Google Explains Why It Doesn’t Matter That Websites Are Getting Larger

A recent podcast by Google called attention to the fact that websites are getting larger than ever before. Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt explained that the idea that websites are getting “larger” is a bad thing is not necessarily true. The takeaway for publishers and SEOs is that Page Weight is not a trustworthy metric because the cause of the “excess” weight might very well be something useful.

Page Size Depends On What ‘s Being Measured

Google’s Martin Splitt explained that what many people think of as page size depends on what is being measured.

• Is it measured by just the HTML?
• Or are you talking about total page size, including images, CSS, and JavaScript?

It’s an important distinction. For example, many SEOs were freaked out when they heard that Googlebot was limiting their page crawl to just 2 megabytes of HTML per page. To put that into perspective, two megabytes of HTML equals about two million characters (letters, numbers, and symbols). That’s…