Avoid enormous network payloads WordPress description

[chrisblakley]

I made a comment in the spreadsheet, but I felt like it might be worth more of a discussion–

Typically when I run into the Avoid enormous network payloads detection in Lighthouse it's usually due to the content manager using overly large images or embedded videos.

The WordPress Description currently recommends reducing the number of posts and using excerpts which certainly wouldn't be a bad suggestion, but I think that would have more of an affect on TTFB unless there were many images within each post being queried.

Perhaps we could mention something about avoiding large images and large videos– possibly even recommending videos be hosted on services like Youtube to reduce their footprint on initial load? In my pull request I did add a note to avoid Full Size images in the WYSIWYG unless they are adequately sized. This could be relevant here too.

[housseindjirdeh]

This sounds good to me. Reducing payload sizes is a pretty broad statement to begin with, but if large images/videos is a common culprit within WordPress - I think we can change the text up a bit to focus on that instead.

CC @westonruter

[webtrainingwheels]

According to : https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/network-payloads
The trigger size for this warning is 1600KB. Would be helpful for the message to state that.

Something like:
Your total page size exceeds 1600KB. Reduce the number of images and videos on this page. Consider displaying fewer posts/products per page if they each have an associated image, and minimize the use of sliders. Compress images and videos to reduce individual file sizes.

possibly even recommending videos be hosted on services like Youtube to reduce their footprint on initial load?

This could have different downsides. Maybe it's safer to focus on reducing the page size?

[westonruter]

The culprit could be identified by Lighthouse, could it not? Lighthouse could have different messages for huge HTML documents vs documents that have huge images/videos, or both.

[housseindjirdeh]

So the current LH audit already provides a list of network payloads in descending order of size:

And the Learn More link already directs readers to a reference article that covers different ways they can fix this (defer, compress, cache, etc...)

I'm assuming this was the reason why the current audit description is pretty broad to begin with. So on second thought, should we just omit the WordPress description entirely unless there's something pretty WordPress-specific to add?

What do you all think?

[webtrainingwheels]

It's really important that WordPress-specific messaging takes into account the fact that many WordPress site owners using Google PageSpeed are NOT developers. So the wording has to be user-friendly in addition to being WordPress-specific.

By and large, the average WordPress user will not understand the terminology "network payload".

It's a good point that the specific files are listed in order of size. Would suggest the following tweak to my original proposal:

Your total page size exceeds 1600KB. Reduce the number of images and videos on this page. Consider displaying fewer posts/products per page if they each have an associated image, and minimize the use of sliders. Compress images and videos to reduce individual file sizes, starting with the largest files listed below.

And the Learn More link already directs readers to a reference article that covers different ways they can fix this (defer, compress, cache, etc...)

The PageSpeed/lighthouse docs are not WordPress-specific and not really that user-friendly in many cases :)