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Lighten the page so it arrives quickly, even on mobile

Technical Updated Oct 4, 2026

Description

This criterion measures the page’s weight during iPand’s mobile load: at most 2 MB transferred, all resources and headers included. It checks that at least 90% of the text bytes (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG) of files over 1 KB arrive compressed, and that at least 80% of your site’s static resources (scripts, styles, fonts, images) can stay cached for a day or more.

This 2 MB threshold is a compromise for image-rich pages; Lighthouse aims for 1,600 KiB.

Why it matters for AI engines

A heavy page takes longer to arrive, for your visitors on mobile as for the crawlers that load it. Compression and caching reduce that weight without changing the content at all.

  • Google’s crawlers accept responses compressed with gzip, deflate or Brotli: a compressed page reaches them faster.
  • Googlebot only reads the first 2 MB of each HTML, CSS or JavaScript file, once uncompressed: content beyond that is ignored.
  • A long cache lifetime saves your visitors from downloading scripts, styles and images again on every page they view.

How to fix it

  1. 1 Lighten the images Resize images to the size at which they are displayed, use a modern format such as WebP or AVIF, and compress them. Lazy-load (loading=lazy) the ones that are off screen on first display, never the main image at the top of the page.
  2. 2 Limit third-party scripts Take stock of the tools added to the page (tracking, advertising, live chat, embedded videos) and remove the ones you no longer use. Load the others only when they become useful, for example on click.
  3. 3 Turn on compression Configure your server or CDN to compress text files with gzip, Brotli (br) or zstd: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON and SVG. Check the Content-Encoding header of the responses in the developer tools. Do not compress images, videos and audio files, which are already compressed.
  4. 4 Set a cache lifetime for static resources Give versioned scripts, styles, fonts and images, with a fingerprint in the file name, a Cache-Control: max-age=31536000 header, that is one year. iPand expects at least one day for 80% of your site’s static resources. Keep no-cache for the HTML, which changes more often.

Key takeaway

A light, compressed and well-cached page reaches visitors and crawlers faster. Aim for less than 2 MB transferred, and less still if you can.

Further reading