Turkish e-commerce, weighed: a 1 GB mobile plan runs out in 70 pages
Opening a Turkish e-commerce homepage on a phone means downloading 14.3 megabytes on average. That is roughly 70 pages on a 1 GB mobile plan. On the heaviest site, that number drops to 12. The figures come from the second edition of UNALSOFT's Visual Weight Index.
50 leading sites, measured with one method
The Visual Weight Index is an independent study that measures the mobile page weight of Turkish e-commerce sites, which image formats they use and how fast they load. This second edition covered 50 leading sites across six sectors: fashion, cosmetics, electronics, home textiles, furniture and grocery. 49 sites were measured successfully; one was excluded because it hit a bot wall without loading real content. The measurement was done with a real mobile browser, capturing the size of every file the page downloads, and the raw data is public as JSON.
More than half of the average page is images
The result is clear: the average page weighs 14.3 MB, and exactly 58% of that weight comes from images. Each site downloads more than 9 megabytes of images on average, far more than all the text, code and font files on a page combined. The most dramatic finding sits in a single page: the heaviest site in the sample was recorded at 86 megabytes because its homepage did not finish loading within 40 seconds, meaning its true weight is even higher.
The gap between sectors is wide. The lightest sector, grocery, opens at an average of 7.9 MB; the heaviest, furniture, at 23 MB, roughly 2.9 times more. On speed, the average LCP, the time for the largest content element to appear, is 2.5 seconds. That sits right on the boundary of what Google considers "good"; the furniture sector, at 3.4 seconds, falls behind it. About one in six sites still uses no modern image format such as WebP or AVIF at all.
Three parties pay for a heavy page
The cost of a heavy page is invisible, because no analytics dashboard has a line that reads "customers lost because my page was too heavy." Yet the bill lands in three places. The user spends mobile data and time. The brand loses conversions to carts abandoned on a slow page. And the site loses search visibility because it falls behind on Core Web Vitals. Since Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, those seconds touch traffic and sales directly.
The problem isn't format, it's discipline
At first glance the culprit looks like old image formats. The index shows the opposite: the vast majority of sites already use modern WebP. The weight comes not from the format itself but from images being served far larger and more numerous than they need to be. So it is not a technical gap but a matter of sizing and priorities. And that is the good news: the biggest item weighing a page down is the easiest one to fix. Serving images at the right size and well compressed cuts the weight of most pages dramatically in a single step. This is not an expensive infrastructure project; it is usually a matter of reprocessing existing images.
The UNALSOFT take
Our reason for publishing this index is simple: to make the problem visible. A site's speed is the most invisible yet most decisive part of its design. In our web design work we evaluate every page against the same metrics used in this index; we serve images as correctly sized WebP and keep pages light with technical SEO and Core Web Vitals. For those who want to optimize their own images, we keep the free, offline UnalSoft Media Optimizer tool open. The goal is not to shame anyone; it is to show how easily the picture can improve.
Sources
Visual Weight Index, 2nd edition (UNALSOFT) · Raw data (JSON) · Report (PDF)
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