AMP(?) is making the world better.

Of course, it's only making the mobile web better, you may be tempted to say. But here's the thing. People now spend 5+ hours on their mobile everyday, and 80% of that time is spent on few select apps on music, video, social media & gaming. And that means people primarily spend that ~1 hour looking for and reading new content outside of their native applications. This browsing happens in their mobile browsers, either native or in-app*.

And that browsing has sucked for a long time. The mobile web in the last few years has been strewn with graceless advertisements, content that pops and jumps around as the page loads and pages that are so big in size and so slow to load - they'd give a Galapagos tortoise a terrible superiority complex. But Accelerated Mobile Pages is changing all of that. AMP in layman terms is a restricted standard of HTML and Javascript that is used to build to web pages. You can identify a page is built using AMP when you see a lightning bolt against a particular result on Google search.

AMP pages load blazingly fast ( < 2s on a good network ), are constructed to prioritise loading content that matters first, have a skeleton that doesn't let content jump around and give the users an overall great experience of browsing on a mobile phone. Not only are AMP pages helping users browse better; they're also helping businesses do better. Since AMP pages load so fast, there's more visit to the pages (lesser drop offs) and because of the better user experience there's lesser abandonment (lower bounce rates) and thus more ad revenues & better conversion. In fact, over time as users learn that AMP pages give them a better experience, they're more inclined to click on AMP pages than others - so business that have already adopted AMP are at an advantage.

We at Myntra observed that our category pages (easily discovered through a google search like "myntra shoes") receive the most organic traffic and had slow loading times. Thus, we decided to experiment with an AMP version of them saw that the load times reduced by 2-3X as you can see in the demo below.

It feels great to have played our role in making the web better, because when we make web better, the world gets better.

Glossary - AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages; Native Browser - Browser on your device (Chrome, Firefox etc); In app browser - The container that displays your content when you click on a external link on an app like Facebook, Gmail, Instagram etc.

PS : I love writing about the web and in the past, I've also written about Progressive Web Apps which you can read here.