Whether or not you have heard of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), chances are great that you have unknowingly seen some. Mobile internet use has surged in recent years, so much so that it has surpassed overall desktop traffic and enabled internet use to hit new record highs. In late 2015, Google announced a new project to make viewing web pages on these devices easier and faster than ever: AMP.
As its acronym implies, AMP “amps” up the speed for loading web pages on mobile, and it does it by creating a standardized, stripped-down version of the page’s source code, limiting bells and whistles, and sometimes storing (caching) a version within Google’s own servers for near-instant access.
Now that the project has matured, it has evolved from a technology in the traditional sense to a set of standards that any website developer can use. If you satisfy all the requirements, you can get favored ranking in Google search results, potentially boosting traffic, while visitors enjoy the benefits of super-fast load times and a better experience overall. Everybody wins!
If you want to help your website adjust to the new, ultra-fast and mobile-friendly standard or want to get a firmer grasp on the benefits AMP pages can provide, read on.
What, Exactly, Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
At their core, AMP pages are more about what they don’t have rather than what they do. HTML code, the main building framework for websites, must be limited to a number of certain, standard functions and arranged just-so. CSS style elements must also be very minimal. Load-intensive elements like Flash and JavaScript are essentially out, although you can pull from a standardized JavaScript library to add more-than-basic functionality.
HTML must also be rigged with certain tags that help sites like Google pull your page up faster and cache it more efficiently, turbocharging the already reduced loading times.
When all these conditions are met, every web page can load in seconds and without any frustrating latency. If HTML tags are used properly, you can even get Google to save a cached version of your page, like a fully-functioning snapshot, meaning that anyone who clicks on it will have even faster loading times than if Google had to direct them to your website.
In a nutshell, AMP pages make your page load faster than ever before while giving your audience a better experience overall.
If you want to see an early example of how AMP pages work, you can visit any story on The Guardian — who was an early partner in the AMP rollout — and add “/amp” to the end of the web address. Here are two pages for comparison:
Why Should I Care About AMP?
So what is the benefit to you as a website host or company when using AMP pages? You make your audience happier, which can make you happy.
According to statistics compiled by the big G themselves, 40 percent of people will hit the “back” button on a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Even worse, 79 percent of customers who have a bad experience on a site are less likely to use the same business again.
Therefore, having a slow page can make you lose business. It can also cause faster-loading competitors to jump you in the Google search engine results, meaning you lose traffic and business to them. The end result, then, is fewer people even seeing your site, and plenty of unhappiness among those who do.
So go ahead and start exploring how to make your web pages AMP pages, or better yet entrust an experienced web developer who can.
If you would like to build your site to be fast, appealing to users and follow AMP best practices, then you can take a look at our website design services we offer, which include ongoing support and more.