Accelerated Mobile Pages - What are they?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP) is a project from Google and Twitter designed to make mobile pages load almost instantly. This is important as it is essential in a mobile first world that websites have fast loading speeds.
Google statistics show that over 50% of users abandon slow sites, yet over 75% of mobile sites take 10+ seconds to load on a 3g connection. Therefore, businesses are losing out on engaging with potential customers by offering bad user experiences.
Maintaining a fast-mobile friendly website on your own can often require large development teams or specialised skill sets. Read on to find out why no longer need this and why you should be using AMP on your website.
Why the AMP project started.
The AMP project was built to help visitors achieve what they came here to do. Accelerated Mobile pages load almost instantly across platforms that link to AMP pages. These include, Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook and more.
It is an open source initiative to help publishers, developers and webmasters create fast web experiences that are straightforward and easy to manage to enable a better web with sites that are fast, beautiful, and monetise well.
By publishing in the AMP format, pages will be fast while retaining the ability to retain style of your page and retain the look and feel that you want to promote your brand image.
AMP pages have better opportunities for distribution through social pages, Google, LinkedIn, Bing etc, encouraging your page to appear across all these platforms.
What are Accelerated Mobile Pages made of?
AMP is built on three core components, the combination of: AMP HTML, AMP JS and AMP cache.
AMP HTML is a restricted subset of HTML. It is restricted to work well with the other pieces Amp JS which is a JavaScript library that implements AMPs best practices for performance and manages resource loading to ensure that the page renders quickly.
The AMP cache fetches AMP pages and caches them, this improves page performance by delivering the document that doesn’t depend on a round trip to a publisher’s origin. The AMP cache also validates pages so that only valid amp pages are displayed to users.
AMP doesn’t require a large development team and budget as it builds on existing skill sets that most web developers already have, or on top of the existing frameworks built on content management systems such as WordPress.
Getting started with AMP is easy
For many CMS’ installing AMP pages can be as easy as installing the plug in compatible with your content management system, to create AMP pages automatically for you, or adjust templates to generate AMP pages. Full documentation on AMP can be found here - ampproject.org
Will AMP work for me?
Many websites and businesses around the world are seeing great results from using AMP pages including positive retention, audience growth, engagement, and monetisation metrics to name a few.
AMP is flexible, so it supports a wide range of layouts, styles, and functionalities, Accelerated Mobile Pages allow you to keep the distinct look and feel of your brand. Whilst supporting subscriptions and paywalls, allowing you to offer more content just for your subscribers.
It is important to measure how your ad performs, the AMP project has received a lot of support from software providers, including Google Analytics. Which means you can continue to use your existing partners for ads, analytics, video and social.
Accelerated mobile pages can complement Progressive Web Apps. To find out more read - Our introduction of progressive web apps blog.
How can I create a AMP page for my website?
If you are interested in building a AMP pages for your business website, or to find out more on whether AMP pages can benefit you, get in touch!
You may have found yourself frustrated with slow loading sites, don’t let your site be one of them!