Short answer: The median desktop web page is now about 2.86 MB (HTTP Archive, 2025). The original 1993 shareware Doom — a complete 3D first-person shooter with nine levels, monsters and a soundtrack — shipped in 2.39 MB. So the average homepage today is heavier than an entire classic video game, and it usually does a lot less. Here’s how the web got this fat, what the bloat actually costs you, and how to put your site on a diet.
We build and host sites for a living and watch page weight on real client sites, so this is the practical version, not just a fun fact.
A whole game, in less than your homepage
In 2016 the engineer Ronan Cremin pointed out that the average web page had reached the size of the Doom shareware download — 2,393 KB. id Software fit a full game engine, level design, enemies, weapons and music into that. The web of 2016 struggled to deliver a page of text and images in the same space.
That was the funny version. The depressing version is what happened next: pages didn’t stop there. The median desktop page has since grown past 2.86 MB — Doom and then some — for what is, very often, an article with a headline and three photos.
The numbers (they’re worse than you think)
HTTP Archive measures millions of real pages every month. The 2025 figures:
| Metric | Desktop | Mobile |
|---|---|---|
| Median page weight | 2,862 KB | 2,559 KB |
| Requests per page | 77 | 72 |
| Heaviest 10% of pages (P90) | 9,179 KB | 8,337 KB |
A decade ago the median mobile page was 845 KB. Today it’s 2,362 KB — a 200%+ increase in ten years. And the heaviest 10% of pages now weigh over 9 MB — nearly four Dooms — on a single load.
Where the weight comes from
Break a median desktop page apart and it’s mostly two things:
- Images — about 1,058 KB (37%). Usually the biggest single chunk, and usually the easiest to fix: unoptimised photos shipped at full resolution.
- JavaScript — about 697 KB (24%). Second by weight, but first by number of requests — the median page fires 23 separate JS requests. This is frameworks, analytics, chat widgets, A/B tests, cookie banners, ad tech.
Fonts, CSS and the actual HTML are rounding errors by comparison. The HTML — the words you came to read — is about 22 KB, under 1% of the page.
Here’s the honest, slightly uncomfortable part. Internet connections got faster over those ten years. We didn’t spend that on speed — we spent it on weight. Every gain in bandwidth got eaten by another tracker, another framework, another full-screen hero video. Maciej Cegłowski called this the website obesity crisis back in 2015, and it has only got heavier since.
Why this isn’t just nostalgia
Page weight isn’t a vanity metric. It hits three things that actually matter to a business:
- Speed, and therefore Google. Heavy pages load slowly, and Core Web Vitals (Google’s page speed-and-experience scores, such as LCP and INP) are a ranking signal. A 9 MB page on a phone is a slow page, and Google notices.
- Mobile users on real connections. Your visitor on a train with two bars doesn’t have your office fibre. Every megabyte is seconds of staring at a blank screen — and a tap on “back.”
- Bandwidth — yours and theirs. Multiply 3 MB by every visit and every bot. Heavy sites cost more to serve and burn through your visitors’ data plans.
A faster, lighter page isn’t an aesthetic preference. It ranks better, converts better and costs less to run.
How to put your site on a diet
You don’t need to rebuild everything. Most of the weight comes off in a few moves:
- Fix the images first — they’re 37% of the page. Compress them, serve modern formats (WebP/AVIF), size them to how they’re actually displayed, and lazy-load below the fold.
- Audit the JavaScript. Every third-party script is someone else’s weight on your page. Drop the trackers, chat widgets and A/B tools you don’t use. Question whether a brochure site needs a heavy framework at all.
- Self-host and subset your fonts. Fewer weights, only the characters you use. (It’s also better for EU data privacy.)
- Be suspicious of page builders. Drag-and-drop WordPress builders are a top cause of bloat — they ship enormous CSS and JS for a simple layout.
- Measure on a real phone, on a throttled connection — not on your fast desktop. That’s what your customers actually see.
Where we come in
This is partly a stack choice. A site built on a heavy WordPress theme with twenty plugins starts fat and stays fat; a static site built with something like Astro can ship a homepage in a few hundred KB — a fraction of one Doom — with the same content. When we build and host a site, keeping it light is part of the job: optimised images, no tracker pile-up, self-hosted fonts, and a server tuned to send it fast. The goal is a page that loads before your visitor reaches for the back button — and, ideally, one that weighs less than a 1993 video game.