Imagine a world where websites load instantly on your mobile phone. Typically, when you’re searching on your phone, you need information immediately and you don’t have time to wait for even the most beautiful sites to load their large images and content. Fortunately, the dream of instantly loading pages is becoming a reality, thanks to the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project and a boost from Google. But what does this mean?
By now, we all know when Google integrates something into their platform, it generally behooves us to listen and act. In Google’s attempts to make a faster, more user friendly Internet, Accelerated Mobile Pages are the next step.
What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is an open source initiative to improve the mobile web experience for everyone. The project aims to embody the vision that web publishers can create mobile-optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.
Accelerated Mobile Pages use a stripped-down form of HTML created on a very accessible framework and are designed to be fast-loading on mobile devices. Web publishers and their users benefit from faster load speeds and a better user experience on mobile devices. The primary web experience isn’t altered with Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Characteristics of AMP
- Doesn’t permit lead forms, third-party JavaScript, on-page comments and other standard implementation elements
- All CSS must be in-line and less than 50kb
- A special amp-font extension must be used for custom fonts in order to better control loading
- Images must use the custom amp-img element and include an explicit width and height
- There are special tags and compounds for videos, GIFs, slideshows and social media feeds
- AMP tags need to be in a certain order and in certain places
- AMP pages need a valid schema markup
It’s important when building your new site or when updating an existing site to validate that your pages qualify as Accelerated Mobile Pages. This can be done with developer tools in Chrome. This tool will help you determine whether or not your page is AMP valid and what problems may exist. Many of the most popular CMS’, including WordPress, have plugins available and will do a lot of the work in creating AMP pages for you.
Get AMPed
With Google’s preference for mobile-friendly websites, choosing to convert and build Accelerated Mobile Pages has many benefits for web publishers. Google initially started sending people to AMP pages in the Top Stories section of news results on mobile phones. While AMP pages started with news outlets, it’s been adopted by ecommerce, entertainment, travel sites and more. AMP sites have many benefits, including faster load times on mobile and a better user experience.
At Savy, we’re amped about Accelerated Mobile Pages and encourage the immediate adoption. Google has confirmed this is not a ranking change for sites, but they do want to make it easier for people to have access to this faster experience. This search experience will be available more broadly later this year. In the meantime, prepare for the shift by getting AMPed. We’ve already updated the Savy Agency website and are excited to implement this change for our clients moving forward.
Contact Savy Agency for more information about Accelerated Mobile Pages and how to implement this change on your site moving forward.