Large page size may cause structured issues in Search Console

Over the last few weeks, some stores reached out with structured data critical issues appearing in Search Console.

Let me first reassure you that it has nothing to do with JSON-LD for SEO. The data from the app was present and working as expected. I also heard other stores not even on Shopify having similar issues.

Spoiler: The issue turned out to be large page sizes.

At first, I thought it was a hiccup in Search Console which happens quite often. I'd sometimes see an error in the Rich Results Testing Tool, but not every time.

The error would either be invalid type or unparsable structured data. Since the error was inconsistent, it was clear there was something funky going on.

If you're seeing something similar, check if your page sizes are an issue.

Test a page with the error and one without.

Right-click on the web page and select Save As -> Web Page Complete. On my Mac, I can select Get Info for the file to see the size.

After testing the pages, I was shocked. The pages with errors were between 2.3MB - 3.6MB and ones without the error were closer to 0.5MB. That's nearly 7 times larger!

When a page is too large, Google's Testing Tool and Search Console may stop processing the HTML before they get to the end.

If Google has a size limit in its tools, the tool could stop processing in the middle of the structured data. That would make the structured data appear malformed and lead to these random errors. In the past, Google's tool would state there was a page loading issue, but they may have changed how that works.

Reducing the page size would be beneficial in general.

So is there a "right" size for images? I might have a different answer if it’s one image on a page vs multiple images. Ideally you're using Shopify's CDN and they are optimizing the images for you as well.

Ask yourself if anything is running on the page that is unnecessary and can be removed. Or if there is an app or theme update you recently added that could have contributed to the size of the page. Unoptimized or excessive amounts of JavaScript is often a culprit here.

If you are looking to slim down your page, avoid using any page speed or optimization apps. Many of those actually cause the page size to be bigger and some are outright scams.