What is AMP and Who Actually Needs It?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is set to roll out within Google’s mobile search results in February 2016. Here we explain what AMP is, how it will impact Google’s results, and look at what you should be doing in preparation.

What is AMP?

AMP is a Google-backed project with the aim of speeding up the delivery of content through the use of stripped down code known as AMP HTML. Put simply, AMP is a way to build web pages for static content (pages that don’t change based on user behavior), that allows the pages to load (and pre-render in Google search) much faster than regular HTML.

AMP has been rolled out in response to projects such as Facebook Instant Articles, in which Facebook can host and render publishers content directly within their news feed, meaning the process of viewing a piece of content is much quicker than opening the equivalent web page in a mobile browser.

How will AMP be used?

Google will be using AMP to quickly serve content on mobile devices without users having to click through to a website to view the content. You can view a demo of AMP within Google’s search results here if you’re reading this article on a mobile device.

Why AMP is fast

The AMP Project aims to bring instant rendering to web content. This is an unsorted list of optimizations that apply to all AMP based documents, which in aggregate make them load fast. Every web page can have these optimizations, but AMP pages can not have them.

While this article is about optimizations in AMP, it might also be useful as a kind of todo list for optimizing a non-AMP website. If we are missing any optimization that might be beneficial to AMP, please leave a comment or send us a pull request.