Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

What is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source initiative project designed to optimize faster mobile pages. It’s like taking a page that’s already mobile friendly and making it load quicker, by stripping it down to basics.

It’s essentially a user centric approach to create a better user experience when browsing web pages on your phone.

How does AMP work?

AMP HTML: A subset of HTML, this markup language has some custom tags and properties and many restrictions. But if you are familiar with regular HTML, you should not have difficulty adapting existing pages to AMP HTML.
AMP JS: A JavaScript framework for mobile pages. For the most part, it manages resource handling and asynchronous loading. It should be noted that third-party JavaScript is not permitted with AMP.
AMP CDN: An optional Content Delivery Network, it will take your AMP-enabled pages, cache them and automatically make some performance optimizations

The AMP plugin renders your mobile page more quickly, by cutting back on the HTML code tag manager aspect and rendering only the ones that are suitable for mobile users. By stripping the standard desktop version of a webpage to only its mobile-compatible components, the load time for users on mobile is drastically decreased, leading to a much better user experience.

Look for the thunderbolt icon below. Articles which have this indicator attached are AMP enabled articles.

The Advantages

Speed. AMPs load about twice as fast as a comparable mobile page, and have only one-tenth the latency. That’s an enormous speed advantage over traditional web pages. That increased speed will give you a couple distinct benefits: customers will be able to access your content faster, and your visitors will be more likely to go through a purchase or checkout process since they know it will go quickly and smoothly.
Visibility. Next, AMPs give your site a boost in visibility. Currently, having a page with AMP protocols doesn’t increase your domain authority or page authority, but it does make that page eligible for the AMP carousel that rests above typical search results. Though not available for every query, this can give your page a substantial boost in organic search results, and send far more traffic your way.
Dwell time. There’s some evidence to suggest that AMPs have a higher dwell time than their traditional counterparts. This could be due to a number of reasons; for example, it could be that the faster loading speed encourages visitors to stick around longer and view more content, or it could be that because they’re higher-ranked results, they naturally attract more dedicated traffic. Either way, using AMP could increase the amount of time your visitors spend on your site.
Engagement. AMPs also give you more opportunities to engage with your visitors. Visitors on an AMP are more likely to interact with any features you offer, including forms, buttons, links, videos, and even online shopping because your site will look sleeker and offer more functionality.
Competition. Don’t forget that there’s a competitive element at play here as well. If all your competitors are using AMPs consistently, and you aren’t, you might stand out as lagging behind them. Conversely, if you adopt AMP protocols before your competition, you could look like a frontrunner and differentiate yourself in a positive light.

The Disadvantages

It’s difficult to implement. Google offers in-depth resources and tutorials designed to help you implement AMP protocols effectively, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to follow. If you don’t have much experience in the web development world, you’ll probably need to hire a professional to assist you. That means you’ll either spend several extra hours to see these benefits, or you’ll end up paying someone to make it work.
Analytics are unsatisfying. Google usually brings its A-game to analytics, but the analytics available for AMPs leave something to be desired. You’ll be able to track basic metrics like visitors and engagement, but there aren’t many opportunities to optimize your user experience.

A Note on Ranking

Although AMP does not directly affect ranking results in search engines, it does indirectly affect them by speeding up page load times. Pages that have a faster load time will inherently have a better user experience, leading to a better ranking.

Publishers Dilemma

An issue that publishers face after the implementation of AMP is that their URLs are not present in the front of the URL. Because of privacy reasons, the AMP pages would need to be loaded from the Google cache instead of the publishers’ servers. This is because in normal web browsing publishers would not know which users are interested in their pages until the user actually clicks in, and Google replicates this with AMP. Google is currently in the process of implementing a solution for this where user privacy remains intact and the actual publisher URL is shown in the front of the address bar.

Example with a Daily Mail Article Using AMP

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1234567/amp

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1234567/amp

Sources