Appsntips:

I decided to move my blog away from Squarespace. The main reason behind the move was that Squarespace is a full-fledged website builder and not necessarily focused on publishers. That meant, I had to deal with many unwanted problems. The biggest problem being the site speed. My website was incredibly slow on Squarespace and I wanted something fast and nimble.

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Since the backend of Squarespace is built to help you create a website with simple drag and drop tools, it is bloated. That means the backend is very slow and you will feel it every time you create a post.

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Another reason Squarespace is not good for publishers is website speed. Google punishes you heavily for a slow website, and my blog on Squarespace was excruciatingly slow. It constantly scored below 10 and 40, in mobile and desktop page speeds respectively. That not only means that Google was not ranking my articles, it also meant readers had a bad experience on my website.

This completely jives with my experience. Jakob Nielsen, a web usability expert, explains that slow response times are the worst offender against web usability: “Users don’t care why response times are slow. All they know is that the site doesn’t offer good service: slow response times often translate directly into a reduced level of trust and they always cause a loss of traffic as users take their business elsewhere.”