Hi Wes,
Your 1MB GIF won’t contribute to Shopify’s 256 KB limit. As your images and GIFs are accessed via Builder’s content API and rendered by the browser, they aren’t saved to your template.
However, keep in mind that having multiple versions of your page, such as the A/B versioning you’ve implemented, can contribute to the file size limit. For a more in-depth explanation, check out this forum post by Korey. Korey provides insights into this topic and suggests ways to reduce your template’s size.
Additionally, please refer to the documentation here for guidance on resolving this issue.
Hope this helps!