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Accelerated Mobile Pages

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What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?

AMP is an open source library that allows developers creating web pages that load almost instantaneously on mobile browsers. It has been launched by Google and adopted by giants of the web publishing industry such as The Guardian and the CNN, top social media websites such as Twitter, and world famous e-commerce websites such as eBay.

In this 6 minutes video, Paul Bakaus, Developer Advocate at Google, explains AMP in plain words. Have a look!

Technically speaking, AMP pages are built with 3 core components: AMP HTML (which is basically HTML with a few restrictions that can guarantee better performances), the javascript library AMP JS, and AMP cache.

Why is AMP so important?

Speed is the crucial factor that AMP aims to optimize. In fact, a great page speed is what can really make the difference between a poor and an excellent the user experience, especially on mobile devices.

When a web page takes too long to load, most of the users will abandon it  – and, for sure, those who have the patience to stay don’t engage with the website and its content as much as they could if it the pages were loaded faster.

Why? Today users navigate mostly via mobile devices. Just to make an example, iPhone users log into their smartphones about 80 times a day for super short sessions that last 30 seconds on average. Yep, 30 seconds.

If you had 30 seconds to spend reading web content, how long would you wait for a webpage to load?

Well, according to Google, 53% of the users leave web pages after 3 seconds of loading. The reason is obvious: hanging there in front of a loading web page looking at a tiny display is frustrating. You really feel you’re losing your time and therefore you most probably choose to lose that specific piece of content and maybe go and look for something similar that is not that slow.

Consider that 75% of mobile websites need more than 10 seconds to load, and you’ll get the measure of the issue, here.

In this context, AMP pages that can load instantaneously are a godsend. On one hand, they will help you build a compelling user experience lowering the friction of the loading time and still offering the user the same exact content and actions. On the other hand, AMP pages help you distribute your content, allowing it to be featured on the news carousel and appearing between the first results on the SERP.

This is not just a matter of UX: it has been demonstrated that websites that load in 5 seconds have 2x the revenues of those which load in 19 seconds. Look how page speed impacts the bottom line of these three well-known brands in terms of revenues, conversions, and traffic.

How page speed can affect the bottom line - revenues, conversions, and traffic
0.1 second is worthed 1.2 billions per year! That’s huge! 

Since Google started rolling out its mobile-first index, having AMP pages has become even more important for SEO rankings – you can’t really postpone its implementation anymore.

How can you furtherly optimize your AMP pages?

If you have already implemented AMP pages on your website, chances are that you are looking to optimize them even better.

Lucky you! We’ve recently written an article about optimizing AMP pages using schema.org markup. Enjoy!