Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu search engines offer their owner webmaster tools account. It helps site owners to verify the ownership and monitor the site’s performance in search result. Unlike Google, Bing Webmaster Tools account offers lot of useful features showing errors transparently. If you notice all your pages are showing “HTML Size is Too Long” in Bing Webmaster Tools, here is how to fix the issue.
Checking the Error
There are multiple places you can check the error in Bing Webmaster Tools. Simple option is to go to “Top Insights” section and select “All” filter for “Error details”. If your site is affected, you will find “Evaluated size of HTML is estimated to be over 125 KB and risks not being fully cached” error. The priority is generally “Low” and you can find the total number of pages on your site affected with this error.
Root Cause of Bigger HTML Size
A webpage contains lot of resources to properly render the content on browser screen.
- Actual text / image content.
- HTML markup tags.
- CSS to style and align elements on the page.
- JavaScript to add additional functionalities.
By look, the error may appear from HTML markup tags. However, using lot of HTML tags will not increase the page’s size more than 125 KB. Go to “URL Inspection” section and “Inspect” the page having issue. Click the “Notice” link showing in front of “HTML size is too long” SEO error.
This will open a pop-up and expand the “How to fix?” section. It will clearly show the page source is having large amount of CSS in the header section and suggest you to use separate files instead of dumping CSS in header.
Fixing Larger HTML Size Issue
The problem is that Google suggests opposite to include used or critical CSS in the header to avoid render blocking CSS in PageSpeed Insights tool. Due to this many WordPress users use plugins to remove unused CSS from pages and inline used CSS (also called critical CSS) in the header. There are also third-party services to generate critical CSS and inline the styles in header like Autoptimize plugin offers.
- Check your SEO, optimization and caching plugin’s setup and disable relevant options. For example, you can do this in WP Rocket’s “File Optimization > Optimize CSS delivery” section and disable “Remove Unused CSS” or “ Load CSS Asynchronously” option.
- If you are using Perfmatters, go to “Assets” section and turn off “Remove Unused CSS” button.
- Disable any third-party services you are using for critical CSS generation.
- Make sure to clear your site’s cache.
Unfortunately, plugins like WP Rocket does not offer an option to load the used CSS as a file. By default, it will automatically inline the CSS in header. If you really want to remove unused CSS on your pages to get good score in Google PageSpeed, then you can use Perfmatters plugin. This plugin offers an option to load the used CSS as a separate file. Though this may still show warning in PageSpeed Insight, this will reduce the total HTML page size and the files can be cached for fast loading.
Testing in Bing Webmaster Tools
Now, go back to Bing Webmaster Tools account and navigate to “URL Inspection” section. Inspect the page which had problem before and you will see “HTML size is too long” error is disappeared.
Click “Request indexing” button to submit the page for reindexing.
Final Words
In general, Bing will crawl the pages as per the submitted Sitemap and remove the error automatically. You can go to “Top Insights” section and check the “Page Count” is reducing over period. Otherwise, you can manually resubmit pages to remove the error.
