Nowadays, mobile search is just as important as desktop; with advanced phone technology, people are able to do more than ever from their phones, including shopping and searching for services. Google’s AMP greatly improves your online performance, places you in the view of more potential customers, and helps you stay ahead in a competitive and ever-changing market.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and was started by Google. AMPs have been adapted by many companies to develop and optimize content delivered to mobile devices. These accelerated mobile pages apply several optimization techniques for quicker load times. In short, AMP is a specialized method for creating fast mobile web pages.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Responsive Web Design (RWD) both use the same basic components for creating mobile pages. These include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While they use the same building blocks, the two are actually very different.
Website Redesigns: One of the biggest benefits with using AMPs is that there’s no need to replace an existing website in order for AMPs to work with mobile. While using AMP exclusively is an option, AMP can also be added to an already existing non-responsive (or responsive) website, without having to redesign the the site. Implementing RWD pages will require a redesign in order for the pages to work on mobile, replacing the existing website.
Content: For now, AMP only works with static content, such as landing pages, news articles, blog entries, and other published content. RWD pages are able to incorporate things like web forms and custom applications.
Different Goals: While AMP and RWD pages will both work on a mobile device, the two have different goals. RWD pages work to design and organize a website so that it works on any device, from a desktop computer to a mobile phone, and focuses on flexibility between devices. AMP pages, on the other hand, are made up of a web framework designed for delivering content to mobile users instantly; basically, AMP pages are more focused on the loading speed of mobile pages.
AMP has a very specific purpose, which is delivering mobile-friendly content as quickly as possible. For websites aiming to deliver published content to their mobile users, AMP will provide a better user experience faster than RWD page or any other software on the market.
AMP Components
AMP HTML: AMP HTML is essentially HTML with a few restrictions for more reliable performance and custom AMP properties. For the most part the tags are regular HTML tags, but some HTML tags are replaced with more AMP-specific tags. These custom elements make common patterns easy to implement into mobile sites.
AMP JS: The AMP JS library ensures that AMP HTML pages are rendered faster. The AMP JS library implements all of AMP’s greatest performance practices, manages resource loading and creates custom tags to ensure a quick rendering of your page.
AMP Cache: The Google AMP Cache can be used to serve cached AMP HTML pages. The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages and caches them while improving the page’s performance automatically.
The better the user experience, the better the business results. When you provide your customers with an excellent user experience, the more likely they are to engage with your website, trust your company/organization, and tell their friends and family about your business.
Google’s search algorithm is designed to favour websites that provide users with a great online experience. To determine a good user experience on mobile, Google has identified two primary indicators; they are speed and the “mobile-friendly” test.
AMP was designed to be highly optimized for speed and mobile user experience. As AMP was created by Google, we know that these pages are a clear definition of what a fast, mobile-friendly experience should look like to Google. While RWD often delivers a mobile-friendly website, they fail when it comes to speed.
