Google Retires Web Light Webpage Transcoding - Search Engine Journal

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Google announced they are retiring the seven year old Web Light service that optimized webpages for devices on slow mobile devices and mobile connections.

The official Google developer page documentation for Web Light Google and the associated user agent (googleweblight) are both retired.

Google Web Light

Introduced in 2015, the purpose of the Web Light service was to make more of the web accessible to users in countries with slow mobile connections and devices.

The service worked by optimizing webpages so that downloading them used 80% less data, resulting in a four-fold increase in speed over the slower 2G mobile networks.

According to Google the service in a 50% increase in traffic to webpages.

Web Light previously worked on Chrome and Android browsers and only when Google detected a slow connection. The functionality did not trigger for desktop devices or tablets, only for mobile devices on slow connections.

Google Analytics still functioned in the Web Light optimized pages.

In terms of ad serving, Web Light optimized pages supported Sovrn, Zedo, AdSense, and Google Publisher Tags.

So in theory Web Light should not have impacted ad revenue but rather increased them since transcoded webpages received up to 50% more traffic at the time.

The service was first...

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