"People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page." - Google
Three year old company Google lists "Fast is better than slow" as #3 of it's guiding philosophies.
Website Optimization.com releases Web Page Analyzer to benchmark website speed and help improve website performance.
Ookla launches Speedtest.net to provide Internet access performance metrics, such as connection data rate and latency.
WebSitePulse releases "Web Page Test" tool to benchmark website speed and help improve website performance.
Patrick Meenan launches WebPagetest.org
Google announces 20% reduction in load time for Gmail.com thanks to performance optimizations.
Google launches their PageSpeed tool as a Firefox plugin
Google gathers hard data to reinforce their intuition that "speed matters" on the Internet.
Gossamer Threads Inc. releases GTmetrix - a free speed optimization tool for websites that uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow to grade a site's performance.
Google announces their start of using page speed as a ranking factor on desktop.
Google states their expectation that websites should ideally load in 0.5 seconds or less. And also cites Akamai’s claim that 2.0 seconds as the threshold for ecommerce site acceptability.
Google releases Mod_PageSpeed for Apache. A module for rewriting web pages to reduce latency and bandwidth.
Google announces their PageSpeed Online Tool to assist webmasters improve performance.
Google Analytics starts tracking page load speed
Google’s Matt Cutts states that only 0.1% of the web sites have site speed issues that are at such a degree where it impacts how well the site ranks.
Google’s Matt Cutts announced that slow-performing mobile sites would soon be penalized in search rankings.
Google starts labeling sites as "mobile-friendly" to denote pages optimized for phones.
Google tests a "Slow" badge for websites in SERPs.
Google increases usage of mobile-friendly label. Starts using it as a ranking signal. Webmasters and Marketers refer to this event as "Mobilegeddon"
Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes strongly hints that page speed will probably become part of the "mobile-friendly" signal group.
Facebook announces proprietary Instant Articles format.
Apple announces proprietary Apple News format.
Google announces the Open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format.
Mobile ad spend overtakes desktop for the first time.
Google's John Mueller announces full roll out of mobile-friendly label.
Netflix launches Fast.com internet speed benchmarking site.
Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes confirmed that the next mobile algorithm update from Google would use page speed as a ranking factor.
Google launches the mobile testing site "Test my site".
Lighthouse website performance auditing tool for Chrome released.
Google discontinues the "mobile-friendly" label noting that most pages had become mobile-friendly.
Worldwide mobile traffic surpasses desktop traffic for the first time.
Google announces begining of testing its Mobile-first indexing.
Google audits 900,000 Mobile pages for speed and announces their findings.
Search engines Baidu, Sogou and Yahoo Japan announce support for AMP.
Facebook announces SDK support for the Apple News format.
Google announces the search algorith change dubbed the “Speed Update" coming in July.
Google starts ranking sites based on their Mobile speed.
Google PageSpeed Insights tool gets a major update with more data from Lighthouse
Mary Ellen Coe president of Google Customer Solutions writes that improving mobile speed is one of the most important decisions a business can make.
Google release a new version of their "Test my site" tool
Chrome 76 enables built-in support for "lazy loading" to prevent images that are off-screen from downloading. Saving bandwidth and significantly speeding up page load times.
Google adds "Speed Report" to Search Console to allow webmasters to more easily monitor and track page speed over time.
Wordpress announces intent to bring native lazy loading to Wordpress core with version 5.4
Google introduces Web Vitals an initiative to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
Cloudflare launches speedtest.cloudflare.com to provide precise insights into real-world performance metrics.
Google reveals Web Vitals will be used in search rankings in 2021.