AMP: ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES

AMP is a technology created by Google. Its main goal is to make websites load faster on mobile devices.

What exactly is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a website creation language derived from HTML and optimised for websites to load almost immediately on mobile devices.

Structuring the HTML in a common and predefined way, you can lighten the pages by accelerating their deployment on mobile platforms.

Current situation

Website traffic from mobile devices has currently become higher than desktop computers and in many cases, web designs do not adapt correctly. Additionally, the user experience (UX) decreases remarkably when the loading speed of a website is slow.

For these reasons, Google has led the AMP project through a CDN (Content Delivery Network) content delivery.

AMP objectives

The main objective of AMP is to improve the loading speed of mobile web pages, thus improving the user experience. Nowadays, if a web page does not appear on the mobile device screen in about 3 seconds, 40% of users leave and start another search.

The AMP platform aims to avoid this high percentage of abandonment by providing programmers and website managers with the technical means they need to optimise performance on mobile devices.

In short, Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project designed to optimise and make mobile websites faster.

Main benefits of the AMP technology

• Websites that use AMP technology load up to 85% faster on mobile devices than websites that do not use AMP. The data expense is notably lower and the battery cost of the mobile device is also reduced.
• AMP technology can increase the number of visits and the permanence of users on the website.
• AMP optimised pages get better search engine rankings and a higher conversion rate from mobile users to customers.
• Increase lead acquisition in mobile environments

The AMP HTML language

The AMP pages are programmed in AMP HTML (HTML sub-language) an open format with Apache license. The AMP HTML code is available on GitHub for integration into content management systems.

The structure of an AMP page has the following files:

AMP HTML:

It offers elements that provide greater performance and an immediate load of static content.

AMP JAVASCRIPT:

JavaScript framework for mobile pages that manages resources and their load. Accelerated Mobile Pages only allows JavaScript provided by AMP JS.

AMP CDN:

Content distribution network, collects AMP pages, saves them cached and optimises them automatically.

AMP CACHE:

Content and file distribution system. This cache stores the HTML of the website to make the delivery more agile.

How to identify AMP pages?

All pages of an HTML website that have an AMP version must have a tag in the code with the “amphtml” attribute indicating Google where the version is located and a tag with the “canonical” attribute indicating the HTML page that comes from in order to prevent the content being considered as duplicate.

On the other hand, pages that do not have an HTML version will have a “canonical” themselves to be indexed.

AMP LITE and the RAISR algorithm

Google has launched a lighter version of the AMP project for users to navigate at maximum speed even with a limited and slow connection.

The AMP Lite version improves the consumption of AMP data by 45%. Google compresses the images in Web format with those browsers with which it is compatible. The images make use of the RAISR algorithm, capable of reducing the weight of an image by 75% while reducing its quality.