The world has shifted marvelously in terms of internet usage. In recent years, the majority of global internet usage is coming from mobile devices instead of desktop browsers. This trend is only expected to rise with the proliferation of tablets and smartphones. This has necessitated websites to cater to people who use these devices to go online.
If your website hasn’t yet adopted a mobile-first strategy, it’s time you optimize it for mobile devices. And the next step in optimization is AMP. Read on to learn what it is and what role it plays in ensuring a great digital experience.
What is AMP?
AMP is the abbreviation for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an open-source program developed by Google to ensure a faster and better mobile internet. Google came up with AMP in response to Facebook’s instant articles, which enabled organizations to let users quickly read their articles without leaving Facebook.
How does AMP work?
AMP accomplishes fast loading of a site on mobile devices in the following ways.
- HTML: The first thing that gets loaded when you try to enter a website is its HTML code. A slow loading HTML cause a delay in website loading. So, the HTML code is stripped down and given a unique markup with unique tags.
- JS: AMP avoids the use of JavaScript. This is because only social widgets and third-party ads use JS for being fetched from an external server. So, the site loading is quickened by preventing unnecessary rendering.
- CDN: AMP CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology is also referred to as the AMP Cache. It is a proxy-based content delivery network. It ensures faster delivery by grabbing AMP content and caching it.
- CSS: CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. These are the styling and layout elements. AMP increases the performance and usability of web pages by reducing the need for additional CSS requests.
- Other elements: The more the elements on a page are, the slower its loading gets. AMP further decreases the site load time and greatly increases its speed by eliminating some on-page elements such as CTAs, bulky pictures, etc.
How Does AMP Ensure a Great Digital Experience?
Providing an outstanding digital experience to its customers is a competitive advantage an organization or business can have. AMP can ensure this in the following ways.
-
Mobile-friendliness
A study by Google and SOASTA has found that people abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. However, most retail mobile sites take some 6.9 seconds to load. That’s over double the duration these users wait before leaving the page. With an increasing number of people using mobile devices to access the internet, it is crucial that organizations or businesses ensure that their websites load fast on these.
-
Improved SEO
AMP also works to enhance your site’s search engine ranking. This is because Google prefers mobile-friendly and fast-loading pages. Thus when your site adopts AMP, it gets to be ahead of the slower and unresponsive websites in the Search Engine Result Pages.
-
Increased visibility
As AMP pages are fast-loading, people prefer these. They can easily identify these by looking at the symbol on AMP pages. Additionally, their visibility is further enhanced as they are positioned higher (even ahead of the number one ranking page) in the SERPs. This results in these pages getting increased click-through rates.
-
Increased support for Ads
AMP also supports different types of ad formats. It uses ALP (AMP Ad landing pages), which are landing pages built-in AMP-HTML to load in a lightning-fast manner. This ensures that users enjoy a great digital experience, increases conversions, and thus, increases your ROI on ad spending. Thus, going AMP can serve as one of your best advertising and marketing strategies.
-
Increased revenue
As AMP pages load faster, the better is the user experience (UX) your mobile site delivers across all platforms. This in turn improves the mobile website conversions and your revenue generation through it.
-
Web components availability
Converting your web pages into AMPs also lets you use optimized web components. For, AMPs have an extensive, copy-paste-compliant component library that meets an elaborate range of functionality and UI needs. This guarantees the delivery of a great on-page experience.
Wrapping up
Providing an outstanding digital experience to your site visitors can give your business or organization a competitive advantage. Turning your web pages into Accelerated Mobile Pages can ensure this. For, an increasing number of people, today access the internet through their mobile devices.
Accelerated Mobile Pages can not only load at incredible speeds, but also improve your site’s SEO, mobile-friendliness, visibility, ad support, and web components availability. So, do convert your site into AMP at the earliest to tap into its potential.
Author Bio:
Shivani is a content writer at Notifyvisitors, a platform that offers AMP that enables you to develop web pages that load quickly on mobile browsers. To further provide a better mobile user experience, you can make AMP versions of your landing pages.