Should you implement AMP onto your website?

Before we start discussing why you should implement AMP, let’s discuss what is AMP.

What is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages; AMP is something, which makes the pages load faster on a mobile device.

No one uses a desktop anymore; ask yourself when the last time was you’ve gone on to a desktop and looked up for something.

Mobile devices have long past surpassed desktop usage, so it is essential to concentrate on your website’s mobile devices’ performance.

Making your web pages load faster is the key to all businesses because many businesses are online, which means a user has more alternatives than before. If a website does not load within 5 seconds, it doesn’t take long for the user to skip your website and go for the others.

Let’s learn more about AMP

Accelerated mobile pages is an open-source initiative to improve the performance of a website on mobile devices. AMP is reliable because the project is lead by Google.

This AMP project is considered as a highly-accessible framework that creates fast-loading mobile-friendly web pages.

Even though an experienced developer could bring in the same results as an AMP, this has been designed to make every website as fast as the website developed by an experienced developer.

It could showcase some severe performance improvements even when adapted to an already built website, even on websites that display a massive number of ads. You can also use a few of the best mobile app development KPIs to optimize the performance of your proposed app.

On top of that, it is encouraged and supported by Google. Further, in the initial stages, the AMP plugin reduces the download time between 15%-85%.

Learn more about Accelerated Mobile Pages.

The AMP plugin was born out of a collaboration between the giant’s Twitter and Google.

So, all you need to do is add this plugin to your WordPress website and make your website better than ever.

AMP is another solid proof, portraying Google’s focus on users.

Whenever Google comes out with an update like this, you might think they are just trying to make some money using their brand.

Yeah, the money-making part is right, but they wouldn’t make any money if the product isn’t any good.

Making its user happy would only generate any revenue; more users make more advertising makes more money.

But Google knows what they should be doing; they are one of the most significant contributions for all the migration from desktops to mobile device usage. They are passionate about mobile search engine users.

AMP’s primary goal is faster loading pages, which makes the user count and, in turn, generates revenue.

AMP is just gaining some popularity, and web development companies realize that it’s not just another product using Google’s branding. But a product that has a future.

How does the implementation of AMP help your website or your business?

It is always a good practice to do proper homework when implementing new technology; you need to understand what you are going ahead with.

When I looked upon the internet on websites that have used AMP and what results they have achieved, I was amazed by the results.

One of the sites has converted its website pages over a month, and they saw a 70% rise in the organic traffic search. And you know who gets the credit there.

There are a lot of other examples which you could find for yourself.

I’m trying to say that AMP makes your website load faster on a mobile device and rank higher on the Google search. This means they do better in terms of speed and also a business.

So, this brings us to a couple of essential questions.

How is Google involved in AMP, and Is speed that important?

How is Google involved in AMP?

Because Google is supportive of lightning-fast experiences on mobile devices, it’s a major sponsor of the AMP project but not the founder or owner.

Back in 2015, Google introduced the AMP project intending to offer fast loading to the web pages. The project was good in integrating rich content like video, graphics, animations, and ad, and worked well alongside smart ads.

The major goal was to use the same code to work across multiple devices and platforms so that content can appear everywhere clearly and instantly, regardless of the type of smart devices you’re using.

Below you can see an example of what an AMP page looks like when rendered on an iPhone 6.

If you’ve observed Google is trying to make AMP something oddly close to what Facebook Instant Articles and Apple news did, they both offered in-app content that offers a fast experience.

AMP does the same by providing a way that Google can boost the web pages’ speed in its search results for those who participate.

If you swipe right from your Android Device, you will find many articles related to your previous searches or interests. All the top results are AMP’d websites, and even when you search about something, the top results you see are AMP’d websites.

All the Results above have this “Flash” sign indicating these websites are converted to AMP.

This means the results are quick, and Google is promoting your website to be AMP.

Will Google stay with AMP long term? There are all kinds of debates on this, but if you ask me, they will. The mobile web holds strategic significance for Google, and consider the world of Native apps a threat. While Google is a solid player in Native Apps, Facebook is at the top spot right now, and Google is in the second, and people at Google want to be on top.

And AMP is an open-source initiative. Other significant participants in AMP’s open system include Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, and many other big names.

