• by Josh Engroff , Op-Ed Contributor, January 15, 2016

Once upon a time, Web sites reigned supreme. For nearly two decades, they defined the user experience online, and for many consumers “the Web” and “the Internet” were synonymous.  For a business, being “online” meant having a Web site, regardless if your business was publishing, fashion, retail, finance, insurance or blogging.

Thanks to open-source, the basic technology required to build a new site only got cheaper over time -- with the “LAMP” stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) displacing the proprietary stack -- as did hosting, thanks to Amazon. And once a site was live, its goal was to get traffic. Always.

And so it went, year after year, Web site after Web site.  

But then something happened. The smartphone began to siphon user attention away from browsers into mobile apps. At the same time, some elements of the user experience on the Web began to noticeably deteriorate. The most obvious example of this was the non-mobile-optimized Web site, a visually jarring experience on a small screen. Another was the site that takes forever to load.

Turns out that -- surprise! -- some of the things we do to optimize revenue do not optimize performance, and that loading up Web pages with tons of JavaScript (tags, pixels, beacons) can crush page load times.

And so consumers found an effective way to counter this: the ad blocker. The growing use of ad blockers is an indirect message to every company with an ad-supported site from consumers: Please stop showing me crappy ads, and please speed up your site.

In 2015, Google delivered a much more direct message. Starting in April of last year, Google began using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in search results. To make sure people got the point, the company didn’t mince words: “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in Google Search results.”

Google said that 40% of mobile users will abandon any site if it takes more than three seconds to load. And so, in October of 2015, it introduced the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), ostensibly aimed to “dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web.”

AMP allows content publishers to streamline content templates with an open-source framework (AMP HTML), and simplifies cumbersome HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements, resulting in a stripped-down page.

The AMP project can be understood as Google’s version of Facebook’s Instant Articles: a way of making the Web work better on mobile devices. Unlike Facebook, Google’s tool is not a walled environment designed to keep you on Google, but operates anywhere online. And starting next month, Google will begin integrating AMP into search results.

Interestingly, AMP requires HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, which is, of course, the foundational transfer protocol of the Web. While AMP is now slowly getting on people’s radars, the coming switch to HTTPS surely isn’t.

As Tim Varner, the co-founder of Roost (a leader in the Web notification space), explained to me, the upcoming changes to Google Chrome will essentially deprecate HTTP. As Google makes clear in its own videos, sites without HTTPS will be flagged to Chrome users. Since Chrome has the largest share of the mobile browser market, and the second-largest share of desktop browsers, this is a big deal.

Google’s power in search provides a strong incentive for sites to clean up their user experience. The search giant's increasing dominance of the browser market provides the same incentive for switching to HTTPS. Everyone with a Web site would be wise to get ahead of this trend in 2016.