What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and why it’s important?

Have you ever had an experience where you tried surfing a website and it took forever to load? It must have been very annoying, or like other users you must have left too due a lot of load time. In this article we will tell you what AMP is and why is it important.

What Is AMP?

To start with, AMP is a short form of ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’. It’s an open source coding standard for a website whose objective is to cut down the massive render-blocking code which enables the sites pages to load faster. AMP is a bare version of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). With AMP, it takes shorter time to load because it makes web pages smaller keeping them visually same.

Why was AMP created?

AMP started getting recognition back in 2015 when the mobile phones took over. The demand and use of phones rose in 2015 and people started using websites on their phones. As google noticed that sites worked slow on mobiles, that’s when they created Accelerated Mobile Pages. If you want your website to be mobile compatible, implement AMP.

AMP project was created to make the web pages load faster on your phones. It makes sure that the web pages load fast by eliminating all elements which slows it down like big photos, multiple pages, plugins and third party scripts, etc. Getting rid of these elements helps page load faster and create a satisfying user experience.

According to the project 70% of conventional web pages take around 7 to 10 seconds to load while accelerated mobile pages only took a second.

Data says that 47% of customers expect that the website should not take more than 3 seconds to load and 40% customers leave the sites which tool too long to load.

How Does it Work?

When pages are coded with AMP-style structure, AMP works making it lighter than the original one. The main objective of AMP project is to increase speed and readability. AMP pages are heavily cached for the content to load as fast as possible. AMP pages are set in such a way that images in the page will be shown after the scroll only which reduces the load time.

Google has listed “key principles” as a guide to advertise Accelerated Mobile Pages:

• Faster is better
• beautiful and innovative ads in AMP are result of ‘Beautiful’ matters
• Be safe, be secure– asking all creatives to employ the HTTPS protocol.
• We’re better together – Ultimately, AMP isn’t about supporting a single entity, but an entire industry.

Importance and Benefits of AMP

1. Traffic and SEO Ranking Growth

One of the best ways to increase traffic and improve SEO ranking is by improving browsing experience of the customers. As AMP focus on content that is lightweight, it enables pages to load faster, which gives good experience to the visitors. It not only reduces wait time but also increases the stay-time on the site than before.

When it comes to SEO, page load time plays a larger role, and as this initiative is initiated by Google, priority is being given to the AMPs in the SERP. In simple words, if two sites are ranked same on the search engine, the one with less loading time gets the top place.

2.    Low Bounce Rate and Increased Time On-Site

Bounce rate is when a user comes to your website and leaves without clicking anything. Most of the time this happens because of high loading time. Fast loading sites creates good impression on the users and increases the chances of them staying on your site for a longer time. Google says that 53% of website visits are abandoned because the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. After implementing AMP, you will see low bounce rate decreases and time on site increases.

3.    Increased Ad Views

HTML is coded in AMP, to enhance the overall experience of images and banners enabling higher viewability rate of ads, which increases conversion rates too.

Being on Google Search Top Stories Leads to Click-Through Rate (CTR) which is Higher.

AMP’s best advantage is that it surfaces the web pages on the top stories of google search. This happens with help of ‘carousel’. When a user search content on their mobiles, carousel comes on the top of the search result, inspiring user to click on that content first. Google does this to encourage other website owners to go for AMP and as the content of the AMP gets featured, it is an added benefit.

4. It improves server performance

AMP will reduce the load time on your server if your site gets huge taffic from mobiles.

AMP vs. Responsive Design

AMP is important because Google recommends it and it affects your SEO ranking too, so it is a must have. But is it important to invest in responsive design when you have AMP? Well, yes. AMP comes with a lot of advantages like enhanced user experience, lower bounce rate and increased load speed and AMP is easy to install as well.

AMP has got many added benefits too but AMP ties website with google. You may want to say that trading site’s liberty for ranking benefits is good but is not guaranteed too. Also, another downfall of AMP is that it is not easy to install. If you want your website to work smoothly, you have to place all relevant tags and code manually-which is time consuming. And if you are using WordPress website, even with AMP plugin, smooth functioning is not guaranteed.

So, it makes sense to use responsive web design if you are facing too many problems.