By Matt G. Southern
Publication Date: 2026-03-30 17:09:00
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.
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…
