Chances are that you might have already heard about the term “AMPs” and are possibly wondering what is an AMP website? Accelerated mobile pages have become crucial in today’s digital age. Do they have any influence on search and can you use it? This AMP website guide is just what you need to read in order to learn more about AMPs.
So What Is An Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) Exactly?
An Accelerated Mobile Page or AMP for short is an open-source HTML framework which offers a straightforward way for users to create web pages. It allows for fast, user-experience focused, and smooth-loading web pages to be created. Anyone that has ever tried using an AMP would know just how effective it is. AMP is used by businesses and developers alike for creating amazing experiences online. Whether you are an email sender, advertiser, storyteller, ecommerce company, or even a publisher, you can use AMP to easily create amazing experiences on the web. AMP is actually a project from Twitter and Google that has been designed for making extremely fast mobile pages. In its essence, AMP is basically a form of HTML that has been stripped-down. Thus, it is an HTMP page which is designed to be fast loading and very lightweight. As it is open source, there are many elements of openness.
How Is AMP So Fast?
When it comes to AMPs, some of the HTML tags cannot be used such as forms which are out. Moreover, a streamlined version of CSS has to be used. Although you can use most of CSS, there are parts which do not meet best practice requirements and hence cannot be used. As for JavaScript, it is not allowed. Instead you need to make use of an off-the-shelf JavaScript library which is provided to users. The reason why AMPs are so fast is because of the fact that the entire platform is designed for pure speed, pure readability. For instance, images do not load until you they have been scrolled into view. As DevsData points out, javaScript does all of the work. The system is designed for being heavily cached as Google would host pages meaning that your actual content would be hosted by Google.
How Does It Work For Smartphones?
In the past, regular web pages used to take some time to load as they were not designed to load fast. However, with AMP, the page will be constructed to be in the HTML stripped-down form. Hosted AMP tends to be much faster. The free platform gstatic.com has allowed web pages to hosted with ease. It is a Google-hosted cached version of the future. Therefore, it is an alternative for the mobile world. Besides just the HTML being cut down, AMP are designed for cached content for everyone. Moreover, you can still provide adverts on the pages that are cached and get all the revenue. Analytics can also be used with the cached versions.
Influence On SERPs
Let’s take a look at how AMPs will impact search results. For now, AMPs are just for mobiles. The name itself gives it away. Hence, at present, it is mobile only. It all comes down to website loading speed. You can try the demo on the official AMP website to find out for yourself how AMPs work in real-time. News publishers have been the first to use AMPs. Thus, it displaces or appears for certain terms where one would see paid search ads. However, it is evolving and only time will tell how impact SERPs.
How Can You Prepare?
As AMPs are the future, it is vital to start creating AMP pages for your website. Moreover, you have to ensure that those pages are in fact valid since AMPs a diet version for HTML. It is strict on how HTML is built. The HTML tags need to be in a specific order and specific places. Some things cannot be used. In order to validate your AMP pages, one has to use a tool that is built into Chrome. You will need to open the developer tools for Chrome to make use of it. There is an option for AMP project website which will be used for validating it.
Benefits of AMPs
AMPs offer numerous benefits to businesses and developers alike. If you want to take your website to the next level, then, you need to take advantage of AMPs. The following benefits will help you get a better idea about why you need to start using AMPs.
- Improvement In Core Business Metrics & User Experience
When you use AMPs, the web page speed improves significantly. This in turn helps improve core business metrics and the user experience. AMPs load instantly. This enables you to provide a consistently fast experience for all platforms and devices.
- Easy To Build AMP Pages & It Also Reduces Developer Expenses
A great thing about creating AMP pages is that they are easy to build and they also help reduce developer expenses at the same time. It can take just a few days for converting the entire archive, especially if one uses a popular CMS like Drupal or WordPress.
- Can Be Applied For Various Web Touch-Points
AMPs are used by popular platforms like Twitter, Bing, and Google. Thus, by using AMPs, you get to provide users with an unparalleled experience that is native-feeling and instantaneous by defaulting to AMPs where possible.
- Maintain Control And Flexibility While Reducing Complexity In Code
The reason why AMPs are so popular among developers is because of the fact that they use CSS for customizing your style. The freshest data can be used where needed for creating the best possible experience for users.
- Saves Time
Building a great website takes up a lot of time. However, the AMP components are already optimize to provide the best performance.
- Create Websites For A Sustainable Future
AMPs are a project that will help protect the future of the web. Thus, everyone has the opportunity to create a faster user-friendly experience.