This is a question I get asked quite often because Squarespace is often the platform that people choose when they decide to build their own website. It has its pros and cons like any platform and performance can unfortunately be one of its cons.
It’s important to understand that at least 60% of your visitors are accessing your website from their mobile phone. Often this figure is much higher, in the region of 75% and it’s only going to keep getting higher. Search engines like Google are obviously well aware of this and that is why since July 2019, Google has been using mobile-first indexing, meaning it uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking.
Generally the content on your mobile version will be virtually identical to the content on your desktop version so the actual content that is indexed by Google will be unaffected. The key point here is that the speed in which your mobile version loads will be used as a performance metric – if your website is slow on mobile then your organic ranking on Google (and other search engines) will be negatively impacted.
And that’s not the only reason to be concerned… website visitors don’t like slow websites either and they are surprisingly impatient: Most mobile sites lose half of their visitors while loading according to Google. Under 3 seconds is the recommended page load time for websites on both mobile and desktop devices and if you analyze some of the top traffic-driving websites on the internet, you’ll find a similar pattern – they all have a load speed less than 4 seconds.
So yes! Increasing website speed on mobile is without doubt a big enough deal to switch platforms. But first you should check to see if there’s anything you can do to your Squarespace website to speed it up. Optimizing images is usually the best way to get a reduction in load time – make sure you’re using appropriately sized images and that you’ve compressed them to the smallest possible file size. Use an online image compression tool such as COMPRESSOR – you will need to re-upload all of your images after compressing them but I guarantee it will be worth the time and effort.
If you’ve done all you can to optimize the mobile version of your site on your current platform and you’re still not getting the kind of performance that Google recommends then switching to WordPress is a great option because it gives you complete control and there are dozens of optimization plugins (free and premium) to choose from to help you get your site running super fast.
When it comes to deciding between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, you want the option that gives you the most control and flexibility for your website and that means using the downloaded version (rather than hosted version) from WordPress.org. You’ll need to choose a hosting company to host the site for you and there are thousands to choose from. You don’t want to cut corners here, you want the best and the fastest.
We also have a host of resources that you can download to get more information on how to market your website.
This article was originally published in Paul Gough’s Cash is King Newsletter in March 2020
Flemming Arnott
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