According to a recent report by Dscout, an average smartphone user touches his smartphone a whopping 2,617 times a day. Many people feel that reading on the mobile web pages is an excruciating and clumsy exercise as the time for the page to load is really grating. A report by Google states that, the average load time for mobile sites is a shocking 19 seconds. More than 50% of mobile users shun a website, if it doesn’t load in 10 seconds. This warranted a “Speedy” solution.
The AMP Project
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As it is evident that smartphones are going to be the primary device for internet use, Google started an open source Project – Accelerated Mobile Pages technology emerged. Over the past few months whenever you clicked a news material in your mobile browser – you would have found a news carousel marked with little grey lightening symbol loading almost instantaneously. These are the Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Accelerated Mobile Pages enables the web pages to load on mobile almost instantaneously, making it easier for the publishers to deliver powerful contents like video, image carousels by reducing the bandwidth required for such contents.
Why Use AMP?
The stripped-down lightweight AMP HTML eliminates usage of many elements that causes a web page to load slowly. AMP enforces a highly specific, limited set of technologies and keeps JavaScript usage at a bare minimum. Further AMP offers Google pre-render support and as a result pages load much faster with 15-85 percent speed improvement. The whole platform is designed to make readability more effective and to hasten the page responsiveness. If your content is eloquent and addictive, you might even get repeat audiences.
SEO Benefit
Google’s algorithm considers page speed and mobile responsiveness for ranking of web pages. The faster your page loads on mobile, the higher it is going to be ranked.
AMP-enabled News pages will appear in a carousel format even above paid ads. Because of the speed, the visitors will spend a long time in your website thereby reducing the bounce rate.
Google is giving a good real estate to AMP enabled pages in mobile search results. A web page or blog post formatted with AMP HTML code carrying requisite keywords, headings will definitely rank up in the search results.
The flat design of AMP enabled websites resonate a lot with modern mobile internet users. AMP hastens the page response and you get what you want without the fancy things like self-starting videos that can irritate customers
Who should use AMP?
AMP technology is used to build Static webpages not influenced by user actions/behaviour. For example – Sites like like NDTV, India Today and Times of India have started using AMP format.
Normal URL that took almost 15 seconds to load in a desktop got loaded almost instantly on a mobile
As an AMP URL. When AMP pages get indexed by Google and hosted on Google’s CDN, they will load instantly than static HTML pages.
Static pages of Dynamic Websites
Although AMP technology was to be used for publisher-based content, it was still an open source project that could be deployed for various experimental purposes. While it is understood that implementing AMP for pages that are dynamic can be difficult, it is still possible. Site can make their otherwise static content AMP enabled so that users will eventually develop a liking to the faster loading site.
Deccan Rummy is an online rummy site has implemented AMP technology only for pages that are largely static in nature. As a gaming website is largely dynamic by nature, they have implemented this technology for one of the most popular pages in their website. Being the most visited page in the site, this technology makes it very easier for the user as the page response time is very quick. An example of amp implemented mobile web page.
Many e-commerce sites like e-bay are also experimenting with AMP for some of their pages with static contents. A search for Camera drones will give us AMP enabled pages. As of now users will not be able to perform actions like purchase directly in e-commerce websites but they still get a solid browsing experience. One such AMP-enabled URL
AMP Mp Plugin For WordPress
WordPress, the world’s popular Content Management System is also supporting the AMP pages. AMP for WP automatically adds Accelerated Mobile Pages (Google AMP Project) functionality to the WordPress site. It is easy to set up and configure and is highly recommended to quickly and effortlessly deploy an entire AMP site. It makes sure that your AMP version gets approved and indexed by Google Webmaster Tools. This plugin comes with various features like Disqus Comments Support, Google Tag Manager Support, Google Analytics Support and many other enticing features.
Blogger
Blogger is a blogging platform provided by the tech giant Google. It is free, reliable, and good enough to publish all your stuff on their platform. Do not get bogged down by google’s customary fiat “Blogger doesn’t currently support AMP HTML”, we can create an AMP blogger page easily. You can easily implement AMP on Blogger platform. You can check Random Tyms, the first fully implemented AMP Blogspot. You just need a little bit of coding knowledge. You can read how to implement AMP blogger blog and how to check its validity. Blog post generally have standard loading speed of 11.1 seconds, But with AMP implemented it comes down to 1.2 Seconds.
In case you’re planning to launch a website, AMP should be a high priority for it. Accelerated Mobile Pages provide an all-around better user experience for mobile Internet users. By this time, you must be clear about the benefits of making your page AMP enabled. Install AMP on your blog (WordPress or blogger) and get your readers addicted to your blog. Do you have any further questions regarding AMP? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.