AMP Up Your Website for Mobile Devices

When you’re out and about, you’ve probably noticed that it seems like people spend more time on their phones than they used to. And it’s true; the data backs it up. In the last four years, the amount of mobile data usage has quadrupled, and according to Google, mobile is now the go-to choice for browsing the net, and their mobile-first index is now in effect.

Yet, a lot of sites are still buggy or slow on phones and tablets. Speed is a huge issue. Nobody wants to sit around waiting for sites to load, and to help out, Google has created the AMP framework that anyone can adopt for their sites to load faster, but it has a few requirements your site must meet first.

What is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and the goal is to make pages load lightning fast on tablets and phones. An AMP page is a simplified version of the code created specifically for mobile that is stripped down to optimise for speed.  Pages using the AMP framework have a little lightning bolt next to them on the Google search results.

While this stripped-down code does come with some restrictions and limitations, for many business owners the speed advantage is worth the change. And for the most part, sites look and function the same as they did without AMP—only faster. AMP pages don’t allow custom JavaScript (unless in the amp-iframe) and have a size limitation for the stylesheet, and instead uses an optimised script that loads faster.

The AMP Logo

Are there other benefits to AMP pages?

The main benefit of AMP is to deliver lightning fast, amplified pages to users. But you might find that you get some other benefits as well, such as:

• More likely to have a higher spot in Google when someone searches on mobile
• Less load on your web servers so performance can go up
• Potentially higher chance of display network ads being shown if your site has advertising
• Chance to be featured at the top of Google results in the Top Stories Carousel. 

AMP is great thing to implement on your site. Just keep in mind that it requires making changes to the code of your website, and it’s important to pay close attention to make sure it’s done right so your website keeps working. If you aren’t comfortable doing this or aren’t sure how to access or change the code, the team at Back9 has an experienced website development team that’s happy to help!