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. 

[tranguyen]

I can appreciate your frustration @RHgifts and apology for al the inconvenience caused by this. 

Our team are continuously working on different elements to help improve Square Online site performance and loading speed is an ongoing effort. Since the last update, the team have provided a recent update in July on what they've been working on:

• Upgrading our backend tools and code to help sites work on more browsers and perform better, as well as optimised how we sized assets (images, etc.).
• Optimising our dependencies on other-parties infrastructure and upgrading our cache performances.

While there has been reduction and improvements in some areas, with some page styles performing better, there hasn't been any major changes to the loading speed as of now. This is an area the team will continue to focus and work on in the next few months.

I'll continue updating the thread as I find more information on the work our team are doing. 

[MichaelNewtown]

Hi @tranguyen,

is there any further word on this? I just tried to search my online catalogue and the browser was grinding just trying to display the characters as i typed! Firefox specifically says its my square site that is slowing the browser. Would be great to know what improvements of those recommended by Google have been made and what is planned.

Also am I right that improvements will be rolled out in all countries? I think this is the UK forum but I'm in Australia

thanks

Michael

[tranguyen]

Hey @MichaelNewtown, thank you for your post!

Improvements are applied to all Square Online sites and are rolled out to all countries. In this instance, the team are working on a number of initiatives to help improve website's speed in the background. I don't have any further specifics at the moment (aside from what have been shared previously) but I'm keeping my eyes out for further reports and will share them as I know more. 

[DrAmy]

Hello Team Square

What is the sit rep with improvements on Web Loading, in particular Mobile Loading times?

We moved over a few months back and recently fine tuned the site with smaller pictures etc. - Happy for you to check out and see where improvements can be made - 

The sites performance:

Mobile Load Time is 13.34 Seconds which is shocking to put it bluntly.

Mobile Interactivity * is 3706 Milliseconds (ideal is less than 200 milliseconds)

*The total time that a page is blocked from responding to user input, such as mouse clicks, or screen taps. An ideal speed is less than 200 milliseconds.

This is really bad for an E-commerce site. One of the reasons we wanted to move over was to improve our SEO before fully integrating payment systems. On this front it has not lived up to expectations. We are moving down Goggle rankings 🙁

Can you please provide a timeline estimate for when this will be improved & resolved? We don't want to switch providers as we have invested a lot of resources into this already. However, before committing anymore including POS systems we need to see a rapid improvement.

Thanks in advance 😀

[JJ_]

Hello @DrArmy 

This sounds like a good question for our Square Online team.

They can take a look at your site with you to help shine a light here, as they can look at your account alongside you to pinpoint what could be causing this behavior and outcome. Please reach out by phone when you have a moment by logging into your Square account and heading here.

P.S. Welcome to the Seller Community ✨

[DrAmy]

Hey @JJ_ 

Thanks for the reply.

Still not noticing any improvement on the mobile loading front (see below). Any update here?

Also, my SEO auditor is not detecting any of the Titles as H1 tiles when they are set to the largest Title size. Any reason why this may be happening?

Thanks,

Amy 

[Breffni]

Hi Amy, just stepping in for JJ here. 

Sorry to hear that you are still experiencing a slow load time with your site, did you manage to call our support team directly? This would need to go to our Square Online team. 

With regards to the H1 tiles, we are not trained and don't provide SEO consultation in the Seller Community. For more information on SEO for your specific website's needs, we recommend consulting an SEO expert.

However, in my experience, section titles are actually not H1. Section titles are typically H3. From looking into this, the only H1 element on the homepage would actually be the banner headline, which you can configure within your Square Online site overview. @DrAmy 

[Jsta]

Hello community, @allan21 @MichaelNewtown @RHgifts @MJD @tranguyen @Emma_ @pessosices @Helen @organico @Cesar123 @kellyj 

Like everyone here, the loading speed of my websites created with Square Online are too slow. I see that this problem has been around for more than 8 months. Do you have any information regarding how to resolve this issue please?

