According to a study, mobile sites that were one second faster had 27% increase in conversion rate of paying customers while those pages that were one second slower experienced a 56 % increase in bounce rate. This is a mind boggling statistics that goes on to show how much speed matters when it comes to mobile web pages. Publishers face a major fall-out in terms of shrinking advertisement revenue when users decide to abandon their slow-loading mobile site.
Google has recently come up with an open source initiative that aims to create fast-loading web pages. Known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), the format intents to provide a better mobile web experience for all users. This helps publishers to enhance the user experience for their readers by increasing the loading speed. AMP helps publishers attain user satisfaction without having to lose any income from the advertisements on the site and at the same time making enhanced distribution of their content across all platforms and applications possible. This means more visibility for their content and thereby more revenue from advertisements and subscriptions. In other words, this ambitious project initiated by Google and supported by various other companies, is aimed at improving the overall mobile content system for publishers, creators and users alike.
Who benefits and how?
The AMP project is virtually for every stakeholder in the system including publishers, consumer platforms and creators.
Accelerated Mobile Pages are very much like the usual HTML pages and will load in any modern browser and the webview of certain apps. What make them different are certain technical functionalities that give preference to speed over other features. This doesn’t mean the entire content would look similar; the idea is to bridge a more common technical base between pages so that the loading time is faster.
The best thing about AMP project is the huge potential for all kinds of published content – news stories, videos, blogs and photographs – to work in this format.
How to Accelerate Mobile Pages
There are three different parts to Accelerated Mobile Pages – AMP html, AMP JS and Google AMP cache.
- AMP html is the basic html with certain restrictions in order to enhance the performance of the page and extension that helps to develop rich content. In an AMP html page, many of the tags are the usual html tags, therefore if one is acquainted with basic html, then it won’t be difficult to adapt pages to AMP html.
- AMP JS ensures the speedy analysis and rendering of AMP html pages. Its main function is handling of resource loading and providing custom tags. In other words, AMP JS ensures speedy processing of the page. Its important feature is to make all that coming from outside asynchronous so that the processing cannot be stopped or blocked by anything in the page.
- Google AMP Cache, on the other hand, brings out the AMP html pages. It is nothing but an optional content delivery network that delivers all authentic AMP documents.
The story so far
Conceived as a pioneering concept and created by Google, the Accelerated Mobile Project is supported and partnered by several major players like Pinterest, The New York Times, LinkedIn, The Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC etc. According to Google, in just over four months, AMP has improved greatly with over hundreds of publishers, several technology companies and many ad-tech enterprises participating in the project aimed at enhancing the mobile user experience for everyone.
As predicted, there is already exciting results coming in and remarkable improvement recorded in the performance of the mobile web pages. It is found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.
For more information on Accelerated Mobile Pages, write to services @suyati.com
