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Defined Term concept ↗ source url updated Wed Aug 12 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Page weight

Page weight is the total number of bytes a browser must download to load a page — the sum of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, and other resources. It is the wiki’s central, founding concept: the thing minimalism tries to shrink and the thing the domain (“page-weight minimalism, front-end byte budgets”) is named for.

The measured baseline

Current edition — July 2025 crawl (web-almanac-page-weight-2025). The median home page grew 7.8% year over year; mobile +8.4%, desktop +7.3%, and mobile inner pages +9.5%. The authors report the growth accelerating since October 2024. Over the decade, the median mobile home page went from 845 KB (July 2015) to about 2.4 MB — a 202.8% increase, against 110.2% on desktop.

Quote the absolute median as a range — ~2.4–2.6 MB mobile / ~2.7–2.9 MB desktop. The 2025 chapter states the mobile median three ways (2,362 KB, 2.6 MB, 2.56 MB) and does not reconcile them; the discrepancy is set out on web-almanac-page-weight-2025. The growth rate is the robust figure.

Composition of the median mobile home page, July 2025: images 911 KB (still the heaviest), JavaScript 632 KB (still the growth driver), fonts 122 KB, CSS 77 KB, HTML 22 KB. Median video bytes rose 28% in one year, 246 KB → 315 KB. At the 90th percentile the same page is 1.9 MB of JavaScript and 6.3 MB of images, with 1.0 MB of it unused.

Previous edition, kept for the series (web-almanac-page-weight-2024, Oct 2024): median 2,652 KB desktop / 2,311 KB mobile; median desktop composition images ≈ 1,054 KB, JavaScript ≈ 613 KB, fonts ≈ 131 KB, CSS ≈ 78 KB, HTML ≈ 18 KB.

Relation to neighbouring concepts

  • bundle-size is the JS-app-era subset of page weight — the JS bytes specifically. As apps replace static pages, bundle size dominates the total.
  • third-party-resources cut across the breakdown: much of the JS and image weight is loaded by third parties, not first-party code (web-almanac-third-parties-2024).
  • performance-budget is how you cap page weight (e.g. quantity-based limits on total bytes, JS size, image size).
  • core-web-vitals are the field outcome: page weight feeds LCP/INP, but is necessary-but-not-sufficient — delivery and execution matter too (see synthesis).

Floors and budgets

Two named targets bracket “how low”: landing-page-14kb‘s 14 KB (first TCP round-trip, static landing pages) and web.dev’s 170 KB critical-path budget (performance-budgets-101). Both sit far below the 2,652 KB median — the bloat is largely optional.

bundle-size · third-party-resources · performance-budget · brotli · avif · core-web-vitals · web-almanac-page-weight-2024 · landing-page-14kb

Related pages

Links to

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