How Does the Site Search 360 Script Affect My Site Speed?
Our script is lightweight (~300 kilobytes raw and ~90KB gzipped; equivalent to a moderately-sized image file) and therefore unlikely to affect your website's performance in any meaningful way.
However, if you suspect that your website loads slower than usual after installing Site Search 360, we'll be happy to investigate.
Check your site's performance by using Google Lighthouse or Google PageSpeed Insights. SpeedCurve is another great tool to follow the performance of a site over time. The screenshot below demonstrates a performance audit report for the very domain you're reading this article on (docs.sitesearch360.com), which also uses our search script.
Note: To correctly assess the performance impact, the "before" state (i.e. the state prior to installing Site Search 360) needs to be captured in advance.
We do everything possible (and feasible) on our part to reduce the script's toll on performance.
We use gzipping to compress the script down to ~90 kilobytes. The cool thing about gzipped files is that they can be sent compressed in that format from the server, and browsers can unzip them and run them on the fly, which is a significant boost to performance. It means that, even though the script itself takes up ~300 kilobytes, your users only have to download 90 kilobytes, or less than a third of that size. Isn't that awesome?
We use code splitting to split the script into larger modules. For example, you won't have to load the filters module if you don't use filters.
Every module is cached indefinitely, so if we make a change to one module, it won't invalidate the cache of a different module.
Your site visitors only have to load the Site Search 360 scripts once, — the very first time they interact with the search on your site. After that, our search scripts are cached in their browsers until the cache gets purged.
We simplify everything to the maximum for increased speed.
We've optimized our rendering code, so it shouldn't block the main thread for a long period of time.
With every Site Search 360 script version, we implement more and more performance upgrades. Make sure you are using the latest v13 script version.
Site Search 360 assets are available for end-users via a Content Delivery Network (Cloudflare), which means that every page visitor downloads the search modules from the nearest server. This ensures that, no matter how far your site visitors are from our servers, they will get results delivered quickly and smoothly.
To further improve performance, here's what you can do on your side:
Make sure that you install our script correctly. The most common integration method would be to insert our script right before the closing <body> tag. This way, the script will not block the website rendering and will be loaded only after the HTML structure has been created.
If the code is inserted into the <head> section (even though we advise against it), do not use the async <script> attribute. Use defer instead, at all times.
Note: If the script is in any section other than <head>, using async is accepted, but should generally be avoided in favor of defer.
Alternatively, if you prefer having full control over your site performance and want to avoid adding any JavaScript code to your website, you can integrate our search via API — as long as your team has the necessary skills, time, and resources to configure the search settings, layout, and analytics tracking on your end.
If you run into any further issues, you can always reach out to us — we'll be happy to help!