•
8-minute read
How to Check Web Page Size – Guide & Checking Tools
Every online searcher is happy to find what they want immediately, and everybody would agree that a slow-loading page is a real drag. The truth is that one-third of mobile searchers bounce off if the page loads longer than 3 seconds.
Whether you want to improve your website’s SEO ranking, user engagement, or design, checking a web page size online will be a necessary component of the preparatory audit.
In this brief guide, you will learn how to thoroughly audit page size issues and discover the best website page size checker.
How to check web page size in WebSite Auditor
Check your page size with WebSite Auditor. It is a powerful desktop tool that allows you to do a complete audit of all your technical onsite issues. It has a set of tools for webmasters, including a page size checker, able to scan all information about your web resources.
Launch the software and enter the URL of the website you are going to check to create a new project. WebSite Auditor will instantly start scanning your website.
In a couple of minutes, you will get a comprehensive page size checker report of all site issues with explanations of why this or that factor is important. Plus, WebSite Auditor will provide you with detailed tips on how to fix each discovered issue.
Check the size of any page on a website
To check the size of any page on a website, in the Site Audit module, go to the Pages section and switch to the Links and technical factors tab. Scroll to the Page size column (you can move the column anywhere closer to the title) and see the corresponding metric for each URL.
Besides, you can select any URL and see what resources contribute to the page’s size the most. In the lower half of the workspace, switch to the All Resources tab and double-click on the header to filter all resources by Size.
Check page size issues sitewide
Moreover, you can use WebSite Auditor to inspect the entire website for page size issues. Go to Site Structure> Site Audit and scroll to the Encoding and technical factors section. Check the warnings next to the Too big pages factor. If there are any, the tool will show the exact URL, its title, and page size. Below, you will see the explanation of the factor and the steps needed to fix the issue.
How to diagnose page size issues with PageSpeed Insights
There are many online page size checkers on the Internet, both free and paid.
One such free tool from Google is Page Speed Insights, which is the fastest way of checking your page size. It is pretty easy to use: simply enter the URL you want to audit and hit Analyze. The checker tool examines complex data related to user experience on a page, and the results are presented in the form of Core Web Vitals metrics.
CWV assessment shows if the page passes or fails according to certain criteria, and the scores can be different for desktop or mobile devices. Below the score charts, you will find warnings and errors with guidance covering the resources that require your attention. The tool will show, among other things, which resources are too big and may affect the total score.
Integrate PageSpeed API to WebSite Auditor
Another hack to measure web page size online and check all other Core Web Vitals is by integrating PageSpeed API in WebSite Auditor. It will allow you to run a bulk check of page speed factors for all your URLs at a time.
Quick tutorial
Watch how to check your page size and loading issues via PageSpeed API in WebSite Auditor:
Generate the free PageSpeed API key and add it in Preferences > Pagespeed settings in WebSite Auditor. Next, staying in the Pages section, hit the Update button and tick the respective box to get the metrics calculated.
You will see detailed information about each factor influencing your Core Web Vitals scores, including the total size of all your resources. There is a quick filter helping to locate the potential savings in your page sizes. For each page, you can tick the Opportunities checkbox and see the list of all page size issues, estimated potential savings, and the URL of each resource.
You can copy the data to a spreadsheet or include it in a site audit report that can be downloaded, sent by email, or shared in the cloud with your development team.
Use online webpage size checkers
You can also use a special page size checker to analyze how “heavy” your pages are. Here are just a couple of them:
- Website Page Size Checker Tool by Rankwatch
- Dupli Checker
- Page Size Checker by CoolSEOTols
Just a reminder: If you are an SEO PowerSuite user, you don’t need a separate website page size checker. You can check the size of each page when doing your regular site audit with WebSite Auditor, which is more than just a page size checker tool.
Why page size is important for SEO
Page size is important for SEO for the following reasons:
- Page size can affect search rankings: the Core Web Vitals score, part of which is page size and page speed factors, is crucial for rankings. With good scores, your site can have a good ranking boost.
- Page size impacts user engagement: a page may load too long (and the page load speed is too low) for users to wait, which leads to a higher bounce rate and, therefore, fewer active users and conversions.
- Optimized total size of a website can help minimize web hosting costs: as some hosting providers charge additional costs for extra bandwidth or optimization of website resources, lower page sizes (which means smaller file transfer sizes) will cut down on expenses for hosting. So, check website size at least once in a while.
Note
If you are launching a new website, you can safely use shared hosting that is fast and secure at the same time. DreamHost is user-friendly and multipurpose, so you'll be able to choose the required option for your website, be it a blog, a service, or an e-commerce store.
For SEO purposes, pages should be as lightweight as possible. Mind, though, that this should be done without damaging the quality of content and the functionality of a page.
Page size is crucial for websites targeting those locations where the connection is slow and bandwidth is rather expensive. In such locations, loading heavy pages will take too long, which means that most visitors will not keep waiting.
According to Google research, the probability of bounces increases dramatically with growing download time: the vast majority of mobile searchers will not wait longer than 5 seconds.
What the perfect web page size should be
Want to know the exact number of KBs? The matter is there are no fixed required limits for page sizes, as it all depends on the type of landing page, the niche, and even the device a page is accessed from.
For example, blog and news websites are likely to be not as heavy as product landings with a lot of photos. Sites with a lot of multimedia cannot but have higher page sizes (even if all the media are optimized).
According to Search Engine Journal, when creating a website, it's best to keep the page size of your HTML document under 100 kilobytes. However, certain types of websites may require larger page sizes. For instance, ecommerce websites may need pages that are around 150 KB to 200 KB, depending on the number of product images on the page.
Ideally, you should make a web page as small in size as possible, but without damaging the quality of its content.
According to the State of the Web report in 2023, the median of all resources’ transfer size requested by the page does not exceed 2.5 Mb.
Recommendations in WebSite Auditor follow the generally accepted limits that pages should not exceed 3Mb in size.
Tips on how to reduce page sizes
- Use images in web-friendly formats: choose the right formats that preserve the quality and load fast at the same time.
- Use lossless image compression tools that decrease the file size but keep its resolution high.
- Use code minification tools for CSS and JS: such tools will eliminate unnecessary coding artifacts without changing the code; also, there may be some unused pieces of code, removing which will also decrease the page size.
- Replace heavy-weight files with files of lighter formats: for example, you can substitute .gif files (that are often heavy) with embedded videos from YouTube.
- Do not overuse third-party elements: custom fonts loaded from Google or plugins also increase the page size. So, apply web-safe fonts and use plugins only when it’s necessary, and have a regular site audit to ensure that everything works properly.
Take a look at how we improved our website performance, which affected our rankings and website traffic – there, you will find more in-depth explanations about the above factors.
Now you know how to check website size and how to find out if there are any issues affecting your rankings. I hope you find the website page size checker tools helpful. If you notice that a website page has its bounce rate soaring up, load up on SEO tools, and see what exactly spoils the performance of a website. When you check the size of a website, and detect all the culprits to your page speed, all that is left next is to strike a balance between the size and the quality of your web pages.
Have a fruitful site audit and check out our article about 65+ ways to use WebSite Auditor.
