May 3, 2016

Accelerated mobile pages, aka AMP, is the new buzzword in the industry. Almost everyone is talking about it at one time or another. But if you are one of those who is yet to figure out what AMP is and why all this buzz around it – then you are at the right place, reading the right thing!

Today most people access internet through their mobile phones. And yes many of us are aware that how slow internet connection makes accessing web pages a very tough job. Keeping this situation in mind Google has come up with an open-source project named accelerated mobile pages. AMP which was launched this February aims at “dramatically improving the performance of the mobile web.” It will do this by streamlining the ads and creating open technical standards thereby building a faster and more engaging ecosystem for mobile web users.

How does AMP makes things fast?

  1. By using streamlined version of CSS
  2. Limiting itself to proprietary JavaScript library for loading images
  3. Allows only the asynchornous scripts
  4. Prioritize resource loading
  5. Only running those animations which are GPU accelerated
  6. By not letting extension mechanism block rendering

These are some of the many ways in which AMP works to load content faster on a mobile browser.

In case you are wondering as to how can you take the advantage of accelerated mobile pages, then all you need to do is create a second version of your posts and link them with rel=amphtml in the header. By doing this Google and other search engines will discover and cache posts for mobile web. Thus it is highly recommended that if you run a blog or a news site to implement AMP at the earliest in order to give the best experience to their audience.

AMP is being seen as Google’s response to ‘Instant Articles’ by Facebook. The only difference is that unlike Instant Articles, AMP is for the open web. Some of the early adapters of accelerated mobile pages are publishers like WordPress.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Chartbeat Adobe Analytics etc. AMP is surely a great change in the sphere of mobile web publishing. Especially the official AMP plugin in WordPress directory generates AMP versions of all the posts, though pages and archives are not supported by AMP yet.

Though there are fair number of critics of Google’s accelerated mobile pages, AMP is surely something which is here is to stay. So it does make sense that as a website owner you to switch to AMP and engage your target audience in an effective manner.

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