In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary and Martin dig into what “page size” and “page weight” actually mean for developers, users, and search engines.
They discuss exploding web page sizes: median mobile homepages hit 2.3 MB in 2025 Web Almanac (up 3x from 2015), key insights for developers on page weight definitions, Googlebot’s crawl limits, HTML bloat from structured data/images, and why size still hurts UX on slow connections despite faster networks.
If you build or maintain websites, this conversation will help you rethink how much data your pages ship, where bloat really comes from, and why page weight still matters even as connections get faster.
Resources: Web Almanac → https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/
HTML living standard → https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
How page speed helps with conversions → https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-data/
Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr106-transcript
Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt
Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral
Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.
#SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch
Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes
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0:14
Will page size matter if 90% user or from areas which have access to faster internet and 5G…
In some cases we cant keep page size small as clients wants hero section with video and lot of images even if they are webp keping page size could be and issue with react based website as i have seen react based website lose google ranking and traffic when redesigned with 90% same content, possibly how developer coded the website with no proper optimization.
好极了
3rd comment 😀
I don't understand how heavy sites are nowdays. If I make a unoptimized website it's still twice as light as the lightest alternative and for most alternative websites it's several times lighter. I'm not even good at developing websites.
1st comment ❤