This content is a companion to our search engine optimization (SEO) content. In truth the 15 MB HTML limit that used to appear in Google's own sources was, a very long time ago, being used with a 2 MB limit on 99.9% of internet pages. But on the Googlebot page, with a quiet update to the passage “Googlebot crawls the first 2 MB of a supported file type and the first 64 MB of a PDF file when it crawls for Google Search. In terms of rendering, every resource referenced in the HTML, such as CSS and JavaScript, is fetched separately, and each resource fetch is subject to the same file size limit that applies to other files, PDF files excepted.”, it officially stated that it had brought this down to a 2 MB limit.

Now we will go through what this means and whether you should make a general update on your websites. First of all, even a 2 MB HTML size is an incredibly high figure. If you have a website that reaches that figure, it probably holds errors of logic. Because:

2MB = 2 x 1024 x 1024 bytes = 2,097,152 characters

That comes to a very high character count. So we can say it will not be easy for a single page of a website to reach those figures.

What We Need to Watch For

In our earlier articles we said we do not recommend using inline CSS. After the 2 MB HTML limit we can say you should definitely not use it now. With inline scripts you can inflate your site's HTML size in the same way. In the story where you think you have added a very nice animation to your site, a badly built script may be inflating your HTML size. On this subject we will integrate a tool that measures HTML size into our Turksemveri system and use that value in our crawls as well.

In the Türk SEM Sitelab section we published in 2025 you can see the HTML size of your pages. You can obtain the other technology details in the same place. Sitelab is a tool developed by Türk SEM that serves to analyze how current the CSS and JS code in use is.

Where This Leaves Old HTML Sites

Some sites I built 20 years ago are still live and I have not changed them. Those sites have almost no visitors left, because they are not responsive and errors come up in a good many places in current browsers. On top of that there is no approach like style.css in these old sites. Since everything is inline CSS, the HTML size is very swollen.

Those sites will probably carry on sitting on the dustiest shelves of the internet's library.

Comments Piling Up on One Page in WordPress

A size of 2 MB is nearly as much as a 300 page novel, but it is not an impossible figure to reach. It can show up in particular on WordPress pages that put every comment on a single page. Check the pages on your site that get a lot of comments and find out how large the page HTML is. If it sits at 2 MB, paginate your comments.

Does It Do Harm?

If you have put as much data as 300 pages of a novel on one page of a website, that is a problem not only for the search engine but for your users in general. If you are publishing extensive content on a page in the style of a story or a novel, we can recommend focusing on speed by using pagination.

Cutting content off halfway and not recording it means that everything after a certain point on your page cannot be indexed, and that really is a problem. There are situations such as losing internal linking and losing the footer. In the same way, because a heavy DOM tree will be built, users may wait 5 to 10 seconds while they reach your site. On mobile users in particular a rise even beyond that figure can be observed. In every case it makes sense to keep your pages at a sensible weight, in the golden proportion.

On PDFs the 64 MB limit still holds. Nothing changed in the PDF limit.