You might be interested in knowing the role of Google’s AMP in online marketing”.

Is speed that important?

Mobile devices have long past surpassed desktops; Google wants mobile users to have the best experience online as possible when they interact with web pages in its mobile index.

Besides the apparent advantage of having a fast page load time so that your visitors don’t skip your page, this impacts your revenue. Also, mobile page bounce rates are higher than Desktops.

Ad revenue is the primary source of any website in Google’s index. Each time a web page takes too long to load, they lose a visitor and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising and subscriptions. This happens because advertisers on these websites usually have difficulty making consumers pay attention to the running ads. Slow website pages load slowly that forcing people to abandon the website instantly.

Moreover, many of the publishers in Google’s index are also allowing advertisers to advertise on their sites using Google’s advertising networks. This, in turn, impacts Google’s revenue; you can begin to see one of the main reasons why Google is taking a particular interest in AMP.

How does AMP work?

As mentioned earlier, AMP is a framework for creating mobile web pages, but it has three main parts. Let us know more about all of these factors.

AMP JS

AMP project comes up with an off the shelf JavaScript library that employs ultimate performance practices, including managing asynchronous loading, resource handling, and giving custom tags to be used in AMP HTML pages.

The above-mentioned ensure your web pages render super fast on different web browsers. One of the best advantages it provides is to ensure that every element is coming from an external source and works in unison. It also checks and prevents the page from being blocked from false rendering.

Many factors, including pre-calculating page layout elements, sandboxing iframes, and disabling slow CSS selectors, play a significant role in delivering faster speeds.

AMP HTML

AMP HTML is a standard HTML with a bunch of custom AMP properties. It is considered a “diet” version of HTML built with some restrictions. But still, it has some functions that allow reliable performance and a few additional extensions to help bring and display rich content.

The available AMP JS library helps quickly render AMP HTML pages.

AMP Cache

This is a proxy-based content delivery network (CDN) (optional) used to distribute all the valid AMP documents. The process starts when CDN takes AMP HTML pages, then caches them to get them automatically optimized to improve your page performance.

The AMP project also involves a validation system that comes with an AMP cache system that helps confirm whether a page will work independently or require external resources.

How to Implement AMP?

Yep! This is how you speed up your website on mobile devices.

If you’re doing this experiment for the first time, it is advised to maintain two versions of your page. The original page will be the mobile and browser-friendly version that users see.

You will also use the AMP version of this most compatible page with an improved speed and performance.

But for WordPress users, you need to download and install the WordPress plugin at GitHub. Installing the AMP plugin through the WordPress dashboard is as simple as installing any other plugin.

When you are done installing and activating the plugin, you are allowed to append “/amp/” to all your pages.

And yeah, don’t forget to tweak the Google search console to help Google pick up the AMP versions of your article faster.

On top of that, the AMP discovery page mentions some platforms will require Schema.org metadata to make your content eligible to appear in the Google search news carousel demo. And then make sure you get your schema right.

AMP provides easy ways to improve the mobile website’s speed and performance. In the upcoming time, AMP (accelerated mobile pages) will influence almost every social media interaction, and it’s an excellent achievement for business owners running business websites.

Don’t forget to incorporate other proven mobile marketing strategies while implementing AMP for your pages. It will help bring relevant and quality customers to your site or mobile app.

Why not add Google AMP to your site?

Apart from the extra effort required to add an AMP site to your leading site, of course? The most powerful reason is, Accelerated Mobile Pages web addresses do not get live on publishers’ websites instead showed at Google.com.

As per Google, there are three types of websites involved in an AMP page:

The original URL on your site should look like this: http://www.xyz.org/amp/qwerty.html

The AMP cache URL, which 95% of the users would never see, can ignore.

The Google AMP viewer URL: This is what appears in your phone’s web address bar: www.google.com/amp/www.xyz.org/amp/qwerty.html.

This shows that anyone that shares your AMP pages isn’t sharing your website, and it also won’t result in an SEO boost. The algorithmic underpinnings of current web searches are that publicly available links are votes for relevance; this is true regardless of whether the engine is Google, Bing, Baidu, or anything else. There is a formula explaining the scenario effectively, i.e., if you have No links = you get no votes = which ultimately results in no PageRank contribution.

