All You Need To Know About AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Since we’re living in a world of short attention spans your consumers are looking for the fastest smoothest web browsing experience. With the advent of the smartphone more and more of the users browsing experience has moved to smartphones. Google recognized this and in 2015 made speed a ranking factor and again in December 2015 hinted at making mobile website loading speeds a ranking factor too. Web developers in Pune and around the world began experimenting with mobile-friendly versions of their website but it wasn’t good enough.
Kissmetrics data shows that pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load are more likely to be abandoned by up to 40% of the users. To battle, this problem Accelerated Mobile pages were introduced, and it was found that websites that were AMP-optimized showed a significant improvement in their rankings. In this blog, we’ll look at what AMP Pages are and how you can use CodePlateau’s world-renowned web development services to take advantage of them on your own website.

What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
It began when Google and Twitter joined forces to bring about a faster online experience to their users. It is an open source experience that helps design your web pages to make them faster and provide a better user experience. It’s a plugin that can help reduce your web page to the absolute essential basics to make it load quicker.

How To Optimize Your Web pages For AMP?

• This is what most of your readers are here to find out. The solution, simple, download the AMP plugin from right within the WordPress plugins search or from the Github downloads. You will need to change a bit of code however and that’s where the excellent team of web developers from CodePlateau in Pune come in handy.
• What we also suggest is that you create two different versions of your content pages. One can simply be a mobile-friendly version where you can have all your features and customizations while the AMP pages will be bare bones but provide a better online experience to the user. You don’t have to be worried about Google considering the pages as duplicate as they take into account the AMP version as long as your page has been validated online.
• Use AMP URL’s to distinguish between the two.

So How Does The AMP Plugin Work?

Like we’ve mentioned before the AMP plugin strips your webpage to the absolute basic code required by smartphones to run smoothly. There are three parts to the AMP structure:
1) AMP HTML
2) AMP JS
3) AMP CDN

AMP pages don’t load regular Javascript, there is an AMP Javascript subset that you need to use. There are several other factors that you need to consider before using the AMP plugin on your page –

– Before you can roll out your AMP pages they need to be validated
– It is best to avoid custom fonts on your AMP pages as this may delay load time as these fonts have to be specially loaded every time
– You have to specify height and width for every image you share on your page if you want them to load correctly
– Videos need specially approved extensions to run on your AMP pages

You also need to be aware of the fact that AMP pages are built for quickness and readability. You might not even be able to enable the social sharing icons on your AMP pages as these are built using Javascript. CodePlateau’s web development team in Pune have found a workaround for this issue, get in touch with us for additional details.

5 Benefits Of Using AMP Pages For Your Website
While there are numerous benefits of using AMP pages for your website, we’ll be looking at the top 5. These are the factors that can really help enhance your site’s ranking and help you convert more sales.

1) Quicker Loading Speeds – The whole purpose of building AMP pages is to get an edge over your competition when it comes to the speed with which the content on your pages load. Users love a faster browsing experience as can be ascertained by the KissMetrics numbers.

Here are some more statistics to help convince you that you need AMP pages for your website

• Every second your page delays in loading you are losing 9.4% of your pageviews
• Conversion rate drops by 3.5% with every second added to your page load time
• Bounce rate can go up by 8.3% for pages that take more than 3 seconds to load

In commercial terms, depending on your monthly traffic this could amount to a serious loss of site visitors, sales and more

2) Highlighted Results In Search – When it comes to SEO every advantage you can find is worth the time you spend getting it. Websites that rely heavily on their content for marketing were thrilled when AMP pages were introduced as it provided them with a green lightning symbol to display them as AMP pages. They also showed up higher in the search results. AMP pages have a higher click-through rate than their non-AMP counterparts.

3) Higher Listing In Search – Since speed is now one of the ranking factors on Google pages that load quicker tend to have a higher listing in search. This is especially true for AMP pages as not only do they have faster loading times as compared to non-AMP pages, they also have a better click-through rate. While Google may not necessarily be focusing on earning money using AMP pages it has helped them generate more revenue. A better user experience has led to more users pushing to use Google as their default browser. More clicks mean more money for Google.

4) Better Ad Support – Speaking of Google making money using AMP pages it has also helped content creators streamline the Ad’s on their sites. Since only custom AMP approved HTML works along with streamlined CSS code and almost no Javascript there are fewer distractions on your web page. Users can focus on the content and there is plenty of space for Ads. While you don’t want to clutter your pages with Ad’s less clutter makes it more convenient for people to click on Ad’s when they’re truly interested in them. AMP pages make the Ad’s stand out more effectively than the rest of the content on the page.

5) Simpler User Tracking – It’s not just that AMP pages provide the user with a better experience they also provide the content creator with more data to work with. Using Tag manager on their AMP pages provides Google webmasters with more information about their users. All the metrics you can find on Google Analytics are provided separately for AMP pages.

Conclusion
India is still in a very nascent stage when it comes to adopting AMP pages. If you want to get a head start on your competition you should start working on converting your pages to AMP as soon as possible. While setting up AMP pages on your website might seem easy there is some web development knowledge that you would need. Who better to help you out with your problem than Pune’s best Web Development company CodePlateau. If you’d like to get started on your project or need more information on the subject, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch today!