How to optimise your images for your Squarespace website

Having really large images (big file sizes) can really slow down your website, impacting not only how easy your website is to use but also your SEO rankings.

Nobody likes a slow-loading website, especially when browsing on the go on the mobile. I don’t know about you but because we often lead hectic lifestyles, multi-tasking on the go, I am not very patient waiting for a website to load and will just give and try another company’s website. First impressions count.

How Squarespace handles your uploaded images

Squarespace does a great job of making your website as fast as possible on different screen sizes and devices. It does this by automatically creating seven variations of each image you upload, to ensure the images looks great on any screen size. The widths the system creates are:

• 100 pixels

• 300 pixels

• 500 pixels

• 750 pixels

• 1000 pixels

• 1500 pixels

• 2500 pixels

NOTE: Images added through Site Styles (background images and site-wide banner images) load at their original dimensions! So be careful with the file sizes of these images.

However, it is important to format your images in the correct way before you upload them to Squarespace to get the most out of this functionality.

Here are my tips for how to format your images before you upload them to your Squarespace website:

• use .jpg or .png files

• use images that are 500 KB or less

• make sure your images are formatted in the RGB colour mode (this is what is used for screens to ensure the best colour match to the original)

• Squarespace recommends using images that are between 1500 and 2500 pixels wide

• Finally use image compression software to make your images file sizes as small as possible (see my tip below)

My main time-saving tip - the image compression software I recommend

Before I upload any of my optimised images to Squarespace, I run them through TINYPNG - which is a smart image file compression online software that uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size. This is a big time saver!

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Need more help?

If you need help optimising your Squarespace website I offer a Squarespace Maintenance Service, as well as a Squarespace Website Audit service to help you understand how to technically improve your website.