Top Tricks to Make A Weebly Site Faster

If you’re like most Weebly users, you were attracted to the easy drag and drop website editor as a way to quickly and easily publish a website. You may also have noticed that your new website loads slowly. Drag-and-drop builders like Weebly tend to add a lot of extra code, scripts and large images, and all of that takes time to load.

Top Tricks to Make A Weebly Site Load Faster

Poor page speed can hurt the user experience and, to a degree, your search rankings. When considering search engine optimization of your Weebly site, page speed is one of the issues worth working on. Luckily, there are a few tricks to getting your Weebly site to load faster, which are discussed below.

Why does page speed matter? Briefly, page speed is a huge part of the user experience for your website. How annoying is it when you visit a site and find that it loads slowly, or when a site continues to load as you try to interact with it. Google says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, though it also says it will show the most relevant content even if page experience is sub-par. So content comes first, but you’ll still want your website to be easy to use and quick to load. For Weebly users, that last issue is very challenging since there are limited things you can do to help. Even if you realize modest improvements in the page speed for your Weebly site, it’s worth the effort though.

USE THE GOOGLE PAGESPEED INSIGHTS TOOL TO CHECK PAGE SPEED FOR FREE.

The link above will take you to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, a free method to test your website’s speed, and identify issues. Focus on the Core Web Vitals in the report. According to web.dev, a good page shows its largest content within 2.5 seconds, responds to interactions within 200 milliseconds, and keeps layout shift at 0.1 or less.

So, what can be done to increase your Weebly website’s page speed?

1. Use a CDN to cache your site and improve load times

This should be the first step for any site that’s built on Weebly. A CDN is a “content delivery network,” basically a globally distributed network of servers that stores a version of your website to more quickly help it load to users who are geographically closer. Some CDNs can also compress JavaScript, HTML, and images to further improve load times. Cloudflare offers a free plan, and Sucuri offers a paid website firewall and CDN.

Weebly already serves sites through its own hosting, so check how a third-party CDN works with your Weebly plan and custom domain before changing your DNS settings.

2. Compress and reduce the size of your images.

This is one of the most effective ways to cut the load time of your Weebly website. Oversized photos are a common reason pages load slowly. By uploading appropriately sized pictures, you can dramatically decrease your Weebly site’s load times and improve page speed. Most images these days are very large – even those that you take with your cell phone can be several mb in size. That’s too much for a website, and you should create appropriately sized images. To do that, there are a few options.

First, and the most professional way, is to use a photo editor like Photoshop, Canva, or GIMP. You’ll want to open your photo in the photo editor, then export the photo at the size it will actually display on your site (often between 640 and about 2,000 pixels wide). Pixel width is what matters; the DPI setting doesn't change file size on the web. Export photos as compressed .jpg (or .webp if your setup supports it) and aim for well under 1 MB per image.

3. Choose a simple Weebly theme.

The Weebly theme you choose is essentially the backbone of your website. It’ll dictate what fonts and colors are used, and what backgrounds are on your pages. That makes it incredibly important to choose a simple, and therefore faster loading, Weebly theme. Some older Weebly themes are also not built using “responsive” design. That means that they will not dynamically resize assets on the page for the device used to access them. Responsive design became popular as mobile browsing grew, and it is now the standard on the internet. If you built your Weebly website many years ago, check to make sure you’re using a modern theme.

Weebly makes it easy to review how new themes would look on your website. Just visit the Themes page in your editor to take a look.

4. Limit the number of Weebly Apps you install.

Each Weebly app adds time to your websites loading and reduces your page speed. It’s important therefore to only install apps that you need, and to uninstall apps you’re not using. This improvement in page speed will be small, but every little bit helps. You can also improve the pagespeed by ensuring the apps you use are from quality developers with good ratings. If you see a drop in page speed after installing a Weebly app, it may be best to uninstall it and find another way to accomplish what you want.

5. Manually edit the HTML, CSS, and Javascript to improve your Weebly Pagespeed.

This last recommendation is for advanced users/web developers only. Weebly lets you edit the HTML and CSS of your theme from the Themes tab of your dashboard, and you can add custom code with the Embed Code element. Weebly warns that theme changes can affect every page of your site, so back up the theme first. This allows those with advanced web development knowledge to implement the recommendations from the Google Pagespeed tool.

Much of the improvements can be found by editing the HTML and CSS of the theme you’re using. Also implement script loading optimization, including ordering the scripts to load with usability in mind.

Advanced users can also use embed codes to bypass standard Weebly widgets for things like video headers and images. These two in particular are huge offenders in page speed optimization on Weebly.

The good news about this advanced Weebly page speed optimization is that load times can improve noticeably. If you’re not comfortable doing this work yourself, you can hire a web developer to help.