Quick links
In short, an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) is a stripped back version of HMTL which allows for very fast loading of mobile content. The project, created by Google and Twitter, is now entering the public conscious as users expect to see fast loading and great mobile experience. As an SEO agency, website owner or digital marketer it is important to understand what AMPs offer and why they are going to be important in 2017.
The next level of mobile friendly-ness
The idea of AMPs is simple and is driven by the ever-increasing use of social media for sharing and Google mobile searches within micro-moments for those looking for immediate answers, directions or inspiration to a query.
Essentially AMPs work on the reduction of HTML code and therefore a reduction in load times and increase in load speed of a webpage on a mobile (and in some cases a tablet).
From a search query, or shared article, the page will then be opened within the Google browser or timeline, with the original URL. Again, this reduces load times and increases the speed of the page.
Overall, like the name suggests an AMP will accelerate a user towards a mobile page (and hopefully along the conversion trail).
Do AMPs work?
In short, yes, hugely. Google has gone beyond just showing AMPs in top stories and opted for a wider roll out and across social media AMPs are now the norm. There have undoubtedly been a few teething problems most notably within sharing of articles.
In some cases, users were unable to fully share articles which were still showing the browsers URL through a copy and paste. However, it was reported in late December that a fix had been worked into AMPs to make social sharing of the ultra-mobile-friendly pages simpler and easier.
Getting AMPs on a website
The process of building AMPs into a website is based on streamlining your code. The idea is AMP pages are faster and to be read very quickly.
Removal of some HTML tags, reducing CSS where possible for every non-essential item and a AMP Javascript library needs to be used (or adhered to if you want to build from scratch). Working in this way means almost all information on a page, it’s layout, image placement, headers, footers etc. can be cached on only the actual text (which is minimal in terms of load times) needs to be pulled and placed on the page within the chosen AMP browser.
Building is a case of thinking efficiently about how pages are built and sending these pages to users based on devices and how they are more likely to interact with a page on these devices.
Are AMPs essential?
At this stage AMPs aren’t essential to SEO success, but if possible should be factored in (such as a general site build or landing page restructure).
It is likely that Google and the other search engines will use AMPs as a signal towards overall mobile effectiveness of a website, so any plans such as large scale website restructures or full site launches should also include the use of AMPs.
