How to Run a Squarespace Site Speed Audit in 10 Minutes

22 Jul

A speed audit sounds technical. It is not.

Most Squarespace site owners have never looked at how their site actually performs for real visitors. They test it on their own laptop, on a fast connection, with the page already cached, and think it seems fine.

A simple 10-minute audit using two free tools will tell you exactly where your site stands and what to fix. Here is the process.

Step 1: Run Google PageSpeed Insights (3 minutes)

Go to pagespeed.web.dev and enter your site URL. Run the test on Mobile, not Desktop. Mobile is where most of your visitors come from and it is what Google uses to determine your rankings.

When the results load, look at two things:

Field Data (Core Web Vitals) - This shows real user experience. If your Core Web Vitals pass here, your site is fast enough for SEO purposes.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - This should be under 2.5 seconds. If it is above that, images are almost certainly the reason.

Ignore the "Reduce unused JavaScript" warning. On Squarespace, that refers to platform code you cannot change.

Step 2: Check your page size with GTmetrix (3 minutes)

Go to gtmetrix.com and run a test on your homepage. Look at the "Page Details" section. The total page size should ideally be under 5 MB. If it is significantly above that, look at the waterfall chart to see which resources are largest. Images will almost always be at the top.

Step 3: Identify the problem images (2 minutes)

Go back to PageSpeed Insights and look at the "Opportunities" section. Any recommendation mentioning images is worth noting. Common ones include:

Properly size images
Efficiently encode images
Serve images in next-gen formats

These all mean the same thing: your images are too large.

Step 4: Fix image file sizes across your entire site (2 minutes to start)

This is where most speed audits stall. You know images are the problem but fixing them manually across an entire site is a project, not a quick task.

SquareOptimizer is a browser extension that scans your entire Squarespace site and compresses every image in one session. Open your Squarespace editor, click the SquareOptimizer icon, hit Scan, select all images, and hit Optimize. The extension handles everything. Nothing is downloaded, nothing is re-uploaded.

Start your audit and optimize images on Squarespace today. Scanning is free.

Step 5: Re-test after fixing (done)

After compression, run PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix again. Your LCP score should drop significantly and your total page size should be dramatically smaller. Most sites see a 50 to 80% reduction in total image weight after running SquareOptimizer.

Save both sets of results so you have a before and after comparison.