The What, Why, How, and Who on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Are you thinking of adding Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to your website? But don’t know whether you should add them or not? Then here is a complete guide for accelerated mobile pages for you.
What is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
In order to reduce the loading time of a website in mobile phones, Google launched their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. These are special web pages that load its content almost instantaneously.
Why did Google create AMP?
Mobile users today expect to load their websites super fast. The reality is a maximum of websites take up to few seconds to load. According to a survey, 40% of mobile users abandon a website which takes more than 3 seconds to load. The only aim of this open source initiative of AMP is to provide faster experience for users by loading content of websites almost instantaneously.
How does Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) work?
AMP is an open-source technology that enables pages on your site to load quickly for users on a mobile device. This happens with the help of a JavaScript library, AMP cache and some additional HTML markup. Do not confuse them with your desktop web pages or mobile web pages. The desktop version of your website is the preferred version while mobile and AMP versions are interpreted separately as substitutes. Thus, AMP works by creating light-weight web pages of your websites mobile version. Google has provided a cache that can be used by anyone at no cost, and all AMPs will be cached by the Google AMP Cache. Other companies may build their own AMP cache as well. For more details visit https://www.ampproject.org/learn/how-amp-works/
How to test your Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
To help ensure that your AMP implementation is working as expected, Google Search Console now has an enhanced AMP testing tool. This testing tool is mobile-friendly and uses Google’s live web-search infrastructure to analyze the AMP page with the real Googlebot. The tool tests the validity of the AMP markup as well as any structured data on the page. If issues are found, you can click on them to see details, and to have the line in the source-code highlighted. For valid AMP pages, a link to a live preview of how this page may appear in Google’s search results will also be provided.
Who should add Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
Initially, AMP is focused on online publishers. However, AMP is also relevant for other types of businesses, such as e-commerce organizations, internet marketing companies, analytics, content management platforms, and video sharing platforms for which the AMP results carousel and other components are well-suited.
For example, Ebay recently added 8 million sale pages, highlighting the AMP project’s expansion into e-commerce whereas recipe pages from sites that have implemented AMP are starting to be collected in their own “Food” AMP carousel in the search results.
Why you should add AMP to your website?
AMP is important for good mobile SEO.
It is a known fact that if you want your website to rank well, it should be mobile friendly. Hence, the need of AMP! With AMP, your web pages will load instantly on mobile devices giving Google a good reason to rank your site well in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
But it’s not just about organic ranking with AMP. With Google’s carousel that displays AMP pages — and only AMP pages — at the very top of the results list, your site could be featured at the very top of the SERPs.
If you take your mobile device right now and Google a keyword related to current events, you’ll see that the results include a carousel of AMP pages at the very top of the SERPs. That’s where your page could be, but only if you adopt AMP.
AMP is so fast, it will reduce your bounce rate.
When people visit your site, hang around for a few seconds, and then go somewhere else, you obviously hate it, right?
One reason people bounce is that the site is too slow in its mobile version. That’s why AMP is so important. It will load your pages in a flash so that users will have one less reason to run away.
AMP helps to monetize your site.
According to the FAQs of APM project, “A goal of the AMP Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach. With that context, the objective is to provide support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies in Accelerated Mobile Pages.”
AMP offers analytics.
Using AMP, you can track important information such as visitor counts, new vs. returning users, clicks, conversions, video engagement, link tracking and more.
AMP analytics offer built-in support of your favorite analytics tool, Google Analytics. So, you can easily track three request values with AMP — page views, events and social interactions.
Why you shouldn’t add AMP to your website?
There are no forms in AMP content.
If your goal is to generate leads by inviting a reader to subscribe or submit his contact information, it’s going to have to wait until AMP provides an upgrade that allows publishers to have forms in their AMP-optimized content. You can implement forms below the fold if you use iframe.
There are no external style sheets or Javascript.
Because of a lack of external stylesheets and external Javascript, the design and user experience (UX) of pages is monotonous. Publishers and non-publishers will have to decide equally if it’s more important to their brand to have the design complement the content to attract return visitors (in which case they might opt out of AMP for now), or if their content stands on its own and their visitors only care about rapidly loading pages (in which case they’ll want to start implementing it now).
It restricts how you can code your pages in significant ways.
Isn’t it obvious!
Expert Talk
The reality is AMP’s future is still uncertain. It solely depends upon whether it is widely adopted as a standard or not. Hence, even if AMP can improve your users’ experience, your traffic, your visibility and organic position, and monetization will most probably be affected; if you are not a publisher delivering primarily news type content then it would not be the best project for you, right now. From the AMP Project website they encourage all the people to help them improve this idea, and it will hopefully get better soon, finding solutions to analytics, ads, monetization and design issues.
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