We audited our own website recently and found 59.6MB of images and video that no page referenced. Not badly compressed. Simply never used: files uploaded during a redesign, superseded a week later, and left where they landed.
That is close to the default state of any site that has been through more than one design iteration without somebody owning asset weight as a number they have to report.
Why it matters commercially
A visitor on a mid-range Android phone on mobile data does not experience your 4MB hero video as a design choice. They experience it as a blank rectangle while they decide whether to wait. If they leave before it resolves, every other decision on that page was irrelevant.
This bites hardest in retail, where load time maps onto completed orders directly, and in any market where a real share of traffic arrives on a constrained connection. Across much of our work, that is most of the traffic.
What we actually do about it
A page weight budget gets agreed before design starts, not after somebody complains. Modern image formats and correct sizing are the default rather than an optimisation pass booked in for later. Video gets a poster frame and loads when a visitor asks for it, instead of autoplaying into a data plan.
We also periodically diff the asset directory against what the code references. That one check told us 73% of our own asset directory was dead weight.
The uncomfortable part
Performance work is unglamorous and invisible when it goes well. Nobody writes in to compliment a site for loading quickly. They just stay on it, which is the entire point, and also the reason this work is so easy to keep deferring.
Written by the Prakmas team, Hyderabad and Union City.
All insights