Getting Started with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google launched the accelerated mobile pages (AMP) in its search results on the mobile platform. This is an important aspect for any marketer and entrepreneur to take note of as well as find out how best they can utilize AMP to get a piece of the action. Here is an overview of this new Google project.
What is Accelerated Mobile Pages? ( AMP)
In October 2016, Google had announced its plans of launching AMP, a very reachable framework that would enable the existence of fast-loading mobile web pages. This open-source initiative according to Google was designed to assist publishers in improving their mobile page speeds quickly. This would consequently also improve the user experience. Publishers would benefit from the high speeds from their readership without having to sacrifice any ad revenue they have.
Experienced developers can achieve almost similar results via rigorous performance optimizations, but publishers neglect this option mostly due to financial constraints. AMP aims at allowing these optimizations by making them readily available without changing the ultimate mobile web experience. There is also a further benefit due to the future uptake by Google as well as other enormous and prominent companies in the internet technology industry. These companies are already encouraging the use of it by including it on a high scale in their specific platforms.
How AMP Affects your Website
First of all, you must maintain at the very least two versions of your article page. You must have the original of your article page that your users will view as well as your AMP version of the same page. The latter does not allow things like third-party JavaScript, lead forms, on-page comments and various other elements present in a standard implementation. You will also need to rewrite the template of your site to take into account all these restrictions. This requires all CSS to be inline and less than 50KB. Images will also need to use the routine amp-ing element and must adhere to a strict height and width. There are also some other restrictions that ought to be observed to allow Google and various other technologies that support the AMP project to detect your compliant article version.
Top Benefits of using AMP
Below are some of the key advantages associated with using the Accelerated Mobile Pages.
(i) Speed
Speed rules everything today, especially in the area of content presentation on a mobile device. On average an AMP has been found to load 15% – 85% faster than a popular web page. The mobile users of today are very demanding, and most have an attention span that lasts for about five seconds. The speed offered by the Accelerated Mobile Pages plays a significant role in making sure that content is delivered fast via a mobile device.
(ii) Search Engine Ranking:
Although AMP has not yet been confirmed as an important ranking factor in search engine results, you can assume it plays a role as page load speeds and mobile friendliness affect the ranking. Accelerated Mobile Pages greatly improves the speed at which pages load as well as mobile friendliness. These two factors are likely to influence the ranking that a page has over the other sites that are unresponsive and those that load slowly.
(iii) Increased Visibility
Publishers stand to benefit a lot from the increased visibility they will stand to enjoy with the Accelerated Mobile Pages. The search results will carry the AMP symbol in a green color. This will see the click through rates greatly improve as the search results will not only be unique from the rest but also users will start looking for such symbols to open fast loading mobile pages.
(iv) Ad Support
AMP will greatly support ads by supporting a range of technologies, formats, and networks of advertisements. The main goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages is delivering ads which open fast to allow its content look great as well as grabbing the viewer’s attention. This will help advertisers a lot as their brands will get a higher influence and improve their return on investment on their ad campaign costs.
Final Words
About 16,000 mobile pages are currently being created using AMP on a daily basis. This means that the project has taken off well and its numbers are growing on a huge scale. If you are looking to improve the performance of your website in the mobile search, then choosing the Accelerated Mobile Pages is the way to go.
Do you need help making your website more mobile-friendly? Talk to us 🙂