What Business Owners Need to Know About AMP Pages

Google constantly analyzes and updates their algorithms to ensure your search returns the most useful results within seconds. Since mobile use has skyrocketed, Google optimized those search results for smartphone. Google is constantly looking at how users are interacting with the internet and making adjustments to their algorithm to reward a better user experience. One of those factors is how fast a website loads on mobile. To help websites be able to provide a very fast loading website, they support something called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Accelerated Mobile Pages are a new type of coding that gives the mobile user a very fast loading version of your website. Google stated the objective of AMP is to “dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web by creating open technical standards to boost page speed and streamline ads with hopes that the ecosystem can build a faster, more engaging mobile web that will benefit everyone.”

Accelerated Mobile Pages: What You Need To Know

• Accelerated Mobile Pages is a new type of coding for web developers to create mobile-friendly pages that load lightning fast, often under 1 second to fully load a page
• The AMP version of a webpage is a modified version of the original. It’s optimized for readability and speed.
• The main problem with loading speed is the large amount of content and ads on a page that are all loading at once. If a page doesn’t load quickly enough, the mobile user will click away and never return.
• AMP also improves the mobile browsing experience by preventing ads from blocking the content.

You must be wondering: How does it work?

The answer is simple. Web developers are limited to specific codes.

This is going to be a little more technical for this section. There are certain HTML tags which are forbidden in AMP. A large amount of CSS is allowed. As for JavaScript, it’s out of the question. You can use an off-the-shelf JavaScript library. Images only load when they are scrolled to, and ads load last in order to speed up the page loading.

Also, AMP pages are cached on Google’s server, therefore, when Google needs the page, loading time isn’t wasted, and the user doesn’t have to wait.

Now, the question you must be asking as a business owner is: What does this mean for you?

Because Google is focused on the user experience, if your website is slow to load, you’re less likely to be in the top 10 results. And even though using AMP won’t boost you to #1 in Google’s search results, speed is a factor that Google considers when ranking sites.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to optimize your site for AMP:

• Create an AMP version of your pages. If you are using WordPress, this can easily be done with a plugin such as AMP or AMP for WordPress.
• Don’t include any forms, comments, or other submissions forms.
• Follow the AMP image guidelines.
• If your website template doesn’t accommodate AMP restrictions already, you might have to rewrite it to keep it within the loading-speed guidelines.
• Check your Schema.org markup data. If you want to show up in the Google Search news carousel, Schema.org metadata is essential.

What Sites Should Use AMP Pages?

AMP pages can work with all types of sites. AMP focused on publisher sites, specifically news sites, initially. It is equally relevant for ecommerce sites.

If your site is mainly content with text and images, then AMP pages will help speed up your loading time and improve your mobile users’ experiences.

AMP is here to stay, and it will help you improve your users’ experience. It reduces distractions and places your content where it was meant to be – in front of your visitors – quickly. Incorporate AMP into your website today. Google and your readers will thank you.

For more information on how AMP works, contact the specialists at SocialSEO.