AMP Pages: What You Need To Know
November 7, 2017
Have you ever visited a website on your smartphone or tablet that took longer than usual to load? Did you find yourself hitting the back button or navigating to a different page after waiting for what seemed like forever for a page to load? You’re not alone.
Whether you’re browsing different websites looking for the best deals or just looking for great restaurants in the area, chances are you’ve come across pages that struggle to load content on mobile browsers. If your website fits this description, don’t be ashamed, we’re here to help.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages
In recent years, search engines like Google and Yahoo have seen a substantial increase in the amount of website traffic coming from mobile devices. Just in 2016, over 51% of online traffic was generated from mobile devices alone. Now that we’re approaching 2017, the number of online users searching for their favorite websites on-the-go is increasing and so is the need to deliver reliable content.
In 2016 Google noticed this upward trend in mobile traffic and launched an initiative to provide a better user-experience for mobile users. Through their creation of Accelerated Mobile Pages or “AMP Pages”, Google has taken a proactive approach to ensuring web users have the same great across multiple devices.
What Are AMP Pages?
AMP Pages are unique pages of a website that feature HTML code that reduces the overall load time of a page. Designed for mobile devices, AMP Pages restrict certain media heavy components of web pages to allow for faster load speeds on smartphones and tablets. By restricting certain Javascript and CSS features, AMP pages are able to be cached on local search engine databases and accessed within seconds from remote devices.
What this means in Lehman’s terms is that AMP pages are a unique version of a webpage that restricts a limited amount of content to users in return for higher load speeds and website performance. This simple sacrifice helps improve the user-experience of the website and improves vital traffic metrics across the site.
Why You Need AMP Pages
Some of you might be asking yourself “My website was designed on a responsive framework, why do I need AMP Pages?” and the answer is simpler than think. AMP pages are designed to be used exclusively for mobile devices. With a responsive framework, your website is designed to scale and shrink down to different screen resolutions and sizes.
With AMP pages, the functionality and coding are changed to deliver the best user experience possible to users. Instead of simply scaling down the visible size of the website, AMP pages offer a limited version of the content to improve loading speeds on mobile devices.
Benefits of AMP Pages
As many of you know, Google is the foremost authority regarding everything search related. In recent algorithm updates, Google has announced that they are giving priority to websites that are mobile-friendly during search results.
Even though AMP Pages do not strictly affect organic SEO rankings, their consequences do. With AMP Pages the pageviews, session duration, and overall user experience for a website greatly improve. This, in turn, helps improve search rankings and also helps with bidding for paid search campaigns.
AMP Pages are one of the latest ways Google is helping to improve the user-experience of website visitors across the globe. By creating a unique way to deliver content to users on-the-go, Google is changing the way developers and website owners are approaching future projects. If you don’t want to be left behind by your competitor’s websites, the time to think AMP is now!
Want to go mobile with your website? Not sure how to start? Think VIG!