Accelerated Mobile Pages are at the forefront of Google’s mobile agenda, and in February this year, Google struck another bullseye. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) intend to make the mobile experience, faster, smoother and richer.

Given online users scarper from a website if it has not loaded within 3-10 seconds, Google has hit on a nice idea – albeit one that is causing web owners more grief.

The good news is, setting up AMP shouldn’t cause business owners too much hassle and will cut down on coding for developers. Furthermore, think of it this way – AMP could bag you a customer you would have lost if your website was a slow-loader. Here’s what you need to know about AMP:

What do Accelerated Mobile Pages do?

AMP strips out features that cause pages to load slowly on a mobile device.  As a consequence, your website could look somewhat threadbare.

However, reinvented HTML codes that remove some language from Javascripts, CSS and third party scripts make the magic happen and lighten the load of your website.

How do you get AMP?

Google has teamed up with technology companies such as WordPress, Twitter, Adobe and Linkedin that will integrate AMP onto their platforms. You will have to either download a zip file and drop it in the HTML code of your website or for WordPress download a plugin. You can find more details at Gibhub.com.

AMP Demo

amplaunch[1]

Newspaper website, The Grauniad, was one of the major players involved in the roll-out of Accelerated Mobile Pages technology. You can see their demo in the animated gif above or read their article about it.

AMP for WordPress

Cutting-edge content platform WordPress already has an AMP plugin, to add AMP functionality. The plugin page states:

“With the plugin active, all posts on your site will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions, accessible by appending /amp/ to the end your post URLs. For example, if your post URL is http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/, you can access the AMP version at http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/amp/. If you do not have pretty permalinks enabled, you can do the same thing by appending ?amp=1, i.e. http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/?amp=1.”

While the plugin sounds great, it currently has 3.7 out of 5 stars from 59 ratings. We’d say that it’s getting medium-vibes from WordPress users and if you can afford to, wait for more WordPress plugins to launch before committing to this current offering.

Do you need AMP?

You don’t have to use AMP, but if you want your website to invite mobile users in by opening the digital doors quickly and giving them the rich experience you create for desktop visitors, then you probably should.

Fast rendering of pages will mean more page views together with multimedia content and native ads that would otherwise be removed. So if you are trying to monetize your website, AMP supports your efforts by accommodating mobile users.

One of Google’s main drivers behind AMP is to increase ad revenue to the tune of $50 billion dollars, so there is plenty of stake to be shared. So now you know all that, do you think it’s about time you polished your darts?

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