What Are AMP Pages?

Digital Strategy Graphic 1

Mobile Browsing Speed Increasing with Google’s AMP Pages

At the start of 2017, Google introduced a number of new and exciting features to their browsing platforms that have already gone a long way towards making web browsing easier and faster across multiple devices. Furthermore, new innovations from Google have also helped website owners gain more traffic and keep their desktop and mobile sites more streamlined and user friendly while making searches more comprehensive and relevant. Making the browsing experience faster and more simplified will especially help business owners reach more customers through their online presence, making their digital marketing campaigns more effective than ever before.

 

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)amp project

The latest item on the long list of ways Google is improving the browsing experience this year is their new Accelerated Mobile Pages. Over the last few years there has been a significant increase in the amount of mobile browser users versus the amount of people who primarily use a desktop browser. As a result, Google is making the effort to ensure that mobile browsing continues to improve as it emerges as the primary way most of us access the internet. Accelerated Mobile Pages have been used by Google for some time now, particularly for news articles. As the technology grows and improves, the use of AMPs will likely spread so publishers can create all kinds of mobile content that will load instantly on any mobile device.

How Does AMP Work?

The major drawback to adding a large amount of content and mobile ads to a website is with everything trying to load at once, the page can become frustratingly slow. A slow mobile page means users are more than likely to navigate away from that page or website all together. An Accelerated Mobile Page is different from a typical mobile page in a few significant ways that actually help make the page faster. Web developers are actually limited to a few specific technologies that they can use to create the mobile page, meaning most JavaScript is forbidden. Also, AMP pages are found exclusively on Google’s servers, which means that you are essentially creating an alternate version of your own site to be used exclusively on Google’s website according to the AMP requirements. These alternate versions can be constructed separately with an optimized site address, or if you are using WordPress there is a handy plugin that will automatically generate your AMP page and allow Google to recognize it.

Does AMP Speedup Your Mobile Site

A major change that comes with the AMP technology is the fact that users view your AMP page on Google’s website, rather than your own original site. This is due to the fact that Google needs to host AMP pages on their own servers to ensure instant load times. While this certainly does accelerate the speed of your mobile page, it means that users who share the link to your AMP page will not be sharing a link to your actual site, but will instead point others to the page hosted by Google on Google.com. In addition, because JavaScript is not allowed to be used with AMP, there are other methods required to add things like advertisement links and analytics to an AMP version of a mobile site.

Speed has a high value in the world of online searches because users won’t wait around for clunky, slow websites to load.

In fact, Google says 40% of users will abandon any website that takes more than three seconds to load.

So even if your company is at the top of the search list, if its website is not keeping up with the latest standards in loading times, it could affect your the future of your SEO rankings and your bottom line.

Businesses are expected to keep up with the latest changes. It may seem daunting but speed and convenience are important in securing new customers and keeping them. Ranking on page one of Google or Bing can truly affect your company, and having an instantaneous site could mean the difference between a customer staying or leaving. 

With help from digital marketing and site building experts at Stigan Media, you will be able to take advantage of these new browsing innovations from Google without having to sacrifice any of your website’s existing features or content.

To learn more about the ways we can help you improve and enhance your business website feel free to contact our digital marketing company. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get all of our latest tips and updates.