Use lazy loading on your images and get a faster Squarespace site

Fast loading times on a website or online shop are essential for both user experience and SEO.

We often see problems with websites that have lots of images and galleries, such as those belonging to estate agents, photographers and architects. But all websites can benefit from faster loading times. Some just more than others.

There is a lot you can do yourself – for example, reducing the size of images, which we always recommend. But if you have a lot of images on your site, this will not always solve the problem.

The reason is that when you load the site, you load all the images. And this applies not only to Squarespace websites but to websites on all platforms.

One of the options you can use to improve the loading time of your website or webshop is to use Lazy Loading, which means that images are only loaded when they are about to enter the user's browser, instead of all images loading immediately when the page is opened.

Squarespace has some ‘built-in’ lazy load effects in their code, but we have found that this is not always enough – mainly because the site feels slow for users.

We have had good results using this plugin called Lazy-Loading Images for Squarespace, which is inexpensive, a one-time expense, and works really well. We have used it on the website of estate agent Ole Lindgreen (see the site here) and the website of the architectural firm Nøhr og Sigsgaard (see the site here) and have seen noticeable effects immediately.

You can also implement lazy load with custom code, but this is an affordable and stable solution. Buy this plugin here

If you need help setting up this plugin or other custom code for Squarespace, please write to us at mail@squarebusiness.digital or fill out the form here