I don't see any improvement in Square Online product updates regarding the resolution of slow performance issues. We can't use your features with such slow performance. At this point, loading speed is a higher priority than any other features.

On the page of all products, randomly some descriptions do not appear even after the page has fully loaded, especially on mobile.

Could you help us solve these important performance issues?

[MJD]

Hello @Jsta!

Please do not mass tag users like this, they end up with masses of notifications from something that has minimal relevance to them - you can tag staff if you feel you've been missed for replies but usually you wont need to tag anyone as there's always someone looking at recent discussions. 

In regards to this, is the website actually slow or is Google's report claiming it is? Google look for very specific things and often their reports end up being irrelevant for this reason as they miss out a lot of the truth behind how well the site works.

It would also be useful if you share a link to the site here in order for us to see what is actually happening and if there are real errors on Square's side of things.

Thanks in advance for your response!

[allan21]

Hi @MJD - true that Google's timing reports don't always tell the whole story.

But... Google Search uses Google Page Speed to help rank search hits. So if you want your shop to be found in the world's largest search engine, you have to make Google happy 🙄

[Jsta]

Hello @MJD and thanks for your help.
I'm not used to writing on forums, I understand your rules and just wanted to bring people together on the subject, sorry for the inconvenience.

Regarding the website link, it's just an example site on which I'm testing Square's functionality.
Here is the link: www.pizza83.square.site

[MJD]

The site seems to run great for me! 

[organico]

It's not terrible but its also not up to par with the quickest sites on the web in terms of loading time and snappiness. 

It does seem like there have been loading time improvements since the last time I checked about 6 months ago. On the desktop and mobile versions. Still not snappy enough to be up to par for a modern professional ecommerce site IMO, but improvements nonetheless. 

I agree that as a restaurant, we are trying to compete with the user experience people have on apps like uber and doordash which have super clean user interface and are very snappy and responsive so we need quicker websites that will make it just as easy for people to order directly with us.

[notso]

Hi, i have just come across the above post and my site seems to be having very similar issues - descriptions disappearing once loaded and slow processing of images.

I have been so happy with the running of the site for over a year and a little concerned this could continue if i don't raise the issues with the support team. 

Can you please look into my site and check for any faults there maybe? 

https://notso-106444.square.site/

To me it feels like the issues have started since i setup the Cookie Captcha...

Many thanks

Charlie

[Jsta]

Hi @notso,

I also have my product descriptions that disappear on mobile from an iPhone XR. Could you tell me on which mobile device do you have this problem please?

[tranguyen]

Hey @notso, thank you for raising this. I had a look at the site on an iPhone 12 using both Google Chrome and Safari and it loads just fine for me with all the descriptions.

I did see that there are some issues with a particular Safari version (Safari 15.1) and our team are currently looking into this. If possible, can you let me know if you run into the same issue with description disappearing when checking the site using Google Chrome on the iPhone device? 

[notso]

Thank you for your quick reply! 

The loss of information/details happens once you click on a product then go back to menu…

Also I can see the descriptions are full length, this has only happened the last few week - it was a shorter description first 5-6 words which is must better - can this be changed? 

also I can confirm i have tried on both Safari & Chrome.

thx Charlie 

[tranguyen]

Thanks for the additional information @notso! I test this again on my end and once I added an item to cart, if I refresh the page, the description disappeared. I had to refresh again in order to see the description once more.

I've raised this with our engineering team so they can investigate further. It's likely related to the issue they are seeing with Safari 15.1 but I want to make sure the team looks into it with Google Chrome as well. 

Once I have an update from the team, I'll be sure to follow up and let you know right away. 

[notso]

I have and IPhone 11 and I have the same issues on my wife’s IPhone x

thx Charlie 

[notso]

Hi, have you in had any feedback from the tech team? The issue is still a major concern 😞

Thanks, Charlie 

[notso]