Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP)

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP)

For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience - but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.

Why You Should Care

Google Is Behind It

Here's the announcement on the Official Google Blog.

Doing what Google recommends always helps your website with respect to users.

It also often helps you rank higher in the search results.

The Pages Are Blazing Fast

If you compare the network load times of a page that loads 70 images, you'll see something startling. The AMP page only loads what is necessary for what is on screen; therefore, it's load time is a mere 2.55s. The "traditional" page loads everything; therefore, it doesn't fire a load event until 14.91s – a terrible user experience.

The two images below show the network response times of each approach – the red "Load:" at the bottom of each image indicates how long it took each page to fire a "load" event in the browser.

As you are probably aware, all other things being equal, the search engines rank faster pages higher in the search engine results page (SERP).

Responsive Web Design (RWD)

AMP pages automatically adapt to different screen sizes – no more terrible phone experiences!

With traditional pages, a developer either spends hours figuring out how to make the page responsive or spends days writing a new version of the page for a mobile-only site – this is a terrible waste of resources and if the links between the desktop and mobile pages to instruct the search engines which is which are not set up 100% correctly, you can have an SEO and SERP nightmare.

In the two images below, you will see the Google PageSpeed Insights test results for both pages. The AMP version scores an 86 on speed and a 100 on user experience; whereas, the traditional page scores a 58 on speed and a 70 on user experience (the page is also not mobile friendly and is less likely to show up in phone searches).

Caching

Google has announced that it will cache the pages on its servers – which will make delivery to your users even faster!

Demo Links

Try It For Yourself

The first two buttons are for the pages referenced above. The third is an example of an image gallery built (very quickly) using AMP.
Traditional Image Loading AMP Image Loading AMP Gallery