AMPs or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source website publishing technology designed purely to improve the performance of advertisements and content on the World Wide Web.
Led by Google, the AMP project can be considered an immediate competitor to Facebook’s instant articles, including various other social, search, and web publishing platforms across the world.
When I first heard about this Google project, I was excited to jump on the bandwagon ASAP. After all, who doesn’t want to bid adieu to clunky, slow, and non-optimized websites? But soon afterward, I realized that in spite of having plenty of pros, AMPs come with cons as well.
Webmasters and digital marketers need to go through the hype and decide whether they really need to implement AMPs on their websites or not. This guide can help.
Accelerated Mobile Pages: A Brief Overview
As I said above, AMP is an open-source, free framework allowing you to create mobile pages capable of delivering content quickly to your audience.
It consists of JS, HTML, and cache libraries that can accelerate the loading speed for mobile pages even if they come with rich feature-laden content like PDFs, infographics, video or audio files.
AMP is nothing, but the bare-bones version of your page. It displays content that matters, getting rid of all the elements in the process that are taking a toll on your site speed and performance.
Why is AMP considered important?
AMP is considered important for obvious reasons like:
- Faster loading time.
- Better engagement.
- Reduced bounce rate.
- Improved mobile ranking.
However, you must also note that AMP doesn’t improve your entire site engagement on its own. It would not make your content useful or entertaining.
If your loading time is great, but your content is not up to the mark, your ranking is not going to improve because of high bounce rate. To make this feature work on your site, you need to have the best of both worlds: faster loading time and superb content.
Advantages of Accelerated Mobile Pages
- Lightning-fast loading speed
It is no surprise that one of the primary benefits of AMP webpages lies in their loading speed – given the project was created for that purpose alone.
Recent studies point to the fact that most users abandon a website taking longer than three seconds to load. Businesses adopting AMP could thereby help in driving their mobile abandonment rates down and increase conversions at one and the same time.
- Improved mobile ranking
Although accelerated mobile pages aren’t considered a key ranking factor in themselves, they can have a compellingly positive influence on mobile ranking purely because of its faster loading time.
And then if Google starts to prioritize AMPs, it may have even more effect on search engine results pages.
- Improved publisher visibility
If a webpage is AMP-optimized, search engines will clearly display the symbol in green (like a bolt of lightning). The inclusion of these symbols can play a direct hand in improving your click through rates.
In addition to this, Google algorithms have also started displaying AMP content in visually dominating carousels including large images.
This will naturally draw the attention of users, and any content written within these carousels should get a significant boost in traffic for search terms related to the AMP page content.
Now try searching for some news stories on your mobile. Do you notice the stories at the top labeled AMP? Well, that’s exactly my point.
- Broad range of support for Ads
Accelerated mobile pages aim to support a broad range of ad formats, networks, and technologies. The primary goal is to deliver ads that are quick while allowing the content to be worthy of grabbing the viewer’s attention at a moment’s notice.
This feature would help to increase the influence of advertisers and ROI on ad expenses.
- Analytics
The importance of tracking visitor behavior has greatly increased in recent times. Accelerated mobile pages take this into account.
Publishers can now choose from 2 tags that can automatically track visitor data including the likes of visitor counts, the number of clicks or conversions, link, and video tracking, and more.
Disadvantages of Accelerated Mobile Pages
- Possible reduction in ad revenue
Although AMPs support ads, the potential to bring in revenue becomes severely limited.
And it’s definitely not a walk in the park to implement ads on AMP-supported pages.
- Amazing speed is achieved only through cache
Google does not offer any particular technology to make your webpages superfast. What it does is that it saves a cached version of your AMP-tagged page, and whenever any visitor tries to access it, it simply serves the page up from the cache.
Now you can figure out the rest. Are you sure you want to be dependent on Google through cache?
- Stripped analytics
Accelerated mobile pages support Google Analytics, but they also require a different tag. This needs to be implemented on all AMP pages.
So naturally, it takes a lot of time and effort on the user’s end to place this tag on all AMP-enabled pages for the collection and analysis of data.
Responsive vs. AMP: A Head-on comparison
Responsive website designing is an absolute must in the current circumstances. But does it make sense to invest in responsive when we already have AMP?
The answer is “yes.”
AMP does come with a lot of advantages like better UX, faster-loading speed, lower bounce rate, higher ranking but at the same time, it also ties your site Google. If your cache is not stored on Google’s servers, you won’t be having any mobile pages at all.
But the most important downside to note is that AMP is not very easy to install. For example, if you have a website based on WordPress, you can always go ahead and install the AMP plugin; but what if it’s not?
You will then have to place all the necessary tags and codes manually; a hugely time-consuming process.
As a result, I would recommend you to wait on the AMP game, especially if you already have a responsive, mobile-friendly website. Wait for the AMP to become a true ranking signal and only then, take the leap of faith without any further ado.
