August 5, 2016
Google to Expand AMP Across All Mobile Search
Mobile content consumption eclipsed desktop over a year ago, and Google has acted swiftly to accommodate user expectations, first with the mobile-friendly algorithm in April 2015 and then last spring with the launch of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. A collaborative effort between Google, publishers, advertisers, and tech companies, the open source initiative promises to improve the mobile web experience with lightweight, lightening fast pages. Since initially being applied only to the “Top stories” news carousel, websites from travel to entertainment have adopted AMP, and now Google plans to expand support for it across the entire mobile search results sometime this year.
Curious webmasters and website owners can get a glimpse of just what this “AMPed up” future could look like by navigating to g.co/ampdemo via their mobile devices and searching for news stories, recipes, or song lyrics. 1
Accelerated Mobile Pages: Quick and Efficient
Time is money—and so is data. In fact, 40 percent of online customers will abandon a retail or travel website if the page fails to load within three seconds. 2 AMP have the potential to offer users a quicker mobile browsing experience: not only do pages rich with graphics, videos, and animations load four times faster, but they also use ten times less data than pages lacking AMP HTML, the open framework behind the technology that can be accessed at GitHub. 3
Why You Should Consider AMP
As is usually the case with Google, the goal of Accelerated Mobile Pages is improving the search and online experience for users—this time through speedier page load times. The company is so serious about the project that it has already indexed more than 150 million AMP documents and is adding over 4 million new ones by the week. Many of these pages are the properties of Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, LinkedIn, and other major players who were quick to participate in the project.
What’s good for users is often beneficial for websites and their owners, and there are several reasons businesses would want to consider “AMPing up” their content:
- A lighting bolt logo will appear next to sites with Accelerated Mobile Pages, helping them stand out in the mobile SERPs and potentially boosting click-through rates as users opt for a faster mobile experience.
- Faster page load times could equate to lower bounce rates and higher conversions, which could drop by seven percent with even a one-second-page response delay. 4
- AMP isn’t a ranking factor yet, but, considering the emphasis Google places on site speed, it could very well be soon.
Head of Google News Richard Gingras said the object of the AMP project is to make the web “fast and furiously compelling.” Who wouldn’t want this for their website and content too? 5
Before You Jump on AMP
- Weigh the potential benefits against the mobile-friendly version of your website.
- Consider the drawbacks and cost to create an AMP version of your pages. For example, since AMP HTML is fairly new, there are still page elements that will not work with the format.
Additional Sources:
1 – https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/amp-your-content-preview-of-amped.html
2 – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/speed-is-key-optimize-your-mobile-experience.html
3 – https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html
4 – https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
5 – https://www.ampproject.org/
