In last 5 to 10 years, mobile penetration has grown by about 25% across the globe. This was also accompanied by increased usage of mobile internet resulting in people spending more time on their smartphones. Since it is easy for mobile users to get distracted, it became absolutely important for websites to be really fast. This gave rise to a framework called AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.
What is AMP?
To render a webpage faster, companies like Google, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc came together and announced a collaborative project named AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages. It aimed to standardize a framework to publish the contents on the web which would be highly cacheable. This collaborative effort resulted in acceptance by several publishers and more than 900,000 websites are now using AMP as well to publish their contents.
Essentials of AMP
- Limited tags are allowed
- Forms are not allowed
- Streamlined CSS
- No custom JS. Only standardized JS can be used.
Due to these restrictions, the contents became highly standardized. The content became easily cachable on the internet as well as on the browser side. This resulted in overall good improvement in web page rendering time and hence the user experience.
In a typical implementation, two versions of the same page are maintained – one standard and one AMP. Standard version holds a link to AMP version which search engines and crawlers can choose to index. AMP version also gets cached by Google and hence after initial crawl, these pages get served pretty fast. There have been reports of improvement of as big as 600% in the page load times. [Caution: Original web page may be poorly designed or not optimized completely]
For new websites, it was easy to adjust to these constraints and publish the content. However, making websites (those developed prior to the launch of AMP) compatible with AMP is a daunting task. This is primarily due to highly customized JS and CSS.
AMP has found good support in major browsers. Google has started giving preference to AMP pages in the mobile search results, leading to higher adoption by publishers.
Alternatives to AMP?
Since this was backed by Google, you could expect alternatives from FB and Apple. And yes, they do. Facebook launched Instant Articles around the same time. Apple has it’s own version Apple News with the similar aim.
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Related Keywords
Page Load Time, Instant Articles, Apple News, Google Analytics, Framework