What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
Indeed tablets and smartphones have revolutionized the way people access information. These days people consume a remarkable number of information or news through their portable devices. Moreover, publishers all over the world have optimized their websites to support different mobile devices are they are browsing through. However, the experience can often leave a lot to be desired.
What does this mean? It simply means that anytime a web page takes too long to load, they lose a reader and their opportunity to grow readers/web-users or convert potential customers. This intern limits their opportunity to earn revenue through subscription or advertising. Well, the reason being that an advertiser on such a website will have a hard time getting users to pay attention to their advertisements because the page is loading slowly. This will make people and advertisers, in general, to abandon the page entirely.
Last October, Google announced a new open source initiative known as Accelerated Mobile Pages that is said to improve the performance of a mobile website dramatically. What are accelerated mobile pages exactly? Well, the aim of AMP is to give web pages with rich contents such as graphics, animation, and videos to work alongside smart ads and load instantly. This code is intended to work across multiple devices and platforms so that content can appear everywhere in a second. Therefore, it does not matter the kind of tablet, phone, or portable device your customers shall be using.
What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (abbreviated as AMP) is a well though and innovative version of a mobile website. It runs on a new version of HTML code that is used to create a mobile web page. This new version of HTML (otherwise known as AMP HTML) removes elements that may cause a web page to load slower on mobile such as third-party Scripts as well as JavaScript.
Google has mentioned that pages created with Accelerate Mobile Page HTML can load anywhere from 15% to 85% faster compared the Non-AMP version of that page. They have also gone ahead to make everything easy for publishers to get started in Accelerated Mobile Pages through tutorials, which walk you through the creation of an AMP page.
Well, the fact is that all this has a good tune to it. However, by looking at it in a whole new perspective, Google has removed all infrastructure marketers, and advertisers currently rely on, to deliver impactful brand messages to users.
But do not lose hope just yet! There are many things to know.
even though some parts of accelerated mobile pages will need a new approach to advertising on mobiles, there are few other reasons you should register with AMP.
What makes AMP Fast?
Google said that this code is like a diet HTML. It is a fact that certain tags of HTML you cannot simply use. These are things such as Forms that are not out yet, which will force you to use a streamlined version of CSS. At the same time, you can use most of CSS; however, some parts will fall under best practice and they are not allowed to be used. Third party JavaScript are basically not allowed. This means that marketers will not be able to use shelf JavaScript libraries, which you are provided with. All these factors and codes will make a website load slowly.
Because of this, this platform has been designed purely for readability and pure speed; things like Images not loading until they are scrolled into view. This is just but a taste of this new platform.
How Does It Work?
As we have come to learn, this is essentially a framework for creating mobile web pages. Accelerated mobile pages consist of three main parts:
1. AMP Content Delivery Network (CDN)
It comes with an optional CDN, which will use enabled web pages; then it is heavily cached. This automatically improves performance.
2. AMP JavaScript (JS)
It also comes with a JavaScript framework for mobile pages. It mainly manages information or content as well as asynchronous loading. What does this mean? It simply means that it will load few items such as images and videos only after you have scrolled.
NOTE: third-party JavaScripts are not acceptable with AMP.
3. AMP HTML
It’s HTML is the backbone of this platform. It is the language that has some custom tags, properties, and many restrictions. However, if you are familiar with regular HTML, then you should not have any difficulties adapting existing pages to AMP HTML. For more information about the details on how these codes differ from basic HTML, refer to Google’s Project List.
How To AMP Your Website?
First, a publisher is required to retain at least 2 types of content they are delivering. The first should be the original version and should be on the article page. This is the page that users will see. The AMP version of that page. AMP does not permit thing like; form element as well as third-party JavaScript. This means that you will likely not have on-page comments, lead forms, and other features marketers are used to, in a conventional implementation.
There are chances that you will have to rewrite your website’s template to include the terms. For instance, CSS in this platform must follow its guidelines and not exceed 50KB. However, because loading-intensiveness, all customs fonts must be loaded with AMP-font extension. This way, a user will have better loading.
All multimedia should be dealt with specially. What does this mean? Images must use the AMP-img extension. It must also have correct height and width. Well, the truth of the matter is that when converting a standard web page to an AMP template, it will indeed be a pain to you; Especially if the size is not applied correctly. Moreover, if you have animated images (GIFs), you will be required to use a separate extension known as AMP-anim.
Just like Images, there is also a custom tag that must be used to activate locally hosted videos through HTML5. This extension is known as AMP-video. For embedded videos, such as YouTube, there is a separate extension known as AMP-YouTube one should use.
As you learn more about what are accelerated mobile pages, it is important to know that this platform does support other features such as slideshows. This is made possible through AMP-carousel. Image lite boxes are made possible through the AMP-image light box. It is also possible to embed social media platform such as Pinterest, Vine, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter through their own extensions.
These are just but a few things this new platform has to offer. Hopefully, the above information has answered your question on what are accelerated mobile pages.
