With over 50% of the traffic on most websites being on mobile phones, it is quite important to look at AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions of your website. It will speed up content loading and accessibility.

AMP vs Responsive

Your website has to be responsive, after all it’s 2018…  If it’s not, you have to get in touch with us as soon as possible. Just in case, a responsive website is a website whose design is modified while viewed on a mobile phone or any other smart device with limited visibility. Even though the tablets and smart phones are getting larger every year, the mobile versions of browsers still display websites differently. If you read this and you are one of our current clients, your website is responsive already. Now AMP is a total different ballgame.

AMP vs Cellular Network

Your visitors, leads and clients are checking out your website on their mobile, everything looks great, and that’s fine. Now speed sometimes can be an issue, the 4G, LTE or any other type of modern network helps for faster display of content, but when you think of it, there are dead zones. Those dead zone can slow down your loading speed, that’s where AMP comes in.

Speed is the key

Having some pages using the AMP technology will speed up the loading time of your website drastically. And the first KPI when it comes to a website is page speed. With ISPs providing faster and faster connections, desktop loading type is always acceptable, even if you have a graphically intense website. Now on mobile, it is another story. We are in the middle of a generation that has instant gratification and high expectations anchored in their mind.

You can see on the screenshot above that the Accelerated Mobile Page of the Digital Marketing page of this website, that the accelerated mobile page has a much simpler design it takes 3.5 times faster to load using 11% of requests the desktop page uses. Don’t let the figures on the right fool you, this is quite normal considering the fact that this website uses features that are a little resource demanding, by consulting those pages, you can see that the loading time is just fine from your Wi-Fi connection.

Features

AMP Pages will have all essential features, but can still be missing a few plugins. On the website shown above the sidebar with the Facebook reviews, Facebook feed, Social media icons and other features are not present on the AMP page. Same for the more graphic friendly interface. Now the content is still there getting you the necessary information you are looking for, just faster.

Is it worth it to get AMP pages on your website

According to the fact that AMP pages are destined for mobile visitors, it’s is key for you to know your audience. This is what Data analysis is for. Looking through the demographics of your website analytics and  analyzing what devices they are using and what parts of your website they are visiting. Converting those pages to AMP is not like recreating a new website but rather add content to a specific AMP section for every page.

AMP for your blog

Just like the page listed above we did a test on our latest Blog post – Accelerated Mobile Page version, and Desktop/Responsive version. You can see that the differences can be seen as less drastic than on the page listed. The AMP page is loading 45% faster than the desktop version. This article converted automatically  into an AMP page with the plugin installed. We didn’t need to do any special operation on the back end of the website.

AMP and SEO

In January 2018, Google announced that later this year speed will be a ranking factor when it comes to mobile queries. This means that when you type your google search, if your page is faster it will rank higher. This will impact your organic displays, conversion and traffic. Google says that, starting July 2018, it will only impact certain queries made through mobile phone. Now a few years back, they were the ones saying that page speed would not influence rankings. Let’s put it this way, now is the time to take care of this. So when time comes, you will be ready.

What to do next?

As we put it above, if your site is not responsive you have to contact us right away. We will find you a solution that can solve this and potentially add the AMP option. If your site is already responsive, you can look into it, that’s for sure. The investment won’t be like building a brand new site, but will still be consequent. It will take us some hours of hard work to make your site AMP compliant. All that depends of the amount of content on your website.