What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages & Do You Need Them?

Since more people are using their smartphones to access the web, it has become important for businesses to start focusing on improving mobile experiences of their websites.

Do you know 4 of 10 visitors leave a mobile web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load? Speed matters when it comes to search engine ranking. With fast-loading web pages, your website will have lower bounce rate, happier visitors, and more sales.

Of the many programs implemented by Google for website speed, accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) is one. What exactly is it and whether it’s worth your website? Let’s discuss.

What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)?

AMP is an open-source HTML framework, which works for reducing the code complexity to help content load quickly. In other words, it compresses the large files and displays only important elements of the web pages.

Accelerated mobile pages are HTML copies of web pages, which load faster than standard HTML5 documents.

One of the major reasons why AMPs load so fast is that Google doesn’t send requests to your server. In fact, the web pages are in a cached version on Google servers. So, users get content immediately after they request it.

There are four types of AMPs- web pages, ads, stories, and emails.

Benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) to a Website

Improved Load Time

AMPs help websites deliver content to users faster. They focus on displaying only essential elements while eliminating non-essential ones. This is important as the majority of the users nowadays prefer using their mobile phones to access the web.

Higher Search Engine Ranking

AMPs can improve search engine ranking. They help your web pages load faster, improving user experience, thus boosting search engine ranking. According to Google, speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Lower Bounce Rate

Bounce rate increases when your website takes longer to load. But, when your web pages load faster, visitors will stay on longer due to great experience. This helps in lowering the bounce rate, which is good as per SEO perspective.

Reduced Ad Revenue

AMP pages show fewer elements of web pages than those of standard web pages. Fewer ads means reduced ad revenue. Keep in mind, it’s not good if ads are a major source of your website’s revenue.

AMP supports multiple ad formats & technologies, thus it can help deliver appealing content. This way, advertisers can get a significant improvement in ROI on ad spend.

Does Your Website Need AMPs?

Accelerated mobile pages lead to a significant improvement in loading speed of web pages & are also preferred by Google search results. So, it’s good to adopt AMP for your website.

Basically, AMP is the best choice for you if you-

• Are struggling with page speed despite performing activities to improve it.
• Have most of the traffic from mobile users
• Publish news stories, and you want to show them up in the top results

However, AMPs are not worth the effort for most websites. If your website already has fast loading speed and high-converting web pages, there’s no need to implement AMP.

Still not sure whether your website needs accelerated mobile pages or not?

Do A/B testing. Measure parameters such as conversion rate, total time on page, etc. to determine if AMP is worth your website.

In nutshell, loading speed plays a vital role when it comes to SEO ranking in mobile searches. If there are two mobile web pages with almost similar SEO ranking attributes, then the one with faster load time will rank higher in the search engine result page.

AMP framework is effective in reducing load time of web pages, thus boosting traffic and improving search engine ranking. However, it isn’t worth the effort for all websites. Fast loading and high-conversion web pages don’t need to implement AMP.

Ever used AMP? What was your experience; rate between 1 to 10? Would you like to recommend accelerated mobile apps? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.