What is AMP?

Definition

Google began supporting the Accelerated Mobile Pages project, known as AMP (translates roughly to accelerated mobile pages), in response to growing consumer demand for fast-loading, efficient websites. These pages are stripped down versions of the normal web pages, containing only what is necessary to make the page load faster. Google states that making websites AMP-compliant can result in a 15 to 85 percent reduction in load times.

Page loading is an important issue, as customers often don’t want to deal with websites that take a long time to load. An estimated 40 percent of users leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. With the introduction of AMP, Google can guarantee users that certain websites will load quickly and meet users’ demands. This helps to improve the user experience and reduce the bounce rate on websites.

How does AMP affect websites?

Websites that have been optimized to load on AMP will need to make some adjustments to their design. These adjustments include:

• The AMP HTML provides a limited number of styles and tags
• With AMP, .JS and external resources are loaded asynchronously and any external scripts that prevent pages from rendering are stopped
• The AMP CDN should be available as an optional content delivery network that caches all AMP-enabled pages so they are instantly accessible on mobile

How is AMP changing mobile content strategies?

With the introduction of AMP, the way mobile websites are optimized for mobile search has changed, i.e. changed mobile content strategies. AMP results are at the top of the mobile SERP for relevant search queries. Websites that are not AMP compliant therefore run the risk of being pushed further down in the organic search results. And with lower visibility, these sites now need to be maintained even more in order to qualify for the top results.

For this reason, brands that want to stay relevant on mobile should consider making AMP adjustments as part of their mobile content strategies.