Online InventThere is a big percentage of mobile users accessing the web. But due to low performance of mobile phones and slow Internet connection, it is hard to read content online. Mobile phone users generally experience slow loading of web pages. Not all mobile users have the best mobile devices and not everyone uses a high-speed Internet connection on their phones.
Generally speaking, people find it difficult to read content online because the web pages do not load instantly. To deal with this problem, Google has developed a framework called AMP in collaboration with Twitter. AMP project is an open source project.
This blog post will give you a basic overview of the AMP project.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page. It is a lightweight mobile web page designed specifically to enhance performance and user experience. The goal is to give instant page loading experience to mobile users.
By using AMP on your website, you can let your website visitors instantly access certain web pages of your website. So when they search for some phrases on Google and if your site appears in the search results and your site is AMP-ified, your web content will be shown instantly to the users when they click on the search result.
Benefits of using AMP for your website
The main benefits of using AMP for your website are as follows.
- It boosts page loading speed,
which results in better user experience. Website performance is a
huge business advantage. So if you can improve the performance of
some web pages on your site using AMP, you will get amazing business
benefits.
- Because of better user experience,
engagement and conversions increase. If your website provides great
user experience, people will love to read from your site, they will
engage more, and as a result, the conversions will also increase
significantly.
- Although AMP is not an officially declared ranking factor, it improves SEO performance as we generally know that fast page loading speed and a great user experience can improve the ranking of a web page. So AMP pages can boost organic search traffic.
How AMP pages are built
This kind of mobile pages is designed using simplified HTML, strict CSS rules, AMP scripts, and AMP’s component library. Take a look at the AMP HTML specification here. They have a strict specification for HTML.
With AMP, you cannot use all HTML tags. There are strict rules for writing HTML. Keep in mind that AMP HTML is just a stripped down version of HTML, where you can use only a limited number of HTML tags. For example, you cannot use forms. This sort of strict rules has been imposed to achieve fast page loading speed.
The required AMP HTML tags can be viewed from here.
When you’re working with AMP, you are not allowed to use JavaScript. But there are AMP scripts that you can use, which has been optimised for performance.
For faster content delivery, a content delivery network is used while working with AMP. It’s an important AMP component which is known as AMP Cache.
If you want to learn how to use AMP on your website, have a look at this quick start guide. It’s an easy-to-understand tutorial that nicely explains how to build AMP pages.
Some limitations
Although AMP has many benefits, it has a few disadvantages, also. Consider the following limitations.
- AMP pages are simple web pages, meaning they are not that much visually appealing. As you’re allowed to use only a leaner version of HTML, you can’t do much with the web page structure and design. So if you want to include some advanced graphics in your web pages for mobile, you can’t do that with AMP. The AMP framework just allows you to build simple pages.
- To use AMP on your website, you need to give a greater level of efforts. AMP-ifying your website will require a lot of time. Building and maintaining assets for AMP is not easy.
- One of the biggest disadvantages of AMP is that the user cannot do anything but going back to search results on Google. This limits the user from exploring the website and hence may decrease conversions to some extent.
These are some of the limitations that AMP has. But keep in mind that although AMP has some drawbacks, its benefits obviously outweigh the disadvantages. So if you want the benefits AMP gives, you can consider using AMP on your website.
If you need help implementing AMP on your website or if you need any other web design/development services, please feel free to contact us.
