When testing your site page’s performance with Google Pagespeed Insights, you might encounter this “Avoid Enormous Network Payload” warning.
Enormous might be a bit of an exaggeration. But broadly this means is that the size of your page might be too big and larger than 1.6 MB.
What Is the “Avoid Enormous Network Payload” Warning?
As we mentioned before, seeing the “Avoid Enormous Network Payload” warning in Google Pagespeed Insights implies that your page size is too big. Bigger pages are always slower to load because there’s more to download, so we want our pages as small as possible.
What Should an Optimal Page Size Be?
Google wants to see pages under 1.6 MB. In an ideal world, we want pages under 1 MB, and if scoring 100 on Google’s Mobile Pagespeed test is your goal. Your pages will need to be around 0.5 MB in size.
This test actually uses a 1.6 megabit connection, which is really slow, so to score above 50 or 60, your pages will have to be 1 megabyte or less.
Realistically speaking, most people today use a connection that’s faster than that. So less than a 100 score doesn’t necessarily translate to your site being slow in the real world. A 1.6 megabit per second connection is super-slow. Given that the majority of users have their connection speeds of 10 megabits per second or above. While we want our pages as small as possible, we typically target 1.5 megabytes when working for our clients. This page size is quite reasonable and allows like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and a reasonable volume of images.
Pages over 1.5 MB are likely going to struggle to score in the “good” range for Google’s Core Web Vitals test, as there’s simply too much data to download to sit under the threshold.
Remember The Size Of All Pages Matter
From a site speed perspective, it’s important to know that you should optimize all site pages, not just the homepage. Naturally, your homepage will probably have the most visits. But all web pages matter when it comes to Google Core Web Vitals metrics. Your homepage might pass the test, while some other pages turn out to be problematic. So make sure to test all your pages.
- Find the Root Cause Of Large Page Sizes to reduce network payload.
First, before troubleshooting the issue, you should diagnose what is causing the enormous network payloads.
You’ll get a detailed breakdown of the page weight by the type of files. It’s very user-friendly, so you’ll find it easy to use, Even if you’re inexperienced and this is your first time doing this.
It will also break down by domain name, which will help highlight third-party scripts causing the problem, like live chat. Once we’ve identified the source of our larger page size, we can then take steps to fix the concern.
Images and Lazy Loading
Images are one of the biggest contributors to page size. There can be two image-related issues that increase the size of your pages:
The page has too many images, most of which are too big.
Lazy loading isn’t implemented on the page.
The solution to the first issue is to get image compression in place using a tool like Shortpixel, EWWW Optimizer, or Imagify. Make sure images are sized appropriately, e.g., making sure the image for a 500×500 pixel placement on the page isn’t 5000×5000 pixels.
The solution to the second issue is also straightforward – Get the image lazy loading in place. After you do this, the images below the fold (the area on the page first visible to the visitor) will not load until the visitor scrolls down. So even if you have a long page with many elements like images, videos, text, etc., your page will load faster.
Either of the two image-related issues might be causing the enormous network payload of your page. But some other things might be responsible for this.
Videos Above the Fold
Next, we have video backgrounds. Video backgrounds are usually either above the fold. In the initially viewable area, or in some sort of autoplaying video or media in that section. So, as soon as the page loads. The browser is forced to download that video or media and start playing it. Naturally, this will increase the page load significantly. Video backgrounds and autoplaying videos are bad for site speed and should be avoided.
Video backgrounds aren’t necessarily for your marketing, as they can often be grainy and buffer. Generally, we suggest you use a high-quality, high-resolution image rather than a video background. If the background video is that important. It’d probably perform better in the foreground with the visitor being able to control the player and hear the audio. As videos playing in the background have no audio.
If your page has videos (such as YouTube videos) above the fold or product pages with many product images. That can also harm your site performance in some cases. In these cases, getting video lazy loading in place with help reduce the impact of video on page weight. Many theme builders and templates can load videos in a speed optimized way if you set a preview image or thumbnail. So it’s worth investigating that.
In this scenario, the page will show the thumbnail and start loading the video only after the user clicks on the thumbnail. Each YouTube player is approximately 0.7 MB in size, so using this method reduces the player “weight” or size down to just the size of the preview image.
Use Images Instead of Sliders
Sliders are generally bad for conversion, and they’re certainly bad for speed, but people still insist on using them – when was the last time you spent time looking through a slider? Some slider plugins like Slider Revolution have some lazy load features built-in (that need to be turned on). Still, broadly, a single image will be better for both speed and your overall marketing than a complicated slider.
Too Much JavaScript & Heavy Third-Party Tools
Too much JavaScript is another problem we come across daily. We commonly see live chat and marketing automation tools cause concerns here.
A simple starting point is to run a basic audit on the plugins and marketing code you have embedded on the site and remove anything that’s no longer being used. Often marketing tools are no longer being used, but the code is left on the site.
Want It Fixed For You?
We’ve optimized over 4000 WordPress sites and can help make yours load lightning fast too! If you’re looking for someone to do this for you, complete the form on our homepage and one of the team will review your site and tell you what’s doable in terms of site speed.
