The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
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[1] 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[2]. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices[3].
Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.
Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study[4] where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a