are terrible.  

I have compressed and reduced the size of all of my images. 

I've been coding websites for decades and decided to join square so I didn't have to build the site from scratch.

I'm assuming the lack of speed is to do with the number of users square is squeezing on to each server.  That, or poorly written code.

I'll definitely be moving to a faster provider at some point. 

[shopfybr]

I too am having problems with painfully slow page loads. I actually think this has gotten worse in the last few months. Hope we have resolution on this soon!

[SarahCrocker]

After looking at a similar website to mine, on a well-known known rival platform, their speeds put Square/Weebly to shame.

Square/Weebly really need to up their game.

My site appears to slow down whenever a page is visited that has online store content. 

I won't hold my breath that Square/Weebly fix this issue anytime soon.

[Inannas1]

totally agree. I was trying to show a vendor something and she was using her mobile phone and EVERYTHING was loading so slow...no way people these days willo wait on a page of NOTHING...so weird. I think they pack too much in to the whole "easy to use" concept, and havent many choices with the set up of the pages. I mean the "elements" it is kind of a dinosaur. 

[Greytoofast]

So is there a way to use a different website, hosted on a different server and then embed the shop components into it?  Obviously Square is not going to be removing the unused and intrusive javascript in their weebly online sites

[k_atie]

Hey @Greytoofast, welcome to the Seller Community! 

That's a great question. We have partnerships with websites such as Woocommerce and Ecwid that will allow you to build your online shop on their platform and integrate Square as a payment processor. 

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any further questions!

[jimmyqpham]

Big issue here!  What's going on Square?  Need to up your game.

[Andes]

Has anyone had a slow loading issue resolved?
Isn't there a way to delete the cdn or remove unnecessary javascript before solving it?
Both of these have a huge impact on website loading.

[k_atie]

Hey @Andes, welcome to the Community! Sorry to hear your website is running slower than expected. Would you mind sharing your website with me so I could try replicating the issue on my end? Thanks!

[Andes]

@k_atie 
https://www.jingstarcloud.com/
This is my website
Too much invalid javascript
please help

[Andes]

I have tried various methods
(such as lazy loading images or javascript)
Google scores still low

[k_atie]

Thank you for that @Andes. I have tried it on my side and the website seems to be loading at a normal speed. Would you be able to conduct a speed test using this website and let me know what results in you get? This will help me further with my investigation.

[Andes]

@k_atie 
I am using "lighthouse" for testing

Below is my test link
Final test results mostly show slow loading on mobile devices

https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jingstarcloud.com%2F&stra...

[Greytoofast]

@k_atie @tranguyen 
Ive tried checking performance using google lighthouse and it is too absolutely abysmal.   2/100.   Ive optimized all images prior to uploading to the square site to minimize load times but the javascript keeps interrupting things.  View the mobile report here:
https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mrbacon.jp%2F&strategy=mo...

Is there a way to not use squares site and then have all the payments and inventory management embedded to another site like wordpress or a gatsby site or something? 

[k_atie]

Hey both @Andes and @Greytoofast, thank you both for providing that information. Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with how Javascript works, so I would recommend getting in touch with our developers on our API forum, as they would be more familiar with how the backend could be affecting the speed of your website. 

Here is the Square API forum. 

Hope this helps!

[Greytoofast]

The backend is not affecting the speed of the site.  API has nothing to do with this issue either.  The frontend`s unnecessary javascript is the issue.  As there is no way to edit the frontends code at all, this has to be done in the WIX template that is being used by Square.   

[MUDE]

I have compressed all images etc on my site, every single image is taking too long to load, average page is taking 30 to excess of 60 seconds to load, this thread is years old and clearly nothing has changed, if other providers can offer the service running as it should be why cant square ? 2 years on would love to hear what response i get. 'we are still working on it, cant give a timescale' same old responses here on pretty much every topic raised by any user.

[Breffni]

Hi @MUDE, if you've followed all the troubleshooting steps on this thread, don't hesitate to get in contact with our Customer Support team directly so that they can take another look and escalate to the Square Online team if necessary. 

[MUDE]

Hi Alegra, Thankyou for your reply, you have everybody complaining about the same thing, clearly users have reached the point where they feel they have to give up and move providers. What are customer services going to do for me if its the same issue for all users. What progress exactly has been made since this thread was opened years ago ?