Ever since it was announced by Google, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has improved the website speed of countless owners of mobile pages. We have reviewed in-depth how it works, and just what an AMP can do to improve your site speed.
What is an AMP?
An AMP is an acronym that means Accelerated Mobile Pages. The minds from Google were the ones to originally announce it a few years back to help initiate the site speed of many mobile pages. At its core, an AMP page is a deconstructed version of some webpage written in HTML. Things like animation and pictures are completely stripped away, leaving only the code it was written in. This open-source initiative project was designed for optimization of faster mobile pages, in other words, it takes a page that is already friendly for mobiles and it makes it load faster by, as we’ve mentioned, stripping it down to its basics. The end goal with AMPs was to achieve a better user experience by having a lightning-speed website. This is quite appropriate, as the AMP icon has white lightning on it, which you may have seen on your phone’s browser, indicating that it’s showing an AMP page.
Why Is It Important?
Many will agree that website speed is a crucial aspect that either makes or breaks the website’s success. As the experts from AMPWPTools.com suggest, only 60% of visitors will stay on the page if it’s taking up to 3 seconds to load. This means that almost one-tenth of visitors are lost by the second it takes the webpage to load, leading to a decline in conversation, and ultimately low webpage rankings. One thing has been made clear – slow websites will fail. This is where an AMP can come in and save the day, as it’s super fast. AMP pages have shown excellent results in increasing conversion rates, site traffic, and page views per visit. Another fact to consider is that AMP pages are required for news sites if they want their content to be in the “Top stories” news on mobile devices. AMP is without a doubt a very useful tool because every second count, quite literally.
How Does an AMP Work Exactly?
To get a thorough explanation of just how an AMP works you should consider all three parts of an AMP structure AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP CND. Firstly, an AMP HTML is a subset of HTML. This language has many restrictions, some custom tabs, and custom properties. However, if someone is familiar with regular HTML they should find it easy to adapt existing pages from regular HTML to AMP HTML.
Secondly, AMP JS is simply a JavaScript framework for mobile webpages. Most of the time it will manage how resources are handled and it will pay attention to asynchronous loading. It’s very important to note that AMP JS has some limits such as that third-party JavaScript isn’t allowed with AMP.
Lastly, an AMP CDN is an optional Content Delivery Network which automatically takes pages where AMP is enabled, caches them, and optimizes some performance automatically.
Some additional AMP aspects are worth knowing such as that AMP plugin pages don’t allow any sort of forms, a streamlined version of CSS needs to be used, and custom fonts have to be specially loaded.
Is AMP the Right Choice for You?
Before we begin this discussion it’s important to mention some drawbacks of AMP. There are two main reasons why AMP might not be the right choice for you. The first one is that your webpage will be stripped of a lot of elements you probably already use today. This concerns all the ads on your website as you will have to adjust them. Email pop-ups and overlays will not work as well. There have even been some reports that AMP decreased the conversion metrics.
Another reason why an AMP could pose a problem is that if you ever decide you want to switch from it, it will be really hard to do. As most AMP involve new URLs for your website with /amp at the end, Google will index URLs with AMP in them instead of your original URLs. Nevertheless, AMP has more benefits than it has drawbacks that might not even pose a problem for most of the users, and it’s a worthy feature to implement into your webpage to make it prosper.
Many compelling reasons make an AMP almost an essential part of ensuring the success of a mobile page. If you decide to switch, we’ve reviewed many of its aspects that will help you make your decision better.