A Guide to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) were first introduced to mobile web users in February 2016. Initially, AMP versions of pages were displayed in the “Top Stories” carousel section of Google’s mobile search results. In September 2016, Google began displaying AMP web links within their main organic mobile search results.

But what are Accelerated Mobile Pages? And what are the benefits of implementing AMP for site owners and their users?

What is AMP?

AMP is an open source initiative designed for creating web pages that load almost instantly. It enables publishers and site owners to improve the load speed of their pages and consequently provide a better user experience for their readers.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are just another faster version of a standard HTML web page, using a stripped down code called AMP HTML. This AMP page can be linked to, and controlled by you just like a standard HTML page.

How Does AMP Work?

AMP consists of 3 core components, which combine to create the mobile web pages:

• AMP HTML – this is HTML code with some custom tags and restrictions in order to provide fast and reliable performance.
• AMP JS – JavaScript library that ensures the fast rendering of AMP pages by managing resource handling and asynchronous loading.
• Google AMP Cache – used to serve cached AMP HTML pages. It fetches AMP pages, caches them and automatically makes performance optimisations to the pages.

How Can AMP Pages Be Discovered By Google?

AMP pages are made discoverable by search engines using the following tag:

In most cases there will be one version of the page as a non-AMP page, and a version that uses AMP. In this instance, the non-AMP page would be given the following tag:

And the AMP page would be given:

So, the tag on the non-AMP version tells the search engines that there is an AMP version of this content available and where to find this.

The tag on the AMP version tells the search engines where the content originated from, using a canonical tag.

AMP Benefits for Web Users

AMP is an attractive concept for mobile web users, providing advantages when it comes to browsing on their mobile devices.

• Lightning quick – pages will load almost instantly for users. This will keep Google’s users happy as they browse the search results pages and receive the information they were looking for immediately after clicking on a link.
• Reduce mobile data – not only will pages load faster for users, but less mobile data will be used when using 3G or 4G connections.

Benefits to Websites Using AMP

AMP offers a number of benefits to websites as well as their users.

• Increased user engagement – it should be no surprise that users want fast loading content. A slow loading page can lead to users giving up and going elsewhere. The fast load speed of an AMP page can therefore help reduce bounce rate, leading to more users engaging with content, and the possibility for more website conversions.
• Increased search engine visibility – news articles using AMP are eligible to appear in the “Top Stories” section of the search results. As well as this, AMP listings will appear within the main organic listings with the AMP symbol. This helps draw more attention to listings, and can lead to higher click-through-rates from users wanting fast loading pages.
• Higher rankings – In July 2018 Google launched their Speed Update, which uses page speed as a mobile ranking factor. A faster loading page can help improve your mobile search engine ranking, so utilising fast AMP pages can now lead to greater prominence in search results pages.

Which Sites Should Use AMP?

AMP can be used by any website regardless of industry. If you’re looking to improve page speed for your website’s pages, then AMP could be the route to go down. It is worth remembering though, that there are limitations. So a page that features a lot of JavaScript for example, may not work with AMP due to its restrictions.

AMP lends itself most perfectly to sites that publish news articles or blog posts, which can feature in Google’s AMP carousel. Articles don’t tend to rely heavily on JavaScript and so won’t be limited by AMP’s restrictions.

As well as news sites, ecommerce sites have been proven to increase conversions due to the use of AMP on product pages.

The use of AMP can help reduce the load time of your mobile web pages, increase user engagement with your website, and lead to more sales and conversions. The benefits to users and site owners are clear, making AMP something certainly worth considering for any site.