It’s the 21st Century, and speed is everything. Users need everything done quickly. Faster than they could imagine. Delays are no more acceptable. Speed is the new Virtual Culture.
Yes, you have guessed correctly. Today we will be talking about your website loading time, focusing on the mobile interface. The tool we will be discussing today is called Accelerated Mobile Pages.
It is abbreviated as AMP, and yes, Google owns it.
Yet another tool released by Google to measure website performance. A survey conducted in Apr 2021 stated some facts about web traffic generated from mobile devices.
According to this survey, mobile devices are contributing to half of the total web traffic generated worldwide.
In Q1 2021, mobile phones only have generated 54.8%of the overall web traffic. However, there is incremental traffic seen from 50%at the start of 2017.
This survey suggested that third-world countries didn’t participate at all in the desktop web traffic era. And there a couple of reasons for that; infrastructure and poverty are on the top of it.
In the US, one of the biggest tech markets in the world, mobile phones contribute48% of the total web traffic generated.
These statistics are enough to convince you of today’s discussion article. However, it is a controversial topic. People have been talking in favor of AMP, and also, people say that there are multiple ways to increase the page loading speed, then why use AMP at all.
I will be discussing what AMP is, the myth of having AMP on your website, and the most talked-about pros and cons of AMP.
Nowadays, almost everyone uses the internet to either watch movies or play games or maybe send an email and roam around in the virtual world of social media.
With this excessive use of the web, developers have to focus their energies on the optimized performance of the mobile version of their website.
To be in the game and keep winning, you need to deploy AMP on your website for better web loading time. The increase in speed AMP gives you enables you to be ranked more. And on top of it, if you have a WordPress-based website, it is super easy for you.
What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
Accelerated Mobile Pages, abbreviated as AMPs, was created by Google to help load the websites faster than normal of mobile devices. It was an open-source project owned by Google.
It has a very basic working methodology that consists of two components:
- Highlight essential parts of the webpage
- Store a cached version on a Google server
Using these two components, Google was able to help people load the websites faster than ever before.
It skims the useless information, which means the advertisements on page and videos, which leaves the text behind on the page.
Text is easy to store and understand, which helps Google to load the page quickly. With the speedy loading of the webpage, the probability of a higher ranking increases limiting the bounce rate.
This is the formula to have a happy customer, speedy loading, higher ranking, and low bounce rate. Yes, that’s it. This makes loading speed one of the fundamental parts of any website.
In 2021, Google decided to put AMP to rest for good, but before that, every website which had a lightning bolt at the end indicated that it was equipped with AMP.
AMP has only one goal: to load your web page faster without letting your customer feel any delay at all. WordPress comes with a built-in AMP module. You can use it without any effort, and it helps with the mobile version of your website.
Things to know about AMP
Everyone has his version of key aspects related to AMP. However, for me following are the most important key points which needs to be followed while using AMP:
- Only selective JavaScript libraries are allowed to be used in the AMP module.
- The module itself controls the page loading time.
- Proper validation of the AMP Module is required for it to work and load the website quickly.
- Avoid videos, but if it’s inevitable, use AMP-approved extensions for quick loading.
The Pros and Cons of Using AMP
With the increase in usability of the worldwide web via mobile devices, AMP (released in 2016) became quite famous. However, it was confirmed that AMP is going to stay a long while.
AMPconsisted of a lot of coding, but it came with a built-in plugin for WordPress websites.
- Pros:
- AMP helped in increased webpage loading speed.
- With higher speed, AMP indirectly resulted in a higher page ranking on Google.
- It was super easy to use.
But that was not it for AMP. It had a lot of negative aspects as well. Here is the list of most commonly faced Cons of AMP:
- Cons:
- Extensive coding is one of the most famous reasons for AMP to get the heat of programmers.
- As AMP skipped the ads and videos, this affected the revenue shares. Almost everyone faced issues with AMP implementation on their websites.
- And as AMP was only about the text, so it didn’t help much with analytics.
- Last but not least, AMP used to strip out the lead capturing forms which deprive the site of getting any organic leads at all.
To use AMP and get the maximum benefit from the product, you need to follow the following set of instructions:
- You need to ensure that the text available on the website is enough and makes sense. Because now it’s only text. So you have to make it attractive and understandable.
- Hire a programmer if you insist on having AMP configurations on your website. An easy way to do so is to get a WordPress-based website.
- Still, I insist on telling you that you don’t need to implement AMP on your high-traffic generating pages. AMP will reduce the information by default, and you will lose traffic, meaning there will be a financial revenue drop.
- Perform extensive testing before launching anything with AMP.
Using Accelerated Mobile Pages
So with so many negative impacts, who would like to use AMP? A very good question. I will answer it as simply as I can.
Being a business owner, you know that mobile devices generate more than 50% of mobile traffic. This means the AMP is an important factor.
But you would not want to reduce your traffic. So we need to come up with a solution to make AMP work with continuous revenue.
In short, you need to develop a method where you get to have a domain of your website configured with AMP and another domain that will serve the purpose of being your regular daily website.
This is the only way using which you will be able to have a speedy loading domain of your actual website and revenue earning domain of your website.
Bottom Line
To get benefits from AMP, you need to have a WordPress-based website. WordPress-based websites help you use an inbuilt AMP plugin. This way, you save a lot of your effort for coding the whole thing.
AMP shrinks the web pages to texts only and removes everything else. It does so to store a text version of your webpage on Google’s servers.
It helps the user load a page with a speedy response from the Google cached content. Page ranking based on website loading speed is the only benefit of AMP; other than this, AMP contributes to SEO, and neither is considered a part of SEO best practices.
But it is of very limited to no use now. Even Google removed the AMP icon from its search interface this year.
If you have ever used AMP, what are your comments about its functionality? Was it beneficial to you?
Meta Description:
Rather than having the AMP module on your website, work on increasing the page loading speed.
Focus Keywords:
AMP, Google Ranking, Speed, Page loading speed, Web Traffic, virtual world of social media.
