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A Guide to Accelerated Mobile Pages

A recent study from data-alliance.net has confirmed what some of us suspected: website loading speed is essential for e-commerce sites. To be more specific, about 65% of people will visit a competitor's site after trying to access a page that doesn't load in under four seconds.

That's bad news for companies who use a lot of heavy content, video-based ads, complex landing pages, etc. for their sites. However, people who choose to use less aggressive tactics for their marketing strategies can get ahead of competitors by using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Google invented AMP with the goal of making the web a better place for all of us. Far too many people have abused their visitors for far too long by throwing at them dangerous pop-ups, intrusive ads, and so on. While these tactics can be tolerated on devices that have larger screens - PCs, for example - they lead to terrible user experiences on mobile devices. So, the search engine giant has decided to launch an innovative project, which can help website pages load much faster on smart phones, tablets, etc.

I said that it "can" help those pages load faster, because website owners need to get involved as well. Fortunately, if your site is built using the WordPress platform, this is as easy as installing, and then activating a plugin. Several people have built AMP plugins, but my recommendation is to choose the official one. Here's the link to it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/

Install the plugin, and then activate it. If your theme and plugins are AMP-compatible, choose the plugin's "Standard" mode. By doing this, people will only see the AMP version of your site, and you won't need to maintain the old one anymore. This means that you can save a lot of time and money.

It is important to be aware of a few negative aspects before making the move, though. Some HTML code won't be loaded anymore, for example. Your JavaScript code won't run if people access the site using a mobile device; you may not want that to happen if you have a script that records visitor sessions, creates heatmaps, etc. In fact, even your social sharing buttons may disappear! However, if you are willing to redesign the site, you will end up having a new one that loads much faster, improving user experience, attracting more visitors, and earning you more business.

To learn more about AMP, go to amp.dev. If you read the documentation, you will discover that the Accelerated Mobile Pages framework uses three essential elements. AMP HTML is a subset of the HTML web programming language, which implements several restrictions and requires the elements to have specific properties. Images need to have their size specified in pixels, for example; otherwise, they will be rendered poorly.

The second element is AMP JS, a simplified JavaScript framework that has been built with mobile devices in mind. Its main goal is to handle web resources, as well as ensure asynchronous loading, the ability to download and run several scripts at the same time while the page continues to load. The last element is the AMP Content Delivery Network. It is an optional component; nevertheless, if you make use of it, your website pages will be cached using thousands of powerful servers located all over the world, so people will be able to access your site at lightning-fast speeds, no matter if they live in the US or Europe.