Accelerated Mobile Pages – AMP
Are we ready to be fully AMP’d?
Google has announced a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP HTML. AMP’s aim is to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. Essentially, the goal is to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone. It wants to make it fast and easy for users on mobile devices to access the content they love and enjoy.
So what is it?
AMP HTML is a new open framework built out of existing web technologies and it allows websites to build light-weight webpages. AMP HTML has a limited set of technical functionality and restricts parts of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that can bloat sites and cause slower load times, in turn providing users with a faster load times and a happier experience. AMP is Open Source, therefore is open for everyone to use and at this stage is unbranded. This will allow uses to keep consistency in their own look and feel.
Do we need AMP?
Over the past 4 years, smartphone web usage is up 396 percent, and tablet usage is up a massive 1,721 percent. This translates to whopping 74 percent of the content on the web being accessed by a mobile device. This rise is predominantly caused by ‘Millennials’, of which 21 percent are no longer using desktop computers to go online. Statistical reports show that slow load times can result in up to a 58 percent bounce rate. These same reports show that even a 1 second improvement on load times could improve conversation rates by 27 percent.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
The world wide web from 1999 is a lot different to the world wide web web know and love today. Content is richer, user experience greater, we are more connected and speed does matters. The question is though, are we moving in the right direction? Well that depends. Are you Mr glass half full or Mr glass half empty? Like most emerging technologies people can tend be critical. Google has only just announcement the release, October 2015, of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, so it is early stages for the project. Their argument is that they want to create mobilised content once, and have it load everywhere. Some developers are arguing that they will lose functionality and uses will be limited in style and design!
AMP is built on existing web technologies, optimized for speed and performance and pages are published normally to your site, using standard tools, and are accelerated via caches created by Google and other providers.
The project’s GitHub page is live but Google stated that AMP is still in preview mode.
Watch your mobile space!
Since AMP is only in its early stages, we will just have to wait and see how this develops. I am hopeful that this will spark a new round of creative intelligence in which we will see richer content faster than ever before. For more information visit https://www.ampproject.org
