Why are websites now required to be faster for mobile display? A summary of the background.
1. The Arrival of a Mobile Society
As predicted in the following "White Paper on Information and Communications, 2008," published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the explosive spread of smartphones has truly created a "mobile society,".
"Regarding what kind of device individuals use to connect to the Internet, 80% or more of all age groups from teens to 40s use smartphones as their main device to connect to the Internet... Next, PCs have a high rate of usage, but still about 20% lower than that of smartphones.”
(Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, "White Paper on Information and Communications 2008," http://www.soumu.go.jp/johotsusintokei/whitepaper/ja/h30/pdf/30honpen.pdf)
It is believed that websites will need to operate on the assumption that they will be increasingly viewed by mobile devices in the future.
2. The "MFI" Announcement from Google and Steady Transitioning
With this in mind, Google, which has long emphasized the user experience on websites,announced the "MFI (Mobile First Index)" in March 2018.
("Rolling out mobile-first indexing" https://webmaster-ja.googleblog.com/2018/03/rolling-out-mobile-first-indexing.html)
Mobile-first indexing (MFI) means that Google will evaluate the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking. Even if a website is mainly used by desktop users, the search result for the site will depend on the Google rating for the mobile site.
The transition to MFI has been progressing steadily. As of December 2018, nine months after the announcement, more than half of all websites in the world had already been migrated to MFI. ("Mobile-First indexing, structured data, images, and your site") https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/12/mobile-first-indexing-structured-data.html).
As a general rule, MFI has been applied to all new domains since July 2019( "Mobile-First Indexing by default for new domains" https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/05/mobile-first-indexing-by-default-for.html)
You can check the Google Search Console to see if your website has transitioned to MFI (https://search.google.com/search-console/about?hl=en).
3.The Growing Need for Improved Mobile User Experience
Today, web operators (those using Google's PageSpeed Insights as a web management tool) also recognize that the user exerience of mobile pages, especially in terms of display speed and MFI, is "an issue that could lead to lost business opportunities," and that there is a growing need to address this issue. Our clients have also been asking for support in this area.
Therefore, "WEXAL® Page Speed Technology" has been developed in response to these growing needs. "WEXAL® Mobile Display Acceleration Service" implements this technology.