Earlier this year Google released their much anticipated, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, allowing for mobile pages to load almost instantly. The reason for its creation is that users tend to close out mobile pages that take more than a few seconds to load, AMP allows for these mobile pages to load faster by changing their format. According to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, “AMP is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.”
AMP is divided into three sections- AMP HTML, AMP JavaScript and AMP Content Delivery Network. AMP HTML has been redesigned to include custom AMP properties. AMP JS transforms anything that comes from an external resource asynchronous, therefore nothing can be blocked from loading. AMP CDN lets anything from JS files to images “load from the same origin”, this allows for the fastest delivery. Alterations on these mobile components allows for increased speeds, although AMP versions of pages will show less design, they speed up loading times, allowing pages to open in half a second, rather than 3 seconds. This may seem minuscule, but to most mobile users, having to wait 3 seconds or more leads to them closing out the page and moving on to the next one.
Pages that are using AMP are currently the top search results on Google. Although AMP is currently only seen in the News carousel in Google, it may soon become an SEO ranking factor. Even if not an SEO ranking factor, it is affecting the results on Google, pushing organic search results down. This means that if you’re not using AMP, your page is going to decrease in clicks and user engagement. Although AMP isn’t currently an SEO ranking factor, mobile-page friendliness is, so if you’re not ready to join the AMP-wagon keep in mind factors such as headlines, your hero image and first 100 words, when making mobile content. Something to keep in mind is that according to Google, “more than 50% of searches globally happen on mobile.”
