Due to overwhelming interest, we’ll be doing a second part to our last week’s article. The most common question was: “How large can my site be before it is too big?” or “I’ve optimized my site and it is still several megabytes. Should I remove images or interactive content?” To answer this, let’s look at larger traffic sites on the internet.
A webpage in 50MB or less
As someone noted in their audit of news websites, high traffic popular sites can be tens of megabytes in size taking dozens or even hundreds of requests to load. These behemoths load many javascript frameworks, media components, and more slowing them down over less than perfect connections. We can run the same benchmarks as last week on these to see how they score.
We’ll use PageSpeed by Google for today: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
For the example from the news website audit, we can see the frameworks, extra features, media players, and more delay loading on older devices or slower connections. You can use this as a comparison to any site such as your own comparing how media or frameworks slow things down one by one. This enables you to choose the parts that matter most trimming only where you can.
A webpage in 500MB or less
In another popular take on the subject, we see a 37MB website grow to use hundreds of megabytes. The advertising framework included cached advertising images downloading them before more pages loaded needing to display them. This pushed total data usage on the page to hundreds of megabytes. For users on limited data plans or using high speed data vs slower tiered data, 500MB can be quite a lot and a reason to enable ad-blocking extensions or similar.
To avoid this on your website, you can disable autoplay media, turn off features in ad frameworks that cache ads before display, and optimize images using features like Speedcache Pro’s automatic image optimizing or Handbrake’s encoder profiles. This trims the data pushed to devices such as the hundreds of megabytes of ads and keeps resources focused. You can take this further by looking at how components such as your theme or plugins are impacting the speed of your site importing content or pushing it before requests.
Your site in Search
Arstechnica reports that AI powered search agents rely on results that wouldn’t appear in the top 100 results on Google. That gives more sites a path to reach new audiences of visitors over time as search moves from classic web search to new AI search agents. These agents are trained to browse much like humans and look for results that fit their needs.
We discussed how humans and robots prefer unique human generated content in ai;dr touching on the voice in the writing. Unique content and faster loading pushes sites higher in search rankings. Search AI agens also rewards sites that continue to deliver this consistently over time with higher traffic to deeper pages instead of just the homepage. For example, an older article about a specific subject that’s refreshed often with the latest will be more highly visited
We hope this helps you optimize your website. Stay tuned for next week when we explore different methods to reach new visitors and optimize your site!