How to increase page load speed?

[beefolks1]

I checked the page speed of my website (through services like LightHouse, PageSpeed, etc), and it royally sucks, sitting right around a 9-12.  I've tried compressing graphic files and making certain they fall within the size recommended by Square, with no luck.  What else can I try?  

[maxpete]

Tagging @uniwebdigital, @Donnie-M, and @ryanwanner for potential ideas!

[Donnie-M]

@beefolks1 I understand what you are going for and what you want to achieve.  I want to caution you as I have seen this thread before, and the most important thing is to make sure your site has all the photos up to date products and is laid out well.  Page load speeds are a secondary and even tertiary concern.

Personally that is a pretty good load time.  You get the basics and images fill in.  For example, mine will score an 11 (bad) on pagespeed, but chick fil a scores a 10.  Wow the millions and gazillions of dollars for chick fil a and my site is performing similar.

Those metric sites are good info, but they are misleading if you ask me.  Craigslist on the other hand is a text heavy no frills site and it scores a 60 on performance...way way way better..but do you really want that for your business?

I just wanted to put it into perspective.  Ask some friends to go to the site and ask their opinion.  Did it load ok?  was it quick enough?  try mobile and desktop etc.

TL:DR  Most of the speed is on square's end and not much you can do.

Hope this puts it into perspective.

[beefolks1]

Donnie,

Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, their conversion rate increased by 2%.  According to my tests, my speed index is as high as 24 seconds on mobile.  If I am able to drop that down to 4 seconds, that enables a huge increase in sales over my holiday season (and potentially a five-figure dollar increase over the course of a year).

With regards to Chick Fil A - Chick Fil A is not making money off their website.  They make money off their restaurants and whatever mobile app they are using.  It is beneficial for them to optimize their app.  And even if you order from their restaurants through the website on your phone, their performance index jumps up to 30+ for order.chickfila, with a speed index of 11.6 seconds.  They are definitely optimizing something better than I am.

Craigslist is not a comparison.  It is not a shopping site.

As for 'asking friends' - I can load the pages myself.  No, they are not loading fast enough.  If I was shopping on my site, I would get impatient with the load time on my phone.  Even the load time on the computer is slow.  And that is testing across multiple phones and multiple computers.

On my last website, I was able to to do the optimization myself.  With square, I don't have access to the programming to make the needed changes.  That does not mean that other people have not found workarounds.  Hence, this post.

My next deep dive into a rabbit hole involves using something like cloudflare to pre-cache the pages. I have not seen a discussion of this with regards square, so no idea if it would work.