Google announced it would be phasing out the seven-year-old Web Light service, which optimizes web pages for devices on slow mobile devices and mobile connections.

The official Google developer site documentation for Web Light Google and its user agent (googleweblight) have both been retired.

Google Weblight

Launched in 2015, the Web Light service aimed to open up more of the internet to users in countries with slow mobile connections and devices.

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

According to Google, the service leads to a 50% increase in website traffic.

Web Light previously worked in Chrome and Android browsers and only when Google detected a slow connection. The functionality was not triggered for desktop devices or tablets, only for mobile devices with slow connections.

Google Analytics continued to work on 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 shouldn’t have had an impact on ad revenue, but rather increase it since transcoded webpages were getting up to 50% more traffic at that point.

The service was launched first in Indonesia and then in India.

The now-deleted documentation described how Web Light works:

“Google shows faster, cleaner pages to users searching on slow mobile clients.

To do this, we transcode (convert) web pages on the fly into a version optimized for slow clients so that these pages load faster and save data at the same time.

This technology is called Web Light.

Web Light pages retain much of the relevant content and provide users with a link to view the original page. “

Mains light is no longer required

Seven years later, the availability of inexpensive but powerful mobile devices and an improvement in mobile connection speeds made the need for the service obsolete.

According to Statista, 99% of mobile data usage in India in 2021 will come from 4G devices.

In 2015, just 47 million devices were 4G-enabled, compared to 650 million in 2021.

Removed Google developer documentation for Web Light and added a note to Google’s user agent documentation to indicate that the Web Light user agent has been retired.

Google’s announcement states:

“The Web Light documentation has been removed and the Web Light user agent has been retired.

We launched Web Light so that we could serve faster, cleaner pages to users searching on entry-level devices.

While this feature worked as intended and allowed broader access to the richness of the web, the increasing affordability of more powerful smartphones has reduced the need for such features.

We continue to strive to evolve and refine the search experience to meet the evolving needs of our users.”

Featured image from Shutterstock/Asier Romero