SQUARESPACE · CMS AUDIT

A brutally honest Squarespace website audit

Squarespace makes the prettiest entry-level websites on the internet. It also serves them with fonts, animations, and gallery scripts that can drag a homepage's mobile load time past six seconds without trying. ShiteScore tells you which of yours is doing that, and how to fix it without breaking the design.

£9.99, one-off. Free score in 30 seconds. Full 15-page report in your inbox in five minutes.

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What makes ShiteScore different on Squarespace

Squarespace gives you less control over your code than WordPress or Webflow, but more than Wix. The audit is calibrated to that reality. Every recommendation is something you can do from inside Squarespace's editor or via a Code Injection block — never something that needs you to edit raw template code.

Index page weight. Squarespace's Index Pages are visually beautiful and load every section in one go. A typical Index Page homepage weighs 5–8MB before any scripts. The audit flags Index Pages that are over budget and lists the heaviest sections.

Custom font count. Squarespace's font picker offers Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts side by side. A typical site loads 3–5 distinct font families with 2–4 weights each, totalling 200–400KB of font assets blocking render. The audit counts your fonts and ranks them by impact.

Gallery and slideshow weight. Squarespace Gallery sections, Slideshows, and Banner Slideshows all load every image at full resolution by default. The audit identifies galleries that need lazy-loading or compression and tells you which images to re-upload.

What we typically find on Squarespace sites

In rough order of impact:

Image weight in galleries. Photographer, designer, and architect templates all suffer from this. A 12-image gallery with no compression weighs 15MB+.

Too many fonts. Aesthetic preference is fine; mobile performance pays the bill. Three fonts is enough; five is too many.

Animation overload. Scroll-triggered animations on every section. Each one adds JavaScript and forces a paint. The audit flags pages where this is meaningful.

Code Injection misuse. Custom analytics, custom chat widgets, custom tracking pixels added via Code Injection without async/defer. Often the single biggest performance fix.

Missing schema. Squarespace ships some structured data but most users miss the optional fields. The audit flags which would matter most for your site.

Mobile typography too big. Default templates often render headlines at desktop sizes on mobile, pushing real content below the fold and tanking LCP scores.

15 pages, six categories. Every fix written for Squarespace specifically, with editor paths and Code Injection snippets where relevant. £9.99 one-off. 7-day refund — we'll ask what went wrong, but we won't argue.

so. how shite is your site?

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FAQ

Reasonable questions.

Is this actually called ShiteScore?

Yes. It's called ShiteScore because that's the word people use when they look at their own website. The brand is the joke that's already in your head.

Will you ring me afterwards?

No. The whole product exists because we're sick of being rung up by agencies. We don't even have a phone number.

What if my score is really shite?

Then the report is more useful, not less. The lower the score, the more low-hanging fruit. We don't sugar-coat, but we also don't shame.

Refund policy?

7 days. If the report genuinely isn't useful to you — not just "I didn't like my score" — reply to your report email with the word "refund" and it's done within an hour. We'll ask what went wrong so we can improve it, but we won't argue.

Is this AI-generated slop?

The crawl and scoring are real data — PageSpeed Insights, a live site crawl, security header checks, DNS lookups. The fix steps are a mix: common, well-understood issues are served from a curated library of pre-reviewed, platform-specific instructions written and checked by a human. Novel or site-specific issues are generated by Claude AI from your actual audit data. Nothing is generic filler.

Which platforms do you support?

We detect your CMS automatically. WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow all get platform-specific fix steps — naming the exact menu, plugin, or setting you need. WordPress sites also get a plugin version check: if your plugins are significantly out of date, we flag it with guidance on updating safely. For custom-built sites, we give you the general technical approach.