I Scanned 10 Squarespace Sites With SquareOptimizer. Here Is What I Found.

Nobody publishes real Squarespace image size data

Every guide about Squarespace image optimization tells you to keep images under 250 KB. Almost none of them show you what typical Squarespace sites actually look like before anyone touches the images.

I scanned 10 real Squarespace sites using SquareOptimizer to get that data. Here is what I found.

The sites I scanned

I scanned a mix of site types to get a representative picture: two portfolio sites, two online stores, two photography sites, two small business service sites, one restaurant, and one blog. All were live sites that had been active for at least six months.

The results

Across 10 sites, the average image file size before optimization was 1.84 MB. The largest single image found was a 9.2 MB hero image on a photography site. The smallest average was 420 KB on a recently launched blog whose owner had been careful about image sizes from the start.

Total image weight per site ranged from 38 MB on the blog to 847 MB on one of the online stores, which had over 280 product images.

After running SquareOptimizer with a 250 KB target:

• Average image size dropped from 1.84 MB to 210 KB, a reduction of about 89%
• Total page weight across all sites dropped by an average of 76%
• The online store with 280 product images went from 847 MB to 68 MB of total image weight
• None of the sites had visible image quality differences after optimization

What this means for load times

On a standard 4G mobile connection, each MB of data takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds to download. A page with 8 MB of images takes 2.4 to 4 seconds on images alone. A page with 800 KB of images takes 0.24 to 0.4 seconds.

The photography site with an average image size of 3.1 MB was loading in over 8 seconds on mobile. After optimization to 250 KB average, that dropped to under 2 seconds.

The pattern across all 10 sites

Every site had the same pattern: images uploaded from phones or downloaded from stock sites without compression. Nobody had done a systematic image audit. Nobody knew how large their images actually were. All of them improved dramatically after one optimization session.

How to check your own site

SquareOptimizer scans your Squarespace site for free. It shows you every image and its current file size across all pages. You can see exactly what you are dealing with before spending anything.

Scan your Squarespace site with SquareOptimizer and see your image sizes. Scanning is always free.