What Changed on the Web This Year

The shape of the year

Most years bring incremental change. This one brought several structural shifts within twelve months, and they fall into three groups.

The web got faster and more mobile, and search began treating that explicitly.

Measurement based on tracking people got substantially harder.

And legal obligations around accessibility and privacy advanced, with effect dates stretching into the next few years.

Separately, two products small businesses use every day changed their names without changing anything else, which absorbed more attention than any of the above.

Faster and more mobile

Three related things happened.

In January, browsers finished removing Flash, which ended a technology that had been declining for a decade and broke a small number of very old sites.

In March, mobile-first indexing completed, meaning the phone version of a site is what search evaluates, not a desktop version with the mobile one as an afterthought.

And from June, the page experience update began rolling out on mobile, making speed, stability, and interaction responsiveness explicit factors alongside relevance.

Together those settled a long argument. A site that is slow or awkward on a phone is not merely worse for customers, it is worse in search, which is a harder thing to argue with internally.

Measurement got harder

The change with the widest practical effect on small advertisers.

From late April, the tracking permission prompt arrived on iPhones, and a large majority of people decline when asked.

The consequences accumulated through the year: retargeting audiences shrank substantially, attribution windows narrowed, reported conversions under-count, and lookalike audiences degraded as their source data thinned.

The practical reversal was that broad targeting with strong creative began outperforming narrow interest targeting in many small accounts, which overturned about a decade of received practice.

The durable response was also clear by the autumn: information customers give you directly is unaffected, and businesses that had been collecting it were in a materially better position than those that had not.

Obligations advanced

• June: British Columbia's accessibility legislation received assent.
• September: Quebec's privacy reform, Law 25, was assented.
• Both phase in over the following years rather than immediately.
• Both reach beyond the obvious organisations.
• Neither required anything from a small business this year.

The pattern is worth noting: legislation with long lead times, which is easy to ignore in the year it passes and expensive to start on in the year it bites.

The two renames

In October, the parent company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp renamed itself Meta, at holding company level, with the apps keeping their names.

In November, Google My Business became Google Business Profile, and management began moving out of a separate dashboard into Search and Maps, with the app due to retire next year.

Neither changed a single account, listing, campaign, or invoice.

The second has a genuine practical consequence in the workflow change, which arrives next year. The first has none for a small advertiser.

Both generated a wave of fraudulent messages using the rename as a pretext for reverification or migration, which was the only thing either required attention for.

What it adds up to

Three sentences, which is the whole year for a small business.

Your site being fast and usable on a phone now matters in a way you can point at.

Knowing what your advertising produced has become less precise, so counting on your own side matters more than it did.

And the direction of travel on accessibility and privacy is settled, with dates attached, even where nothing is required yet.

None of that is dramatic in any single month, and together they change what a competent small business site looks like.

A worked example

A firm reviewed the year in early December and found they had reacted to the wrong things.

They had spent time on the renames, changing references and worrying about migration, which required nothing.

They had not looked at their site on a phone since 2019, had no idea what their advertising actually produced because they had never counted enquiries themselves, and had done nothing about accessibility.

Their January list reversed that: a mobile speed check, a monthly enquiry count with a question about how people found them, and an afternoon on the accessibility items that cost nothing.

None of it was urgent, and all of it was on the direction the year had pointed in.

What did not change

Worth stating, because year-in-review pieces imply everything is different.

Customers still choose a local business on reviews, photographs of real work, a clear price, and whether the phone gets answered.

A complete business listing still outperforms most paid activity for a local business.

Content that answers a real question still works, and content written to fill a schedule still does not.

And the largest constraint on most small businesses remains the offer and the follow-up rather than anything technical.

The fundamentals did not move this year, which is the reassuring half of the summary.

What is already visible for next year

Worth a short paragraph, since the dated items are known rather than predicted.

The separate listing application is due to retire during next year, with management moving fully into Search and Maps.

The first tranche of the Quebec privacy reform takes effect next September, with the larger body of it the year after.

The accessibility legislation continues its own phased implementation.

And the measurement picture will keep moving rather than settling, since this year's changes were the beginning of a direction rather than a single event.

None of those requires anything in January, and all of them are worth a calendar entry so the year does not arrive as a surprise.

The counter-case

There is a version of this list that produces unnecessary anxiety.

Nothing described here required a small business to act during the year, and most of the businesses that ignored all of it were unaffected.

The legislation phases in over years, the ranking changes were gradual and modest for most sites, and the renames changed nothing at all.

Year-end summaries also over-weight what happened to be announced, and under-weight the slow things that matter more, such as reviews accumulating or a list being built.

Read it as direction rather than as a list of tasks, and take one or two things from it into January rather than all of it.

Into January

1. Load your own site on a phone, on mobile data.
2. Start counting enquiries and asking how people found you.
3. Do the free accessibility items.
4. Establish whether the privacy reform reaches you.
5. Collect contact details at every opportunity.
6. Learn the new listing workflow before the app retires.
7. Ignore the renames.

Step two is the one that makes every other decision next year a better one.

The page experience change is covered in Google started using page experience this month.

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West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.