From a 62 to a 98 — A Squarespace Rebuild That Actually Performs
A home service business in northwest Toledo came to us running on Squarespace, and like most Squarespace sites, it looked fine but performed terribly. Their PageSpeed score was sitting at 62.
That's a slow site, and slow sites lose customers, especially on mobile where people bounce if a page takes more than a couple seconds to load.
Here's what we did:
Moved off Squarespace entirely.
Squarespace is a website builder, not a performance platform. It's bloated by design because it has to work for every possible use case. We rebuilt the site on our own platform, built specifically for local service businesses, so there's no dead weight in the code.
Compressed and optimized every image and video.
Obviously if you're loading full-resolution photos and video straight off a phone, the page is going to crawl. We resized, compressed, and converted everything to modern formats so it loads fast without losing quality.
Put the whole site behind a CDN.
Instead of every visitor pulling data from one server, the CDN serves content from a location closer to them. That alone shaves real time off load speed.
Stripped out the code that wasn't doing anything.
Old plugins, unused scripts, extra tracking pixels, all the stuff that piles up on a website over time. If it wasn't earning its place, it got cut.
Minified and combined the code.
All the extra spacing, formatting, and separate CSS/JS files that make code readable for humans are dead weight for a browser. We compressed it all down and combined files where we could so the browser isn't making a dozen extra requests just to render the page.
Removed render-blocking resources.
A lot of Squarespace sites load scripts and stylesheets in a way that forces the browser to stop and wait before it can show anything. We restructured that so the important content shows up first and everything else loads in behind it.
Added lazy loading for images below the fold.
No reason to load a photo of the team or a gallery shot before someone even scrolls down to see it. We set it up so images only load as the visitor actually gets to them.
Set up proper caching.
Repeat visitors shouldn't have to redownload the whole site every time they come back. We configured caching so return visits load almost instantly.
Optimized fonts.
Custom fonts are another thing that quietly slows a page down if they're not handled right. We limited font weights to what's actually used and loaded them in a way that doesn't block the page.
Cleaned up the DOM.
Squarespace tends to wrap everything in layers and layers of unnecessary divs and containers. We simplified the actual page structure, which helps both load speed and how easily search engines and screen readers can read the page.
The Results
That mobile jump matters most since most local searches happen on a phone. A faster site means fewer people leaving before the page even loads, which means more calls booked for a home service business that runs on same-day service calls.
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