The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project
Increasing your Sites Load Time and Impressions with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
From old school static websites to the newly “everyone has to have it” responsive website design, now comes AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages!
Apple revolutionized the mobile reading world when it came out with its News app that provides nothing but simple, minimalistic, instantly loading news articles that people can read without having to wade through a bunch of ads and graphics, or wait for a bunch of slow scripts to load. Facebook followed close behind with its Instant Stories, which does just about the same thing for users of the popular social media site.
But for everyone who does not have an Apple mobile device, does not use the News app, or does not get their news from Facebook, it has been difficult to get information from a mobile phone because of how clunky even the most responsive website design projects tends to be. When a web site is built to be viewed on a desktop, even if the page design is responsive and the columns all automatically adjust their width to the screen that the page is being viewed on, the site often takes forever to load on a mobile device, not to mention being hard to read.
The Accelerated Mobile Pages project is Google’s and Twitter’s open source answer to Apple News and Facebook Instant Stories. Instead of limiting readability to a single app or a single social media site, AMP allows any site at all to make its pages and posts extremely readable and easy to load for mobile viewers.
With loads of features, AMP increase your web page load time, conversion rates and even enhances your Search Engine Optimization efforts in the search engines due to the fact that Google will be displaying these pages front and center when you are searching on a mobile device.
How does AMP work?
Instead of running clunky scripts and trying to open a full site (or even a full mobile site) on your phone or tablet, AMP uses a sleek, minimalized version of HTML to bring a sleek, beautiful article format to your phone. There are specific guidelines and restrictions on what you can and can’t use in your AMP coding, and in the Chrome browser you can even check your AMP coding in the browswer’s development tools. This will let you see what the site will look like in its AMP version.
AMP articles can have images, but instead of beginning to load the images as soon as you open the page, the images don’t start to load until you scroll to them. So readers get to read the story without any delay, and the images are loaded as they are needed. This significantly cuts down on lag time.
AMP doesn’t allow for CSS, which means that you don’t really have a lot of design options. This creates the minimal look that is the trademark of AMP and Apple News alike. The simplicity of the code means that pages load lightning fast, and trust us, this sort of convenience is a lot more important to customers than whether there is a fancy graphic on the page or a special arrangement of your columns or tables.
How can I get AMP on my site?
There are several different options. You can go to the AMP site itself and learn how to do the code, and then go in on the backside of your web site and create an AMP version of your pages. If you want to use your coding skills, you can go into the developer tools in Chrome and check to make sure that your new and improved AMP page will display correctly.
If your site is built on a WordPress CMS, you can use an AMP WordPress plugin to create your AMP pages automatically. This is a great, simple way to go about this, but there are some limitations to the plugin. For example, you will have to add the extension /amp/ to the URL whenever you put in a link, if you want your readers to go to the AMP version. The plugin does not automatically load the AMP version of the site based on whether your readers are visiting from a desktop or a mobile device.
Of course, if you want the best results with the least amount of headache and hassle, you can have us help you create your AMP pages. We will make sure your loyal readers have a beautiful, convenient format to read on their mobile devices, and better yet it will load at lightning speed so that your readers can enjoy a fantastic reading experience and you can enjoy the benefits of having a satisfied, happy reader base. Give us a call today and let us optimize your site for AMP – the newest, biggest thing in mobile content delivery!
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