What It Is
When a page gets heavy, skip the general “speed work” and find the one element that is inflating it. Then run that element through a three-way decision: replace it, modify it or remove it. This is the decision tree Erika Braeger of Ten Speed uses. Her working rule of thumb is that a page should weigh two megabytes or less, “ideally a lot less”, and any page over or nearing that line is where she zooms in.
That 2 MB figure is a practitioner threshold for total page weight, not a Google rule. The Google number that does exist is narrower. Per Google’s Googlebot documentation (last updated 3 February 2026), when crawling for Google Search, Googlebot fetches the first 2MB of a supported file type and the first 64MB of a PDF. The limit applies to each file separately (the HTML, and every CSS or JavaScript file it references), it is measured on the uncompressed data, and anything past the cutoff is not sent for indexing. So a heavy page is a speed problem for users, and a single oversized HTML file is an indexing problem as well.
How It Works
- Measure total page weight and load time across a sample of page types, and flag pages over or near your threshold. Erika uses 2 MB as hers.
- On each flagged page, identify what is adding the weight: a video, an image, a motion graphic, a form fill, a reCAPTCHA.
- Run each heavy element through the decision tree: replace it, modify it or remove it.
- Separately check the raw HTML and each CSS and JavaScript file against Googlebot’s 2MB per-file fetch limit, measured uncompressed. Content past the cutoff is not indexed.
- Re-measure page size and load time after each change, for both the user and the crawler.
Who Recommends It
- Erika Braeger endorses — Ten Speed. “Is it a video? Is it an image? Is it a motion graphic? Is it a form fill? Is it a reCAPTCHA? … that’s where we start our decision tree. Do we replace it? Do we modify it? Do we remove it?” Unscripted SEO episode →
Difficulty & Time Estimates
Read the full conversation: Erika Braeger on machine readability, page speed and technical debt (Unscripted SEO), or the SEO Arcade breakdown, technical SEO triage with Erika Braeger.