AMP. Yet another acronym to come to grips with. How important can it be to warrant taking up even more brain real estate?
Quite important, as it turns out.
Here’s a quick explanation:
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Helpfully, the name gives away most of the story. AMP is an open-source code library that allows you to create webpages that load almost instantaneously across devices, with the focus being on mobile. In order to achieve this, the websites use a specific code set and are slightly stripped back from a design perspective. Think functional rather than flashy.
What does AMP do?
This amazing page load time makes Google very happy (after all, it’s a Google backed project). Google will then hopefully reward this lightning speed (look out for the lightning bolt icon in your search results) with search ranking improvement for AMP pages.
Not only have websites using AMP seen ranking improvements; onsite performance has also increased. Case Studies have shown an upturn in both the amount of time a user spends on site and the conversion rate of users on the website.
Sounds good right? But do you really need AMP?
Would AMP work its magic for your website? Its most successful implementations have been for titan news and ecommerce websites that have large traffic volumes and ever changing content.
If you aren’t one of the above examples, it doesn’t necessarily mean your website won’t benefit from AMP. However, the drawback is that it’s quite difficult to implement on an existing website. The best-case scenario is to explore AMP when starting a new website, or developing a mobile specific version of your website.
Overall, what we need to remember is that every page on every website needs to have an individual purpose. Ranking and speed are important, but the user always comes first. If your website needs a three minute video on the homepage to achieve its goal, we can work together to make that work—with or without AMP.
