Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) – User-first web experience

It is no secret that IT is a vast field when it comes to the scope of knowledge. Hence, it is no surprise that there are a myriad of concepts closely related to this subject, unknown to a wider audience. We may also encounter many enigmatic abbreviations within this field. What are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and what kind of User-first experiences do they provide? We decided to investigate and explain the details related to this in the following text.

AMP – what are accelerated mobile pages?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open source initiative aimed at improving the user experience when using websites on mobile devices. This project is being developed under the leadership of American big tech giant, Google, which announced the AMP initiative in 2016. According to Google, Accelerated Mobile Pages use 10 times less data than standard pages and load in less than a second. The use of AMP allows for designing and creating pages and ads that are just as fast and attractive and work equally well on various devices and with different methods of distribution.

How does it work?

The aim of AMP mobile pages is to emphasize lightness and thus significantly increase their loading speed in the browser, even when using packet data bandwidth with lower throughput (e.g. EDGE or 3G). This is possible thanks to special JavaScript mechanisms managing the loading of resources on a web page, and the AMP Cache service. In December 2018, the most popular content management system in the world, WordPress, released an official extension allowing full integration of the AMP standard with websites created using this software.

AMP pages work as follows:

• First, a crawler bot scans and indexes the page;
• Next, this crawler finds a special link to the AMP version of the analyzed page, so it knows that the static version of the website for mobile devices is at a different URL;
• Finally, Google scans the AMP variant of the page and saves its static state on the server.

How do accelerated mobile pages work exactly?

AMP pages load so quickly because there are restrictions placed on HTML/CSS and JavaScript, which allows for better rendering of mobile pages. Unlike regular websites, AMP pages are automatically cached by Google’s AMP Cache, which allows for faster loading in Google search results.

AMP HTML

AMP HTML is essentially standard HTML with certain restrictions. Most of the tags in it are typical for regular HTML, but some of them are specially adapted for AMP. Such non-standard tags are called AMP HTML components – they make common tag patterns easy to implement in an efficient way. AMP pages themselves are discovered by search engines and other platforms via HTML tags. When creating a website, you can decide whether you want to use both the regular and AMP version or just AMP.

AMP JavaScript

The AMP JavaScript library ensures fast rendering of AMP HTML pages. It implements all the best AMP practices and manages resource loading and provides its own HTML tags to ensure fast page rendering. AMP JavaScript works asynchronously based on external resources, so the library’s operation does not negatively impact the rendering of the page itself. JavaScript also uses other techniques to ensure performance, such as pre-calculating the layout of each page element before loading resources and disabling slow CSS selectors.

AMP Cache

The Google AMP Cache is designed to serve cached AMP HTML pages. Technically speaking, it is a proxy-based network providing all necessary AMP documents. The cache fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them to automatically improve page performance. To maintain maximum performance, the AMP Cache loads the document, JS files, and all images from the same source, which uses HTTP 2.0.

Top 3 Benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages

1. SEO and site visits – page speed is one of the most important factors from an SEO perspective. Google algorithms reward sites that load quickly as this enhances the user experience. As we have mentioned, AMP places a great emphasis on this issue, as the standards promoted by this initiative promote more efficient site resource handling;
2. Visibility in the Google Carousel – one of the big advantages of AMP pages is that they are promoted in the Google Carousel, which displays the most accurate search results at the very top. The links contained therein are particularly attractive to smartphone users and other mobile devices;
3. Lower bounce rate and longer session duration (spent on the page) – loading time also has a gigantic impact on the bounce rate. More than half of users abandon a site if its loading time exceeds 3 seconds. Moreover, a faster loading time will also make visitors spend more time using the site. One study commissioned by Google found that the use of AMP technology can even double the time spent on the page.

What else is worth knowing about this topic?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is definitely a great initiative, which is also very helpful in the context of creating websites, especially those placing a great emphasis on the mobile version. Implementing AMP or RWD is a great investment that can greatly help in reaching new users. It’s worth going this way in your online business to be able to record tangible and long-term benefits. Therefore, it is worth getting more familiar with this topic to implement AMP in your company.

This is almost the end, but we are very pleased that you have reached this place

If you have made it here, you probably appreciate our work for the popularization of the IT industry. Thank you for being with us. This is very important to us as our content is created specifically for you. Do you like what we write and the way we do it? On our blog, you will find more interesting articles in which we post many tips, trivia, and hints from the IT and new technologies sector. You may hear about some of them for the first time with us. That’s okay, it’s not a shame. They say that man learns all his life and even then he still doesn’t have too much knowledge. Acquire this knowledge to avoid coming off as ignorant, but to shine with it in company. Knowledge is something that helps you develop and that nobody can take away from you. Take this chance today.