A brief history of Google’s mission to make the web faster

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers . That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices .

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project.…