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. 

[pessosices]

Hey @allan21 

Well that's super interesting and not so great.

Thanks so much for diving deep into this and doing all the legwork. Hopefully this is something that Square can improve, and quickly.

Any insights @Helen @kellyj ?

[Helen]

Hello! Thank you for sharing this @allan2 and for the tag @pessosices. We're taking a look and we'll post here as soon as we can.

[pessosices]

Sweeeet, thanks so much @Helen !

[allan21]

Thanks @Helen. Also tagging @tranguyen who said they'd look into the WebP images in my earlier post.

[tranguyen]

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. 

[allan21]

Thanks @tranguyen - looking forward to seeing those improvements soon!

[allan21]

In terms of timing, please note:

Faster sites will rank higher on Google Search starting in May 2021

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience

[organico]

Hey Tra, 

Any word on timeline of when this will be better? I've just built out the site and want to switch over from current provider but the slowness (especially on the ordering page) is truly too much. It doesn't react quick enough when you click the button that many customers will just assume the site isn't working. Its very rare to have to wait 10 full seconds for a page to load w/o any notice that its working or not. Do you expect some sort of fix within 1 month, 6 months, or more?

Thank you,

[tranguyen]

Hi @organico, thank you for letting us know. This is something I'll be able to feed back to the team as well.

Improving the speed and performance of Square Online site is always ongoing in the background. There is no set date as the team continue to work on different parts of the website to ensure they are performing as they should, especially on mobile. From the latest report, the team are doing a lot of cleanup in the back-end and check plugins for the site as these can slow down performances.

As the team continue their work on this, I'll keep an eye out for anything that may be of interests and share in this thread as well. 

[GenEngelhardt]

Hi @tranguyen, do you know if they've improved this? I've also just moved my website from Shopify to Square and am disappointed with the performance issues. 

The speed score of my website is similar and is mainly to do with render-blocking resources, server response time and unused javascript. This is something that the customer can't fix/improve so it will need to come from the Squareup Dev team.

[Breffni]

Hi @GenEngelhardt, thanks for your post. 

I'm sorry to hear that you're not fully satisfied with your Square Online site. 

Unfortunately, I don't have any updates since my last comment on this thread a couple of weeks ago. 

I hope to have a positive update to share soon. 

[Mc6]

Site loading is getting slower over the years I’m thinking of leaving square if we can’t get a better speed at loading my site so many customers are complaining about the speed of my site not loading fast enough 😩

[GenEngelhardt]

Hi @Breffni, any updates on these issues? If they're not rectified soon I'll look at using a different platform. Which, as a small business I REALLY cannot afford. Below is the performance score on Google's Page Page Speed tester, while mostly the Square website scores are good, the performance is HORRENDOUS! This seems to have been going on for years, it should not take your dev team this long to rectify. 

With users mostly using mobile these days, this really needs to be fixed. This is to do with needing to reduce unused JavaScript (2.82s), Preload Largest Contentful Paint image (1.38s), Reduce initial server response time (1.23s), Eliminate render-blocking resources (0.45s) and Reduce unused CSS (0.15s).

Google penalises websites that are slow to load, so this is detrimental to business. The Square team need to give an ETa on when this is going to befixed.

[k_atie]

Hey @GenEngelhardt, thank you for your post. I can appreciate your frustration here. 

We don't have any updates to share at this time. We'll be sure to update this thread whenever we have more to share. 

[GenEngelhardt]

Hi @k_atie, does square want to keep its customers using its website platform This has been the response for years which isn't really good enough

[Farmerscandleco]

Any update on this?????

[Lindak22]

As a new customer  of square this is very disappointing  to see the slow loading speed hasn't  been resolved after years of complaints. If I had of know this I would of looked elsewhere.   If this issue isn't resolved by the time my subscription is up, I'll have to look elsewhere.  

[Cesar123]

Any updates? 

[MJD]

Hi there @Cesar123!

All updates to square online are noted in the latest release of the square online update log. You can find the update log for the UK here: https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Square-UK-Product-Updates/Square-Online-release-notes-June-9-2021... 

As far as my knowledge goes, there are minimal changes to this yet, but square are working on it! I'll tag @tranguyen who could possibly give you a little extra info, if such is available.

[RHgifts]

@tranguyen Is there any update on this yet?? I am having the same issues with horrendous load speeds! For an e-commerce partnership this is not acceptable at all!  It is becoming so frustrating to the point that I am now looking into starting afresh with a new provider that can offer mug more flexibility and better load speeds. Which lets face it isn't difficult when my site is currently rated at 1/100 for mobile and 25/100 for desktop! The suggestions from google in improving this points to weebly...

Understandably customers are abandoning their carts as it is completely unacceptable to have to wait up to 12 seconds for a page to load. 

For a small business, this is devastating!