Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Speed up Your Website

Since 24th of February, AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages have been the talk of the tech town. It was on this date that Google search results included links to mobile-friendly websites, developed with the help of this open-source project. And with this, it becomes highly imperative to know about AMP.

So, How Do We Define AMP?

In simple terms, the concept of AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages involves unsurpassed User Experience. The initiative aims at making mobile-page loading faster, thus improving UX. AMP proponents particularly wish to create engaging contents just once, subsequently loading it elsewhere.

With that brief introduction, let’s get down to discussing the technical aspects of AMP

Mobile content creation is quite different from that of websites. Several individuals such as publishers, consumers, creators, and users are involved in the entire process. Discussions between content publishers and tech giants resulted in the birth of AMP. It is an open-source project bearing similarity with conventional HTML pages.

However, the difference lies in its technical functionalities. Some of the crucial aspects worth noticing, in this context, are:

• AMP is capable of loading any modern browser or app web view.
• There is no need of bringing in your JavaScript
• You will not have to code for several analytical services and ad providers
• You will require minimal speed at lower than 50kb CSS.

As a result of all these aspects, you receive lighter pages resulting in faster loading times.

How does it Work?

AMP utilizes quite a few of its custom elements while optimizing your websites. The emphasis is on site optimization and faster loading. Contents at the top of the fold in accelerated mobile pages will load at the beginning.

Once the reader completes viewing this part of the content, the remaining fold starts loading. The main idea behind AMP is to load pages at a lightning speed. As the consequence, pages will load even before visitors land on them.

AMP utilizes certain methodologies that make faster loading possible. Some of them are:

• Pre-connecting
• Lazy loading
• Pre-rendering
• Pre-fetching

Website owners can also utilize these speed-boosting optimizations while optimizing their non-AMP pages.

Even though it makes website loading faster, AMP is not the ultimate. You will find AMP useful only in some specific cases. And your website’s technical considerations, as well as requirements, will prove to be crucial determiners of its utility.

So, where can you reap the benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages?

• Media-rich websites: If your site is quite rich in media, it will surely benefit from the optimized loading processes.
• Complete reliance on AMP: Another way of making AMP work is by placing complete reliance on it. AMP will be responsible for optimizing your site’s speed and not you.

Knowing the Limitations

Although a lot has been said and done about AMP, there is something beyond the virtual reality. According to present market trends, the concept is still in a nascent stage and will take time to gain traction.

So, it is on website owners to wait and watch how AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) does to speed up their websites.