The Internet Got Faster and Websites Got Heavier
Broadband and mobile connections have improved enormously. Average page weight has grown faster, with the result that a text article can take longer to load today than it did a decade ago. The reasons are almost entirely commercial.
Most of the weight is not content
On a typical commercial page, the article text represents a tiny fraction of what is transferred. The remainder is advertising, analytics, tag managers, tracking pixels, chat widgets, consent banners, custom fonts and video that plays automatically. Each was added by a different team for a different reason, and nobody owns the total.
Third-party scripts are the dominant cost
These are loaded from external servers, execute arbitrary code, and are frequently outside the site owner’s control or monitoring. A single poorly performing third-party script can block rendering entirely. Sites routinely include dozens of them without any performance budget.
The cost is unevenly distributed
On a fast connection and a recent device, a heavy page is mildly slow. On an older phone with an intermittent connection — which describes a very large number of Indian internet users — it may not load at all. Sites built and tested on high-end hardware in offices with good connectivity systematically exclude the users who have neither.
Data cost is a real barrier
For users on limited data plans, a heavy page has a direct monetary cost. Loading several megabytes to read a short article is a meaningful expense at that end of the market, and it shapes behaviour in ways site owners rarely consider.
What actually fixes it
A page weight budget that is enforced. Auditing third-party scripts and removing those that nobody can justify. Properly sized and compressed images, which remain the single largest content cost. System fonts instead of custom ones. And testing on a mid-range device over a throttled connection, which reveals more than any lab metric.
The connections improved. Whether the experience improved depends entirely on whether anyone was measuring the right thing.
