Google’s AMP: The Future of Mobile Explained with Examples

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:

1. AMP HTML – a subset of HTML tags optimized for AMP pages
2. AMP JS – a JavaScript library specifically for AMP pages,
3. AMP CDN – a Content Delivery Manager responsible for delivering all documents to the AMP page.

1. Google’s crawler comes to a website to scan the website for content.
2. The crawler finds a special link to the AMP version of the website. Thanks to that, it knows that the static version of the website for mobile devices is available at a different URL address.
3. After that, Google scans the AMP version of the website, saves a static version of it and uploads it to its own server.

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:

• Even though ads are supported by AMP, their implementation is somewhat different, which requires developers to learn and develop the website correctly,
• Your servers might see less load, but that is only because AMP is hosted by Google,
• The page load speed is great, but it’s affected by the cache provided by Google and is highly reliant on that mechanism, whether you like it or not.

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:

• CNBC – British financial and business TV station,
• The Washington Post – American newspaper,
• The Verge – technology journalism portal, (read about it here)
• The Guardian – British newspaper (read about it here)
• Gizmodo – design, tech and sci-fi website (highlighted in the AMP Project portfolio)
• Finally, Wordpress implemented AMP automatically for all of its sites.

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):

Let’s summarize what we’ve learned:

1. The stats show that mobile web traffic is more important than ever, and catering to mobile users is a no-brainer.
2. AMP is a way to attract and retain mobile traffic with better page performance and better SEO.
3. AMP is not perfect though, because you become reliant on Google’s servers and you need to meet Google’s AMP requirements that can affect the way your page serves ads.
4. AMP is becoming more widely adopted, with pages such as CNBC, the Washington Post and the Verge following the trend.
5. The future of AMP is bright. Initially geared mainly toward publishers, it is bound to be more widely adopted by all kinds of websites in the months to come.

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:

• Progressive Web Apps: Features and Business Advantages
• Serverless Computing Explained: Comparing Features and Pricing to SaaS, IaaS, PaaS
• Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Developers?