Page weight budget calculator for local business sites
A customer with a burst pipe or a dead fuse box is on a phone, often on weak signal, and will go back to the search results if your page is still blank after a few seconds. Enter what your page loads and see how long the transfer alone takes on a slow mobile connection. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Assumptions: a 1.6 Mbps connection (Lighthouse slow 4G), 150 ms round trip, 6 requests at a time, 3 round trips for connection setup, and 1 KB counted as 1,000 bytes. Inputs are capped at 100,000 KB and 10,000 requests. Real results vary with your host, caching and device.
How to find the real numbers
- Chrome DevTools. Open your page, press F12, go to the Network tab, tick "Disable cache", reload, and read the transferred size and request count in the status bar at the bottom. Filter by CSS, JS, Font and Img to fill in the boxes above.
- PageSpeed Insights. Paste your address at pagespeed.web.dev for Google's lab test and, if your site has enough visitors, real-user data from the Chrome UX Report. Read the mobile tab first.
- Test on a real phone with Wi-Fi switched off. Numbers can pass while the page still feels slow.
What "good" means
Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds, measured for the 75th percentile of real visits, are: Largest Contentful Paint 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift 0.1 or less (source: web.dev/articles/vitals). There is no official weight limit, so the budget in the calculator is a rule of thumb: less to download means the first screen appears sooner on a poor connection.
Where local trade sites usually lose weight
- One hero photo at camera size. A 2 MB stock image can outweigh the rest of the page tenfold.
- Page-builder and theme scripts that load on every page, including pages that do not use them.
- Chat, review and map widgets in the first screen. Load them on a tap, not on page load.
- Several web fonts in many weights, when the call button and phone number need none.
Keep the first screen about one job
For a trade, the first screen should show the business name, the phone number as a tap-to-call link, and a short quote request. A page built that way can come to around 20 KB of HTML and CSS. The free local trade website checklist covers the rest of a go-live review, and the LocalBusiness schema generator produces the structured data for your listing.
If you would rather start from a site built to this budget, the Callout Kit is three plain HTML trade sites with pages of 5 to 13 KB, one 7 KB stylesheet and a 3.8 KB script, with no images or fonts to download. There is a live demo.