Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP… Should you invest in them?

Before we dive in to answer the questions, let’s understand what exactly are Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and it is basically a stripped version of HTML that helps create lightweight pages for mobile traffic only.

According to Ericsson mobility report, more than 70 percent of the world’s population will be using smartphones by 2020, reaching 6.1 billion people all around the globe. The global mobile traffic is increasing in a staggering fashion and we see that most of the people use their smartphones on the go, which means the use of 3G networks tops the chart.

• 
• 

This implies that most of the traffic driving to your website is coming from smartphone users and which demands some investment in optimizing your website for mobile traffic. In the recent times, we see the rise in responsive websites which is great but even responsive websites are massively slow and according to one research, 75% of mobile sites take 10+ seconds to load and 53% of users leave after 3 seconds of load time, so all the effort that you did to drive traffic to your website isn’t reaping great benefits. Also, that ad revenue you were relying upon, goes down the drain too.

75% of mobile sites take 10+ seconds to load and 53% of users leave after 3 seconds of load time. Click To Tweet

The media content on your website takes most of the bandwidth and on top of that, heavy CSS styling kills the rest of it. Optimizing for better performance usually need a savvy developer who can make changes to the code and implementation of your website to make it comparatively faster, but even with all the optimization, it is important to grasp, that most of the elements of a desktop website are unnecessary for a mobile site and even critical optimization will obtain limited benefits.

Google along with Twitter, WordPress and other publishers and companies came up to the rescue by announcing the AMP project. The project was announced back in 2015 and it has been embraced largely by publishing companies to make sure that their websites are fast and content is instantly available for consumption.

AMP helps create lightweight pages for mobile traffic only. Click To Tweet

AMP has mainly three basic components:

AMP HTML

It is a subset of HTML with some must-have custom tags and properties and apply restrictions on the use of some of the HTML tags. It also restricts us from embedding JS scripts and external CSS, and only single (inline) style sheet (CSS) is allowed with a 50KB limit to make sure that the pages are lightweight and load faster.

AMP JS

It is a JS framework specifically designed for mobile pages and manages resource handling and asynchronous loading. Third party JS is not permitted with AMP because the aim here is to make the content available and readable, rather than slow and pretty.

AMP Cache

It is a content delivery network for AMP enabled pages which mainly caches pages and optimize their performance to provide faster user experience across the mobile web.

AMP can easily be implemented with all the major Content Management Systems, including WordPress and Drupal and supports design customization and flexibility. For WordPress, you can download and install the official plugin available and with some basic customization, you are good to go. For custom CMS frameworks, you will need to take an expert’s help along with the resources available on AMP Project website

So should you invest your resources in AMP?

This question can only be answered by analyzing your business and in the following cases, AMP can be a game changer for you.

1. An ecommerce business, selling goods and services online.
2. A publishing business, like a news websites, blogs, vlogs.
3. A business that relies on ad monetization.

It will provide excellent user experience to your visitors by enabling them to access the content faster than ever and which in turn can increase engagement, retention and conversion. AMP provides excellent support for a broad range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies and has a very user-centric approach. According to the available data on AMP Project website, websites that load in 5 seconds see 2X more mobile ad revenue than the ones that load in 19 seconds.

AMP provides excellent user experience by loading the content faster than ever increasing engagement, retention and conversion Click To Tweet

Let’s admit that we all have used ad blockers to improve our browsing speed and this creates massive barriers for the publishers to monetize their websites. AMP can help both the publishers and users by improving user experience and speed of content as well as providing support for ad-tech to make sure that website monetization happens smoothly. It also provides support for third party analytics services to help publishers understand user behavior and employ better strategies for user retention.

The decision to choose AMP will give some immediate advantages to you as a business and especially if you are the first mover in your competitors:

1. AMP will give instant speed to your website when accessed from a mobile device on a 3G network, almost twice as fast. The pages will of course be simpler but fast and readable, which will make your user stay longer on the website and consume more content or browse more products and services.
2. Images will benefit from lazy loading and won’t be loaded before user scrolls to them. This is opposite of image preloading. Lazy loading can improve user experience, especially in long web pages (parallax scrolling, etc.).
3. Implementing AMP will make you eligible for the search result carousal, which can drive more organic traffic to your website.
4. Due to better speed and simpler interface, users will most likely interact with your website and add up to user engagement.
5. Users will perceive a better impression of your brand and will trust to give you their time and business.
6. Website monetization will become easier and more measurable.

It’s high time for you to make this important business decision and take the plunge to optimize your website for the major stream of users coming from the mobile devices. Implementing AMP effectively to gain maximum benefits will require some expert help and if you are still unsure about embracing AMP for your website, write to us, we at Genetech Solutions will be happy to help!