*What are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) you may ask? And what do you need to know about them? Here’s Senior Web Developer Josh Pyzer with the answers…*
Imagine the scenario. You’re at the bus stop waiting for a bus and you decide to check-up on the latest world news on your mobile. You go on your favourite news website, only having access to mobile data you wait… and wait… and wait… until you give up and go back to wondering how much longer that bus is going to be.
So this is an issue. News should be instantly accessible from any device at any time.
The press industry is trying to keep their content free but at what cost to the user. Newspaper websites know that users are not willing to pay for news online and this was backed up after a u-turn by the Sun newspaper, who went back to free content and introducing a subscription service. In order to make money from their content the newspapers are now bombarding us with ads and subjecting us to many hidden trackers. All of which is slowing the Internet down.
**What is the answer? **
Introducing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). A (link: https://www.ampproject.org/ text: project backed by Google) with the aim to speed up content delivery for users. It consists of a stripped down version of a webpage designed for speed and ease of use.
The AMP pages have strict limitations that have been put in place by Google in the interest of speed. The requirements are based around basic HTML, limited CSS (which needs to be inline) and no custom JS. Images are lazy loaded into the page and features like YouTube videos and AdSense can still be used but have to run through the AMP filer. Once again, all in the interest of speed.
In order for the pages to index and appear in the Google’s mobile search the page’s have to be validated which can be tested by adding *?development=1* to the end of an AMP URL. The validation status is now in the developer tools inspector (in Google Chrome).
One the page is passes Google validation test and it index’s on Google the page will take advantage of AMP Cache. AMP cache will take a version of the site and cache it on Google’s servers. This means Google can then serve that page instantly rather than requesting it from another server.
(image: https://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/01/google-blog-amp-example.gif alt: )
Here’s an example of an AMP page we produced recently:
**Site Example **
(link: http://www.thefca.co.uk/news/call-for-more-lgbt-foster-carers-ahead-of-awareness-week/ text: The normal version of a page on the Foster Care Associates website)
**AMP example**
(link: http://www.thefca.co.uk/news/call-for-more-lgbt-foster-carers-ahead-of-awareness-week/?amp=1 text: The AMP version of a page on the Foster Care Associates website)
Who does this benefit?
It benefits everyone!
**The user:**
– Instant content – being cached on Google’s server mean’s they can serve webpages to the client instantly,
– Better accessibility to content – the navigation means the next article is only a swipe away.
– Strict Google requirement limits sites functionality. No pop up’s, no bull, just content!
**The publisher:**
– If user is accessing your content quicker there is less chance of them bouncing and going else wear.
– There is also easy access to your other articles through Google’s navigation.
– You can still have ads on the page meaning your not losing out on vital income.
– Google will show AMP pages at the top of mobile search results meaning better presence and potentially more visitors.
**Limitations **
The AMP page are served on Google servers meaning the page comes from a Google URL. This raises the question of weather there will be any SEO benefit for the publisher.
Also, with the page being on a Google URL, there is also the question of weather Google might serve their own ad’s on these URL’s or even take revenue of publishers ads on the page. One would think Google generally care about the AMP project and wouldn’t go as low as this. We remain to see.
**Further reading**
– AMP is only the start of accessing content on Internet quicker. (link: https://instantarticles.fb.com/ text: Facebook Instant Articles) and (link: http://www.apple.com/uk/news/ text: Apple news) have their own versions of AMP, which are worth looking at.
– (link: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/ text: AMP Blog)
**Is this something you should be doing?**
Definitely, with Facebook already in on the act and with Apple now getting involved this doesn’t look like it’s going to be going away anytime soon. Google love content, so if this method helps users to access to content quicker, it’s only a matter of time before Google start pushing pages with AMP up the search rankings.
On another note, if you are a publisher posting regular content, why wouldn’t you want users accessing your content more?