Are websites getting "fat"? Page weight, HTML size & Googlebot limits explained
From Search Off the Record by Google
March 30, 2026 · 32 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the implications of page size and weight for developers, users, and search engines, highlighting the challenges of HTML bloat and its impact on user experience.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Martin Splitt
Guest: Gary Illyes
Topics covered
- page size
- page weight
- web development
- Googlebot
- user experience
- HTML bloat
Keywords
- page weight
- HTML size
- Googlebot limits
- web page sizes
- user experience
- structured data
- mobile homepages
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Google
Books & works: Web Almanac, HTML living standard, How page speed helps with conversions
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