How big should a web page be?
Page weight is the total amount a visitor's browser must download to show the page: the page itself plus every image, script, font and stylesheet. Under 1.5 MB loads comfortably on a 4G connection. Over 3 MB, visitors on phones will wait several seconds, and the average small business page is now heavier than that.
Why it matters
Most visits to most business sites now come from phones, often on mobile data that is slower and more variable than home broadband. Every megabyte is roughly a second of waiting on an ordinary 4G signal, and more in a shop or a car park. Heavy pages also cost your visitors data and their battery, and Google measures the effect on how quickly the page becomes usable.
Where the weight comes from
Oversized photos are the usual cause. A picture straight from a phone camera can be 5 MB when the page only displays it at 800 pixels wide and needs 80 KB of it. After images, the biggest contributors are usually embedded videos, page builder scripts, several web fonts and sliders.
How to check
Our check adds up the size of the page and the files it links to, and reports the total together with the single largest file. Google's PageSpeed Insights gives a fuller breakdown under "Avoid enormous network payloads".
How to fix it
- Resize every image to the largest size it will actually be shown at.
- Save photos as WebP or AVIF, or as JPEG at around eighty per cent quality.
- Let the platform generate smaller versions for phones and serve those.
- Lazy load images below the top of the page.
- Remove sliders, unused plugins and fonts you do not need.
On WordPress, an image optimisation plugin handles the first three steps automatically for new and existing uploads.
Not sure how your own site does on this? Run the free check: it takes about twenty seconds and reports on this and thirty other things.