Page weight, crawl limits, these are things that you probably don’t give much thought to on your website, but here are three important stats to keep in mind:
- Page size growth has gone 3x in a decade
- 2,362 KB is the median mobile homepage today
- Google’s default crawl limit per URL is 15 MB
Do you know how heavy your website is? Not how it looks, or whether the contact form works. How heavy it is. How much data does a visitor’s phone have to download just to load your homepage?
Most business owners don’t think about this, but Google does, and if our digital overlords at Google are concerned with page weight, you should be as well.
Why does Google care about page weight?
Web pages are getting fat. This isn’t referring to total website size; we’re talking about individual page weight.
Back in 2015, the median mobile homepage weighed around 845 KB. By mid-2024, that same median had ballooned to 2,362 KB. That’s the 3x increase we mentioned above, and it happened in a decade.
So what? We hear you, but trust us, it matters.
Internet speeds have gotten faster, sure, but page sizes have grown faster than mobile connection speeds, especially for people in rural areas, developing markets, or anyone roaming on satellite internet. If you are travelling and connecting through metered satellite internet, you’ll quickly become aware of how much data websites consume when you see your roaming bill. Every unnecessary kilobyte becomes a real slap in the face.
What does Google’s crawler do with your page?
If you care about ranking in search (which you should), it’s important to know that Googlebot, the software Google uses to crawl and index your site, doesn’t have unlimited patience. It operates with crawl limits.
There’s a 15 MB default across Google’s crawl infrastructure, where each URL gets its own allocation. The images, CSS files, and JavaScript your page loads are all fetched separately. Google’s public documentation states that Googlebot crawls the first 2 MB of a supported file type and the first 64 MB of a PDF. If your page content or code is bloated, there’s a real chance some of it simply doesn’t get seen.
Again, this is kinda crazy: If your page is loading a mountain of unnecessary code, Google’s crawler might give up before it even reaches the stuff that matters. That could be your products, services, or calls to action. It’s like hosting an open home and piling so much furniture in the hallway that the real estate agent can’t even get to the kitchen.
What is all of this a problem?
Faster websites tend to have better retention and conversion rates, so if your page loads slowly, people leave. They don’t wait. They go to your competitor. That means the issue we are discussing here becomes a revenue problem.
Google doesn’t crawl every page on the internet every day. It prioritises. If your site is bloated and slow to crawl, Google might not index your newest content as quickly (or at all). Your brilliant new blog could sit invisible in search results for weeks longer than it needs to.
Also, and somewhat most importantly, a significant chunk of your potential customers are browsing on phones with patchy connections. A 2,362 KB page on a slow 4G connection is a very different experience from the same page on fibre broadband. You might never notice the problem because you’re testing your own site on your office Wi-Fi.
What can be done about page weights?
Over the years, Google has asked web admins to add more and more structured data to their pages. Schema markup for products, reviews, events, FAQs, breadcrumbs, etc. All of that is code that users never see, but it still adds weight.
As a business owner, you’re not a developer; you just want customers to find you, like what they see, and get in touch. To help reduce your page weight, you can try tricks like:
- Image compression
- Smarter use of JavaScript
- Cutting unnecessary plugins
- Being thoughtful about which structured data you need versus which you’re adding out of habit
However, most business owners don’t have the time, the tools, or the technical knowledge to audit their own page weight, let alone fix it. That’s completely understandable, you’re running a business, not a web development agency.
We do that kind of work, however, and know how to ensure the technical foundations of your website aren’t quietly undermining everything else. A slow, bloated site is a leaky bucket. You can keep pouring ad spend in, but you’ll never fill it.
If you’d like to know how your site is performing on page speed, crawl efficiency, and technical SEO, that’s exactly the kind of audit we do. Get in touch and let’s have a look under the hood.
