Have you ever experienced that you were trying to find the website for a store, a restaurant, or maybe a movie, but the web page loading causing torment. As per recent research, smartphone users use their phones 2,617 times each day on an average and also spend an average of 145 daily minutes on their mobile phones. For web publishers, a slow mobile experience implies fewer page views, less attention and disengaged audience. For users, it implies a dragging web experience and increased bandwidth use. There are various solutions offered to make a mobile website quicker. Google Accelerated Mobile Pages project is the contribution made by the search giant – Google for a faster mobile web. Smartphone are the primary approach to access websites for a growing number of users, in spite of the prevalent speed issues Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative is aimed to tackle these issues by presenting a set of rules and restrictions for websites sent to mobile devices.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an approach to make mobile websites faster and remove unnecessary elements from the page which decreases the loading time of websites. It organizes on priority the text-based content, other video, animations and graphics content and at last load the additional content on the remainder of the page that has been rendered. The reason behind Google’s open-source initiative lies in the significance of improving the user experience (UX) for the millions of mobile searchers globally. Some of News publishers such as BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and many more have expressed interest in AMP since the launch. Basically, AMP is a modified and slimmed down version of HTML plus a JavaScript library. Common HTML elements like image and video are replaced with AMP HTML specific version like amp-img and amp-video, which are web components. AMP is basically consists of three basic parts:
AMP JS
AMP JS basically takes care of asynchronous loading and resource handling. It does not allow any author-written JavaScript or any third-party scripts, but there’s still JavaScript under the hood.
AMP HTML
This is fundamentally the same as HTML with some restrictions for reliable performance and some extensions for building rich content.
AMP CDN
AMP Cache is a proxy-based CDN for conveying all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and automatically enhances the page performance optimization.
To bridge the gap between users’ needs and best performance practices, AMP has specific Components. These AMP Components are specific HTML tags. They behave similar to regular HTML tags: they have an opening and closing tags, attributes, and most of them can be styled with CSS. They can be easily identified, as they generally start with the amp-prefix.
There Are Two Types of AMP Components
Built-In Component: You don’t need to separately include them because it was built into AMP’s JavaScript runtime. Some of the components are; amp-img, amp-video, amp-ad, amp-pixel and so on.
Extended Component: you need to import them into <head> section of your AMP page in which you want to use them because it’s not the part of the JavaScript Runtime. Some of the components are: amp-audio, amp-iframe, amp-accordion and so on.
Here are some of the benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages that are beneficial for both for the user and your business.
Improved User Experience
Mobile friendliness is on absolute priority when it comes to the components Google has been focusing their efforts around. With the introduction of the Google AMP, one of the additional advantages is the pages are seeing a tremendous boost in their search rankings as a result. One of the ways that AMP benefits both the website owner and the consumer is by providing a much improved online experience. The consumer finds the relevant content they are looking for at the top of the search pages and the pages rapidly load to allow them to access the information in matter of seconds. The website owner sees more interaction on their pages and as a result their pages get boosted over the search rankings.
Increased Profits for Business Owners
There are various advantages for the entrepreneurs that utilize Google AMP. Insights reveal that 40% of consumers searching for content will abandon the page if it is not fully loaded in less than three seconds. This can be particularly problematic for entrepreneurs marketing via mobile avenues because there are outside forces that can slow the page load speed. The faster loading AMP means that entrepreneurs are going to reduce their bounce rates as visitors stay on those pages rather than hitting the back button. Being able to stay on that page implies the entrepreneur can use advertising banners and branding messages that require a click-through to generate revenue. These all are the win-win conditions for the entrepreneur trying to score as many visitors as possible to their offerings.
Controlling Advertising Campaigns
Entrepreneurs will now be able to have the ability to traffic the ads with any ad server of their choice. These entrepreneurs will have full control over the placement of ads, increased viewer measurements, and support for multiple demand formats and sources. The ultimate goal here for Google with regards to promoting content is that it has to be appealing, secure, and extremely quick. Allowing both marketers and publishers to have more control over promotions generated on the pages is a tremendous step in the progressive direction for everyone involved.
Speed
There have been thousands of studies that have shown the impact of speed on the bottom line, user experience, and your ability to rank your website in Google. Because of their adaptable and streamlined design, they are built to load fast. A fast loading time will in turn boost the revenue generation.
Enhanced Search Engine Results
Google isn’t going to rank AMPs higher just because they’re AMPs. However, download speed is an important factor in Search Engine Optimization rankings. For an instance, if all other things are equal between two website pages, the AMP will rank first because it downloads faster. Actually, it follows that an AMP is likely to get more clicks and fewer bounces because it’s faster to load and Google will see the AMP as more significant to users.
Google’s open source AMP project offers to the business websites the opportunity to significantly speed up mobile website pages to better reach mobile device users. AMP is likely to become an industry standard not just for news publishers but also for eCommerce websites and other different ventures moving forward as AMP is relatively easy to implement, and can be added page by page. You can always experiment using AMP over few pages to check the impact before making the decision as to use it site-wide.
