Google recently published this article talking about how they crawl, fetch, and process pages on a website. It’s a great article and there’s a lot of good information about how Google is working with pages. A lot of good stuff to keep in mind when you’re reviewing and assessing your pages to see what kinds of things maybe you need to fix for Google to be able to make sure that Google’s crawling your page correctly. But there’s one part of this article that’s gotten a lot of attention that I want to talk about here. And that’s the 2 megabyte limit. So in this article, Google said that they’re fetching up to 2 megabytes for any individual URL on a page and up to 64 megabytes for a PDF. So is this something you need to worry about?
Is this a problem? No. For most websites, this is not going to be a problem. Where I think a lot of the confusion is coming up is that if we look at the average size of a page in total, the average size of a web page as of March 26th is 2.9 meg, right? 2,988 K on desktop, and then on mobile 2.6 meg or 2,641 K on mobile. That’s the total size of the page. Google is not talking about the total size of the page. They are talking about individual URLs.
So each individual URL gets its own size limit. And this number here is not one URL. What that number is saying is across all the requests for a page, how big was it? And so the median website loads 76 different files when building out a page. So when you go and you load a page on any website, there’s probably around 76 additional files that need to be requested on average on desktop and about 71 on mobile. And on average, those 76 files add up to 2.9 meg on desktop and those 71 files on mobile add up to 2.6 meg on mobile.
So, all of those files together get to above 2 meg. Again, that is not what Google is talking about. They are talking about individual URLs. So, what we actually need to look at is the size of those individual URLs. Starting with the size of our HTML content.
So, our HTML page, the average on desktop is 35.7 K, kilobytes. That’s way less than 2 megabytes. And on mobile, that’s 33.1 K, kilobytes. And so, that also is way less than what we have with Google’s limit. And even if we look at the detailed table and we go up to the 90th percentile, right? Capturing 90% of pages here, we’re only up to 161 K. Most websites, their HTML pages are well below the 2 megabyte limit.
So, most websites are not going to have to worry about this limit at all, or worry about the cutoff if they’re above that limit. Now, if your page happens to be close to 2 megabytes, you have lots of other problems here because there’s a reason most pages on most websites are below, in this case, below 161 K. And the reason they’re below that is speed. It is really hard to load a page that is too big. And so, you have to make sure that you’re optimizing those files to be really small and efficient to load.
So, if your site is approaching 2 megabytes for an HTML page, Google crawling your website, yeah, that’s a problem, but there’s also lots of other problems that come with that as well. So, I was looking at averages here on HTTP Archive. But, you can also look at this specifically for your site. So, if you go to your website in Chrome, and then you right-click and go to inspect, that’ll open up DevTools. And then in DevTools, across the nav, you can select Network.
If you don’t see Network here, hit the double arrows and then you can select Network from here. And then once you have Network open, go ahead and select doc. And that will filter it down to just the HTML pages on your site. Then you can refresh. And that will load in a fresh version of your page. And so on here, we can see the HTML page, right? This is the main page that we’re looking at on the site.
And so this is our core HTML document. And this core HTML document is 12.2k. So, 12.2k is well below 2 megabytes. Google is going to be able to crawl this very easily. They’re going to be able to fetch everything from this page and be able to process it and look at everything. There’ll be no cutoff here. And while Elementor’s page is smaller than maybe what other sites are at, it’s still well within the limits for most websites that I’ve looked at.
When you open up most pages and look at it, they’re well below even a couple hundred K, let alone 2000k, right? 2 megabytes. So, this is not something you need to worry about. Now, it’s a good idea to check the size of your pages both for your HTML pages, also what is the size of your CSS file, what’s the size of JavaScript files as well. These are all good things to go through and look at and make sure all of those are below 2 megabytes. Chances are they’re already going to be well below 2 megabytes, but you may want to look and see if you can make any of these smaller. Okay, we have this one that’s 370k. Could I make that smaller?
Maybe, and maybe there are some options there. But again, when it comes to Google’s limit of the 2 megabytes, it’s typically not something you’re going to have to worry about and something you can easily check in Dev Tools to see if you do happen to have a problem with that.
If you have any questions about Google’s limit, other aspects of this article from Google, or just other questions about technical SEO, please let me know. You can email me at [email protected]. For more videos like this, please subscribe. Thank you for watching.