There are other issues, too; things like branding are limited. AMP sites look like Google sites rather than their brand. And above all, social media posts, videos, animations, advertising, audio, and analytics can only be delivered using AMP components.

All JavaScript must be one of the pre-approved Google scripts hosted on the Google AMP content delivery network, which I have mentioned above that you can only use the code off the shelves of Google.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, when you are using AMP, you are locking yourself into Google’s tools, rather than the open standards that underpin the rest of the internet.

Should you Adopt AMP?

Well definitely! The conversation was all about it. Besides, many other factors need to be considered before adopting it.

There are a few factors that can help you recognize the importance of AMP for your business website.

The type of site that you have and whether or not AMP supports exists for it now. For Ecommerce websites, it may be a bit early to adopt AMP. Even as initial AMP support rolls out, it isn’t apparent how robust it will be. If you’re an aggressive early adopter type and ready to bear the circumstances, you can always perform a test on a few key pages of your website. However, for blogs and news types of article-type content, AMP is the most recommended tool to be adapted.

Presence of the right feature support. If you have a video-centric site, you might want to hold off for a bit. If the current type of ads you are running doesn’t work with AMP, that would be a non-starter. Make sure that the AMP functionality for what you need is in place before you moreover.

Level of effort involved. Both Drupal and WordPress have AMP plugins and modules that make AMP implementation easy and effective.

Availability of programming assistance. If you don’t have any one of these platforms, it would be hard for you to implement AMP for your site. In principle, AMP is not hard to learn, as it’s a direct derivative of necessary HTML coding, but it does represent an incremental effort. But for many, this step is considered a cost-prohibitive effort.

How aggressively you want to pursue AMP. Many want to take an aggressive approach to AMP and be an early adopter. At the stone template, we’re helping many companies with AMP taking this stance, and there are certainly advantages to being early out of the gate. As a downside, you will have to work through more programming difficulties than you will if you sit back for another six months or more.

Like every software of AMP has its Pros and Cons.

Since we were already discussing many Pros throughout, let’s start with the Cons.

Cons of AMP

Ad revenue is reduced

Through the Accelerated Mobile Pages project that supports Google ads, the potential to bring in revenue is quite limited. Implementing ads on AMP pages and running them as well is not that much easy as it sounds.

Analytics is a bit stripped

AMP supports Google Analytics, but it requires a different tag, which needs to be implemented on all AMP pages.

It takes much time to place this tag and be able to collect and analyze data.

Achieves Amazing speeds, all thanks to the cache

What’s a con in this?

To be accurate, Google does not offer any specific technology to speed up web pages. Instead, it saves cached versions of AMP-tagged pages, and whenever visitors access them, it merely serves them up from the cache, which is a simple strategy that everybody knows.

AMP allows your site to load faster and guarantees better UX, but its disadvantages raise several questions.

Questions like

• Would you be agreed to sacrifice a small part of your ad revenue?
• Can you think of surviving without the tables and charts of Google Analytics?
• And the last question is, Are you sure that you want to depend entirely on Google and its cache?

It would be best if you considered detailed answers to them before you implement AMP.

Pros of AMP

• It Speeds up website load time.

This one is obvious. With no useless elements to slow them down, AMPs are lean, sleek, and fast.

Everyone enjoys pages that don’t make them wait, so AMPs guarantee that your site brings in more visitors.

• Increases mobile ranking

However, AMP is not a primary ranking factor, but it positively influences mobile ranking owing to its faster page load time. If Google starts giving priority to AMPs, the process can have an effective impact on SERPs.

• It improves server performance.

If your site is getting massive traffic from mobile devices, AMP will automatically reduce the servers’ load and improve the overall performance.

• How do you check if your pages are AMP’d?

We could explain to you, but someone did that already; here is “How to validate AMP?”

After you’re done validating your pages, here’s where you” check if you’re page is AMP’d.”

Conclusion

Overall, AMP offers substantial benefits to everyone who appropriately implements it, especially blogs and news sites. You only need to do it right to reap numerous advantages!

If your implementation is done with care, your website will be more scalable than ever. And you don’t even have to spend much time implementing it.

Get in touch with us with any inquiries, and don’t forget to leave your valuable comments and feedback.