Send half as much data for the same page

Bytes are the honest part

Most claims on a performance site are one step removed from what was measured. Rankings, conversions, emissions — each is a model applied to a measurement, and the model is where the overclaiming happens.

Page weight is not like that. We fetch the page as it was, we fetch it as we serve it, and we count. There is no coefficient in between, nothing to argue about, and nothing that stops being true if the industry benchmark it rested on turns out to have measured something else.

That is why this page exists as its own thing rather than as a bullet somewhere: it is the claim we can make most plainly.

What came off

The numbers above are one mobile load per site, across the audit base, gated the same way everything else on this site is gated — both devices held up, the proxy genuinely served the page rather than bouncing back to the original, the render was not degraded into a page that looks light because half of it never arrived. That last gate matters most here: a broken page is very light indeed, and without checking what was actually delivered, “we halved the weight” and “we failed to load your site” produce the same number.

Roughly half, at the median. Most of it is images — WebP instead of JPEG and PNG, animated WebP instead of GIFs that routinely run to ten megabytes each. The rest is the accumulation of small things: icon fonts cut to the glyphs in use, stylesheets that stop shipping the whole site to render one screen, below-fold media that waits until someone scrolls.

And on a handful of sites the number went the other way. That count is printed with the median, not hidden under it. Optimizing delivery means adding a little in order to remove a lot, and on a page that was already lean, there is little to remove and the small addition shows. It is a real limit of the approach, it is visible in your own before/after, and you should know it before you are asked to pay for anything.

Where the saving actually lands

For your visitors, immediately and entirely: half the data spent on your page, most sharply felt on the connections that were already struggling with it.

For your bill, less directly than a vendor would like to imply. Visitors are served from our cache, so what changes on your side is how often we come to your origin at all — which depends on your traffic pattern and how much of your transfer is pages rather than video, downloads and API traffic we do not touch. We do not publish a number for that, because we do not measure it yet. When we do, it will be on this page with the sample beside it, like everything else here.