If you’ve been hearing talk of AMP and been wondering what it is and whether you need an AMP version of your website, here’s the lowdown.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a project designed to improve the performance of web content and advertisements. By using stripped down code known as AMP HTML, an open-source website publishing technology, it speeds up delivery, allowing static pages to load much faster than standard HTML.
Backed by Google and including several other big search, social and web publishing platforms, it was created in response to projects like Facebook’s Instant Articles (which allows Facebook to show content directly within their news feed without having to open the equivalent web page in a mobile browser). However whereas Facebook’s Instant Article technology is specific to their platform only, the AMP project is open-source and so can be used by other companies to dish up content that’s been built using AMP HTML. This makes it a big deal for content publishers.
How does AMP work?
The increased speed of delivery by AMP is accomplished firstly by only allowing developers to use certain web technologies to create pages (e.g. most JavaScript and third party scripts are a no-no) and secondly because it serves pages from its own servers when you visit an AMP page via a Google search.
In order to use AMP, you produce an alternative version of your web pages that conforms to AMP project specifications (a pared down version of your site), giving these pages their own separate address. Google then hosts these pages on its server and delivers them to the user.
Some Advantages of AMP
The most obvious advantage is the speed with which content is delivered to the user.Google boasts that most AMP pages will load in less than a second, and up to 10 times faster than their non-AMP equivalents.
AMP pages could also experience a boost in search rankings. How mobile friendly pages are has already been a big factor in Google’s search rankings since its ‘Mobilegeddon’ algorithm and it naturally follows that AMP pages will benefit from this.
Google is also highlighting AMP results with a small green lightning-bolt, so users know that these pages will load much faster than others and may be more inclined to click on them. So AMP pages may get increased page views both because of this and because users are less likely to abandon a page that loads almost instantly.
Some Disadvantages of AMP
The functionality available on AMP pages is limited and the focus is on static content and load speeds. Although ads are supported, it is more difficult to bring in revenue via AMP pages, both because of the difficulty in implementing ads on AMP pages and because of how they are served up.
Another criticism is that AMP pages have a tendency to look very similar as a result and so there is limited opportunity for increasing brand awareness. From a user’s point of view it is also sometimes difficult to tell which pages are credible and which are not, as a fake news article won’t look much different to an article by a far more authoritative publisher.
Using Google Analytics on AMP pages is supported, but because it needs a different tag on every AMP page it will be time consuming to implement and there will then also be a delay before enough data is collected for analysis to be useful.
Summary
The AMP project has both pros and cons and so each business will need to weigh these up and decide whether it’s worthwhile for them to create an AMP version of their website. If you’re interested in exploring this further, get in touch with TU Marketing and we’ll be happy to discuss your requirements with you.