How to Get Started With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Google recently allowed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) into the organic mobile search engine results. It means that mobile search users can now see mobile pages right within their search results with a little AMP lightning bolt logo next to it. AMP is an accessible open-source technology that allows pages on a site to load quickly for users on the mobile device (smartphones, tablets, iPhones). This open-source initiative is created to not just allow people to increase the speed for their mobile readership but also the user experience (UX). It will also give Google a good reason to rank your site well in the mobile search engine results pages. On traditional mobile sites, the ad units and scripts can make the time required by pages much longer to load. Thus, it generates a negative as well as frustrating user experience. AMP is a part of Google’s various initiatives which are implementing to make the mobile web more user-friendly. The web developers and publishers are prompted to use this format by Google, however, for now; the company has made it evident that the search rankings will not be affected by AMPlification.

How Does AMP Work?

AMP fundamentally comprises of three essential elements in order to create a framework for mobile web pages:

1. AMP HTML: This markup language is a sub-division of HTML and has few custom tags, properties, and various restrictions. Though while modifying existing pages to AMP HTML you ought to not face any sort of trouble if you are familiar with the regular HTML.
2. AMP JS: A JavaScript structure for pages on mobile. For the better part, it maintains handling of resource and asynchronous loading. The fact that third-party JavaScript is not permitted with AMP should be taken into consideration
3. AMP CDN: An optional Content Delivery Network, it will take your AMP-enabled pages, cache them and make some performance optimizations automatically.

How to Get Started With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) – An Infographic

Infographic Source: visualistan.com

How Will You Improve AMP to Your Site?

You, as a beginner will have to sustain two variants of any article page at least. The first, original version of your article page will be the one that users will generally view, and the other is page’s AMP version. As it is common knowledge that third-party JavaScript and form elements are two things that AMP doesn’t permit, it is highly possible that you will be unable to have lead forms, on-page comments and few other ingredients that you might be practiced to see on your page in an implementation that is standard.

Furthermore, it is probable that in order to support the restrictions, your site template will have to be rewritten. For instance, all CSS in AMP must be in-line and be less than 50KB. Due to loading-intensiveness of custom fonts, AMP must be loaded using a special amp-font extension.

Particularly you must handle the multimedia. For instance, images need to utilize the custom amp-img element and they are required to incorporate a specific width and height. In addition to that, if you are using animated GIFs images, you would require adopting the separate amp-anim extended component.

Like images, there is a custom tag known as amp-video that should be used to embed locally hosted videos through HTML5. For embedding YouTube video, there is a separate extended component, amp-youtube. Also, there is a support for elements such as slideshows through amp-carousel and image lightboxes by amp-image-lightbox, as well social media embeds for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Vine via their own extended components. Though these tags and extended components demand some preparation in your site design, they are very easy to use.

You will be required to develop the original version of the article page in order for Google and other technologies supporting the AMP Project to detect the AMP version of your article. The page of original article should incorporate the following tag, a canonical tag for AMP pages particularly:

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”http://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/”>

The AMP Discovery Page also states that few platforms that support AMP will require Schema.org meta-data to specify the content type of the page. (Currently, “article,” “recipe,” “review” and “video” are listed as page type examples on GitHub.) Furthermore, it also suggested that Schema.org meta-data “is a requirement to make your content eligible to appear in the demo of the Google Search news carousel.” Thus, in case you’re attempting to get an advantage in future from Google by implementing AMP, make sure all schema are right by you!

In the process to generate more revenue, websites increase ads but by doing so, it causes a lot of distraction to the visitor and as a result, they end up leaving the site. However with AMP, there is nothing to worry about, for it was designed with keeping ad monetization in consideration. The conclusion is that with AMP, mobile pages even if they have many advertisements will load fast . As a result, mobile users won’t see any reason to install ad blockers. AMP is great news for advertisers and publishers alike.

The team who started the AMP project said “A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach. With that context, the objective is to provide support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies in Accelerated Mobile Pages.”

It is evident from the Google search results that AMP sites are highlighted with a little green lightning-bolt, inviting users in to experience these lightning-fast mobile pages. Thus, as a conclusion, Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is particularly intended to boost the speed of mobile websites for publishers, load quickly and provide a great user experience on mobile, would get a serious search ranking lift.