SEJ ⋅ Technical SEO
Google: Pages Are Getting Larger & It Still Matters
Highlights
Google's Search Relations team discussed page weight and crawling in a new podcast episode.
Web pages have grown nearly 3x over the past decade.
Illyes questioned whether the structured data Google
asks websites to add is contributing to page bloat.
Google's Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt discuss page weight growth, the 15MB crawl limit, and whether structured data is adding bloat to web pages.
By Matt G. Southern
Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt used a recent episode of the Search Off the Record podcast to discuss whether webpages are getting too large and what that means for both users and crawlers.
Search Off the Record podcast
youtube.com/watch?v=kype1JQb…
The conversation started with a simple question: are websites getting fat? Splitt immediately pushed back on the framing, arguing that website-level size is meaningless. Individual page size is where the discussion belongs.
What The Data Shows
Splitt cited the 2025 Web Almanac from HTTP Archive, which found that the median mobile homepage weighed 845 KB in 2015. By July, that same median page had grown to 2,362 KB. That’s roughly a 3x increase over a decade.
Both agreed the growth was expected, given the complexity of modern web applications. But the numbers still surprised them.
Splitt noted the challenge of even defining “page weight” consistently, since different people interpret the term differently depending on whether they’re thinking about raw HTML, transferred bytes, or everything a browser needs to render a page. (SEJ)
Full article and coverage via Search Engine Journal
@sejournal
searchenginejournal.com/goog…
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Search Off the Record podcast
youtube.com/watch?v=kype1JQb…
youtube.com/@GoogleSearchCen…
Social Media
Media Man Peg-On
Search Engine Journal's Matt covers another interesting episode of Google's 'Search Off The Record' news. The SEJ article has saved us having to allocate extra time to listen to the whole podcast. On some of our own websites we've found that sometimes our smaller articles and pages get indexed quicker, and referenced by Google (and others) more frequently that some of our larger articles and pages. If the information is relevant, concise and what Google and the bots are looking for, sometimes size matters in this case, smaller articles and pages often being prefered. That's what we have found over the years, but even more frequently over the past 5 months or so. Perhaps this extra intel may assist others, as well as further back up intel released and published by Alphabet's Google, broadcast via Search Off The Record, in addition to what's published today by SEJ. As is frequently the case, Google's 'Search Off The Record' and SEJ help as navigate the web/digital/online publishing landscape much better than if we just went at it alone. An element of crawl, walk, run, page by page. Thumbs up crew. Good hunting and indexing.
News
Search Engine Journal wins Media Man 'Search Publication Of The Month' award
Google 'Search Off The Record Podcast' wins Media Man 'Podcast Of The Month' award
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