Faster pages with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Since the introduction at the end of 2015, the popularity of Accelerated Mobile Pages, also called AMP, has increased. Dirk Swartjes, Front-end Developer at Iquality, developed Accelerated Mobile Pages for our client Freo. AMP is an open source project and an initiative from – among others - Google. By using AMP, web pages viewed on a mobile phone or tablet are loaded almost immediately. The developer can indicate where ads should be displayed and in what form. Furthermore, visitors tend to stay longer on the webpage and it also stimulates the click through rate (CTR).
Implementing AMP
AMP consists of three components: AMP HTML, AMP JS and Google AMP Cache. These three components ensure that the web page is presented in a "light" form. The content is indexed by Google, where a copy is made and stored on the Google server. This version is shown to the visitor, instead of the page stored on the own server. AMP is not suitable for every purpose: most use cases consist of news and blog articles. These articles generally contribute to the findability of the website and do not contain complex components. You do not need extra developers or budget to implement AMP; front-end developers often already in possess of the required skillset. Some content management systems provide ready-to-use plug-ins, for other systems AMP has to be implemented manually. When a manual implementation is required, back-end will have to step in and implement the code.
The benefits of AMP
Because the pages are visible almost immediately, visitors tend to stay longer on the website and are more likely to click through to other pages within the domain. Marketers can choose from a variety of flexible ad formats such as a banner, sticky ad, flying carpet and video ad. It is also possible to place promoted content on the webpage to stimulate the click through rate. At the moment, news sites often use AMP because this makes it possible to implement a paywall relatively easily. This way, only subscribers can see the article. AMP has no direct effect on the position of your website in Google, but the page can be shown in a carousel to "news". This increases the findability of your website.
Want to know more about AMP?
Dirk is more than happy to tell you more!
Dirk was involved with the implementation of AMP for Freo. He is more than happy to tell you more!
