Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages is designed specifically to help web publishers create optimized content for mobile devices. Earlier with the mobile-friendly update, web publishers were required to get the mobile versions of their websites ready in order to rank better. This led to more than 60% of all websites applying responsive themes. But then, why AMP now?
Studies showed a behavioral trend that about 2/3rd of visitors from mobile devices left if a website took more than 10 seconds to load. This resulted in losing a good amount of traffic and revenue. AMP, on the other hand, loads your website on mobile devices at lightning speeds and therefore increases your traffic and dividends.
Google AMP intends to deliver the best possible mobile experience to its users and that the median time of loading AMP-coded content is just 0.7 seconds, whereas it exceeded 22 seconds in most other cases. Enough time for someone to go away and never come back.
How does it work?
First of all, AMP has nothing to do with the desktop versions of your website. It is a subset of HTML also called AMP HTML, a specific JavaScript and a specific cache also called AMP cache. AMP HTML is basically a stripped-down form of HTML which doesn’t recognize many syntaxes and uses only inline CSS.
The JavaScript basically is what slows down the rendering of pages. The JavaScript for AMP, created by Google is drastically limited and is designed to make sure they don’t cause performance degradation. Author-written JavaScript cannot be used in AMP pages.
The third front of AMP model is the cache that is placed on Google. Commonly referred to as AMP Cache. It is a proxy-based content delivery network (CDN) that enables super fast loading. The content is cached by Google every time a visitor visits the page and all subsequent visitors get the content from the cache which results in fast loading.
So, why is AMP a good idea?
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Search Ranking Boost
Accelerated Mobile Pages are specifically designed to load faster and since this is exactly what Google wants, there is no doubt that they will get a search ranking boost. On top of that, the AMP page listings are highlighted with a green lightning-bolt, welcoming users to check out the fast pages, which is an additional crowd-puller.
- More Page & Ad Views
Surveys reveal that 2/3rd of users abandon a page that takes more than 10 seconds to load and 40% leave if it takes 4-5 seconds to load. So AMP pages will work in everyone’s interest. Faster loading of pages means more page views and proportionate increase in Ad impressions. Although there are certain things that need to be pondered upon more about the Advert rules, there’s no question of it being removed as that’s the primary source of Google revenue.
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Ad Control
For anyone involved in Advertising has nothing to frown about. Google itself made it clear in their January 2017 announcement that AMP functionalities will include the ability to control ads of your choice and full control of ads placements. However, it is to be noted here that there are some dictations from Google. For example, The ads should be fast, beautiful and secure (HTTPS is mandatory).
It, however, has raised some concerns among the critics. Google’s clout is well known over the internet, where, when you go the AMP way, you’re basically getting locked-in within the Google world. But if all go the AMP way, you’ve got to go too. You may hate Google, but you can’t ignore it within a 100 miles.
It will be interesting to see the future course from here!