What is AMP? How Can It Help your Website?
What is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) & How Can It Help My Website?
Since Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open source initiative, the world has quickly adapted to it. Considered to speed up mobile browsing, the project has had the cooperation of many big names in the technology industry.
But what is AMP, how does it affect your SEO efforts and what benefits can your website reap from it? Here’s the whole story.
What is AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is an Open-source coding standard that is developed to allow web pages on mobile phones to load faster. AMP enables publishers to take heavy and clunky web pages and streamline them.
To effectively run these AMP sites, a thin version of HTML is included rather than the bulky website version. This slim line of code allows sites to load faster in smaller spaces, such as your smartphones.
Features of an AMP website include:
» Use of CSS and HTML is streamlined, with the size of inline CSS in less than 50kb.
» Includes Image Lazy Load, which means images appear only when you scroll down.
» Ads and Analytics are accepted on AMP, just like regular web pages.
» No JavaScript should be used.
» AMP sites must be validated with the AMP Validator which comes bundled with the AMP JS Library.
» Custom fonts must be specially loaded, and image height and width must be declared.
» Forms are not allowed.
» Videos can be included by using AMP approved extensions.
All these restrictions ensure quicker loading times and will eliminate the frustration of waiting for a long time to access content.
What are the benefits of AMP?
» Faster Load Times
By far, the greatest advantage of Accelerated Mobile Pages is quick loading web pages.
Have you ever tried to access content from your smartphone? Then, you would understand the long wait you have to endure due to the slow loading speeds. With most users on a slow-internet pack, the speed offered is simply not enough to access information on-the-go.
However, with AMP, you can access content faster. According to Google, AMP web pages load 15-85% faster than the non-AMP websites. With faster loading sites, you give your users a better experience. If the users have quick access to information, they will most certainly stay on your website longer.
» SEO Benefits:
It is pretty evident that the future is mobile, and Google is an advocate of this idea too. So if your website is mobile-friendly, Google caches these sites quicker thus improving your ranking. Also, the longer a user stays on your page, the better your page ranking gets.
The importance of AMP pages cannot be emphasized more than with Google’s introduction of the AMP page carousel that appears on the first page of mobile search results. The carousel features articles that are related to the query. It includes an image with the article heading. The kind of content marketing you’d receive is huge.
Who can use AMP pages?
Although, Accelerated Mobile Pages are great, is it worth the time and effort? Not for everyone.
Accelerated Mobile pages are useful for sites that publish blog content, news articles or any other kind of content. However, if you convert your products or service page into AMP, you’ll lose the chance to impress your visitors with gorgeous websites, due to the slim HTML code required for AMP mobile pages.
So rather than turning your entire website into AMP, focus on converting your blog section or news feed into AMP. With lightning fast loading on your blog section, users will receive the information they need quickly thus improving your ranking.
If you are a content marketer or a publishing website releasing fresh content frequently, then AMP will be a lucrative tool for increasing your search engine ranking.
Get started with AMP
If you have a WordPress site, then there’s a 5-minute process for integrating AMP. Use the following plug-ins.
» AMP WordPress by Automattic
» Yoast SEO
If your website is not WordPress-based, then you’ll have to go to the AMP website and learn how to integrate it by hard-coding it. Or, you could get in touch with our experienced developers who can turn your eCommerce websites into AMP pages effortlessly. For PrestaShop AMP, Magento AMP or any AMP for CMS pages, SHAMLA TECH can help you out.
Once you do integrate your AMP, be patient. Your content will not immediately appear in search results. Google will take at least a few days to crawl these new pages. It can be a relatively slow process, especially when it comes to already existing content.
AMP is a free open source framework offering lucrative opportunities for you to build your site ranking and search engine results. Don’t lose up on this opportunity to give your users a faster mobile experience with Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Will you be implementing AMP for you blog and content pages? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
