Let’s face it, you should have been into this since 2015 or right when mobile devices were already starting to boom. But what is it and why do you need it?
Let’s answer the first question and explore it. AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is this baby project by Google and Twitter to essentially make pages load faster when you tap on them. People share news, blog articles and all that through social media so much hence trying to optimize the performance of these links opening up also came into the picture. Why? Because of this widespread occurrence of these pages loading so slow on mobile when you try to open one.
We’ve all been there. And I know that you know what I’m talking about. It’s when you try and open a link and it doesn’t open quick enough. Then there’s this phase where all the texts keep shifting so while you’re already reading, you get disoriented thanks to images that are loading late. Imagine just for a moment where there’s a page you can open on your phone and it takes less than a second for you to view the whole entirety of it, images and text.
And this is where AMP comes in.
Why do we need it? Like what it’s name says, it makes pages load faster. Accelerating the load time so that you won’t get bored trying to wait for 15 minutes for a blog or an article to load completely.
*Quick side note, Google and Twitter weren’t the first ones on this. Facebook came up with this idea first called Facebook Instant Articles. Keep that in mind. Imagine Facebook as the Backstreet Boys and Google and Twitter, NSYNC.
In a more easy type of way to describe it, AMP is like a light version of HTML. And because it doesn’t have that much weight to it, loading it on mobile won’t take too much effort.
This then gives off better performance when it comes to engagement for example. Always keep in mind that mobile performance is now the fad for Google. If you’re doing well on mobile, you’ll definitely do well on SERPS overall.
Which means..
The performance and effect on you and your business is greatly improved. Like what we’ve been saying for the last couple thousand words ago, mobile use greatly affects how websites are optimized today and hence how Google prioritizes these sites.
So how do you apply this to your site? First is that you should build AMP type of pages for your website. But keep in mind that how you build the HTML will be very important. You need to leave out a lot of things. Tags will need to have a certain order and be on certain places. AMP pages will need to be validated. And to do that, you can use a tool that’s found in Chrome.
Easy peasy.
Another easy way to exploit this in a white hat type of way is with Plug ins on certain CMS’. WordPress, the butter in our bread, has such plug in. So all you lucky WordPress based blogs and websites out there will have an easier way of applying this to your sites. All you have to do is upload the folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, activate the plugin, refresh your permalinks in the Settings Permalinks then click save.
And there you have it! This is just a mild shave off of the top of the iceberg of mobile optimization. AMP however is something that every website owners need if they want to have an edge against every one. What most business people forget even today is how the audience’s experience affects the overall performance of the website. If it’s too slow when they look at it through their phones, they will without a shadow of a doubt tap away and find another article or site.