If you had to guess, would you be able to say how many mobile users are browsing the web today?
In the modern web, mobile is rising to dominance. According to gs.statcounter.com, more than 48% of devices browsing the Internet are mobile devices. Desktop users rank slightly lower, while tablets form up less than 10%.
What can we learn from these stats? Mobile users are crucial. You ignore them at your own peril.
Since Google’s Mobilegeddon in April 2015, there’s more and more tools aiming to improve the web experience of mobile users. One of them is Google’s AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages.
If you want to stay competitive on the mobile market, you should know about AMP.
In this post, I’ll present what AMP is, how it works, and why you should care about AMP in general. I’ll also present some AMP examples and, to keep things from getting too sweet, some disadvantages of this solution. We'll take a look at the future of AMP, as well.
Let’s get started!
AMP (which stands for Accelerated Mobile Page) is an open source project backed by Google. Its purpose is to speed up how fast webpage content is displayed to mobile users.
To enjoy the advantages of AMP, your website needs to meet certain requirements set by Google. Once the requirements are met, your users will enjoy a website that loads almost instantly on phones because its content is optimized and served directly via Google’s servers.
How much faster are we talking here?
In early tests, we found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.
Jon Parise, product manager at Pinterest
An AMP consists of three elements:
After the upload is complete, mobile users can find the AMP version of the website via through the search engine or Google Cards.
So in essence, implementing AMP requires you to create a specially optimized version of your website that will make the mobile user’s experience smooth as butter.
If your target users are people using mobiles devices, AMP is definitely going to help you.
The same applies if the business you are running consists of static pages or has a blog-like structure.
Due to the speed of AMP, it improves your website SEO ranking, since load time is an important factor for SEO.
Additionally, users searching for information through Google can see that a particular page is an AMP Page, indicated by a lightning bolt icon. They expect AMPs to load almost instantly, making them more willing to click on the article.
As with anything, AMP is not perfect and has its downsides:
However, as we'll see in the next section, a range of popular pages have decided that the AMP tradeoff is worth it for them.
More and more websites are deciding to implement AMP. Here are just a few examples:
The list goes on, and grows day by day. Feel free to drop us a line if you wish to share any interesting examples you've come across.
It’s pretty simple. To start using AMP on your website, the developers have to create a static page using AMP syntax and link to it using the <link rel=”amphtml”> tag.
Google provides a pretty cool AMP tutorial, accessible here.
What’s in store for AMP in the future?
Our wager is that the trend will continue to grow in popularity. One reason is that it will be adopted by a wider variety of websites.
“Although Google AMP was initially made available for publishers, it will be available for all types of websites soon,” says Erin Feldman at unamo.com. “In the not too distant future, all kinds of apps and websites will be AMPed.”
And if you’re still sceptical, you can turn to Richard Gingras, head of news and social products at Google. In a February 2016 interview, he lays out the plans for AMP (via Nieman Lab):
At the very least, AMP will be “the future of mobile SEO,” as mentioned by Daniel Boardman, Head of SEO at hoppa.
And you can expect Google to keep pushing AMP for wider and wider adoption. If there’s anything to learn from Google’s history, it’s that you should rather follow what the search giant is doing rather than be left abandoned and unranked in its wake.
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned:
In the end, AMP is just another way to make the life of your users easier when they visit your website. It’s worth putting in the effort to help them have a smooth experience.
Thanks for reading my article! Hope it has been helpful. If you want to read more, make sure to check out some our other posts:
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