Site speed
Why Your Squarespace Site Is Still Slow After the LCP Fix
SEO title: Why Your Squarespace Site Is Slow: 7 Fixes After LCP | NoJoke Agency Slug: /insights/squarespace-site-speed Meta description: The fade-in fix gets most Squarespace sites from red to amber. These are the seven causes we find next, in the order we find them, and what fixes each.
The fade-in animation fix gets most Squarespace sites from failing to borderline. This post is about what's left after that: the seven things we find on slow sites we audit, ordered by how often they turn out to be the cause.
Squarespace hosting is fast. When a Squarespace site is slow, it is almost always because of something that was added to it.
Measure the right thing first
Run the homepage and your most-visited page through PageSpeed Insights. Look at the top section, field data from real Chrome users, before the lab score underneath.
Three numbers matter. LCP (how long until the main content appears) should be under 2.5 seconds. INP (how long the page takes to respond to a tap or click) should be under 200 milliseconds. CLS (how much the layout jumps while loading) should be under 0.1.
If your site has too little traffic for field data, use the lab results, but read them as a direction, not a verdict. A lab mobile score of 70 on a site that passes in the field is not a problem worth paying to fix.
1. Third-party scripts
This is the most common cause we find. A chat widget, an Instagram feed, a review widget, a heatmap tool, a Meta pixel, two analytics tags from two different agencies. Each one downloads its own JavaScript on every page, and most of them compete for the browser's attention exactly when a visitor first taps something. That is what wrecks INP.
Fix: open Settings, then Developer Tools, then Code Injection, and list every script. Then check every Code Block and Embed Block on the site. Remove anything nobody can name a reason for. Load chat widgets only when someone clicks a "Chat" button. Replace an inline Calendly embed with a button that opens the booking page. If you need several tracking tags, put them in one Google Tag Manager container.
2. Too many fonts
Every font family and every weight is a separate file. We regularly open sites with three families and seven weights, chosen one at a time over two years of edits. Fonts also cause layout shift when the fallback font is replaced by the real one at a different width.
Fix: two families, three or four weights in total. If you upload custom fonts, use WOFF2 files and set font-display: swap in the @font-face rule. Remove weights from Site Styles that no text on the site uses.
3. Video in the first screen
A background video in the hero is the most expensive design decision on a Squarespace site. On mobile it often becomes the LCP element, and it loads before anything a visitor came for.
Fix: use a still image on mobile and keep the video for desktop, or compress the video to a short loop under 3 MB. If the video is there because it looked good in the design review, test the page without it. Most clients don't miss it.
4. Pages that do too much
Fluid Engine makes long pages easy to build. A homepage with 18 sections, three Summary Blocks pulling blog posts, products and events, and a 40-image gallery is fifteen pages' worth of content loaded at once.
Fix: keep the homepage to what a first-time visitor needs to decide where to go next. Move the gallery to its own page. Keep one Summary Block per page and limit it to the six or eight most recent items.
5. Images in galleries and carousels
Squarespace serves resized versions of your uploads, but it starts from what you uploaded. Galleries and carousels are where 6 MB phone photos end up, twenty at a time. Our SEO checklist covers the basics: under 500 KB, 2500 pixels wide at most, JPEG or WebP.
Fix: re-export the images in your biggest galleries and replace them. On a gallery-heavy site this is often the single largest saving after scripts.
6. Things that push the layout around
CLS problems on Squarespace usually come from four places: a cookie banner or announcement bar that appears after the page has drawn, embedded widgets that load late and push content down, custom code that inserts elements above existing content, and fonts swapping (see point 2).
Fix: give late-loading embeds a fixed height with CSS (min-height on their container) so the space is reserved before they arrive. Keep banners as overlays rather than elements that push the page down.
7. Custom code that loads everywhere
The common pattern: jQuery loaded in the site header to power one effect on one page, plus three plugins bought from code shops, each loading on every page whether it's used there or not.
Fix: move page-specific code into that page's own header injection (page settings, then Advanced). Rewrite small jQuery effects in plain JavaScript. Add defer to script tags that don't need to run before the page draws. Our custom code library has lightweight versions of the effects we see most often.
What you can't change
Squarespace's own JavaScript and the server it runs on are not editable. That's fine. A Squarespace site built with restraint passes Core Web Vitals in field data. It will rarely score 100 in the lab test, and it doesn't need to.
The order we work in
Fade-in fix, if not already done.
Scripts: remove, consolidate, delay.
Hero video and homepage length.
Fonts.
Gallery images.
Layout shift sources.
Custom code cleanup.
Then re-test, and wait 28 days for the field data to update before judging the result. Field data is a rolling average of real visits.
Questions we get
Does PageSpeed affect Google rankings? Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, but a small one next to content and relevance. The bigger reason to fix speed is that slow pages lose visitors before they've read anything.
Will switching templates make my site faster? On Squarespace 7.1, no. All 7.1 templates run on the same engine; a template is a starting design, not a different codebase. What's on the page decides the speed.
Should I upgrade my plan for better performance? No. Every plan runs on the same hosting.
My score changes every time I test. Why? The lab test runs once, on a simulated mid-range phone, from a server somewhere. Variation of 5 to 10 points between runs is normal. Field data is the stable number.
Can you do this for us? Yes. Speed work is part of every build, and a standalone performance and SEO audit with fixes on an existing site is usually six to twelve hours.
