Many of us are already aware of the impact of the loading speed of a website as a positioning factor in search engines and its influence on the percentages of sales conversions. Due to the global boom in web browsing through a mobile device, the famous Accelerated Mobile Pages, or more popularly known as AMPs, have been gaining more attention in the last year compared to its beginnings in 2015. When AMP first became known, its highest acceptance was notorious among news websites.
One of the main reasons why news publishers wanted to use AMPs was to make their mobile pages much faster and, in addition to everything, they discovered that Google was offering them an incremental exposure, in the corresponding search engine, through the carousel of the most viewed news. Today, beyond the news media, the AMP project has gained much more acceptance among mobile e-commerce pages due to an average increase of 20% in sales conversions compared to non-AMP web pages.
What is an AMP?
The
Accelerated Mobile Page is an open-source project, promoted by Google and Twitter, and designed to make mobile pages really fast. In essence, it is basically a simplified form of HTML. But fundamentally, it is an HTML page that includes critical designs of really light and fast loading in order to improve the mobile user experience. AMPs enable special search features in Google's engines. This technology has been shown to increase the number of visits to a specific page and the permanence in time of its visitors. These pages are identified by their lightning symbol accompanied by the acronym AMP or by bearing the same acronym at the beginning of their respective URL address.
AMP Advantages
Standardized Mobile Optimization
Optimization for mobile sites is essential to offer a high-quality experience to the users who visit them. To meet the demands of today's market, it is important to be informed about what works and what does not in order to build or update websites based on it. The adoption of an AMP offers the possibility of measuring whether the mobile page is generating the desired conversions.
Improved Ranking In The Mobile-First Generation
It is logical that creating pages for a mobile standard helps your website rank better on
Google SERPs that are governed by mobile availability. Although AMP may not be directly connected to better rankings, preparing your pages for fast mobile loading times and ease of use will improve the performance of your entire site.
Speed Improvement
In addition to ranking better in SERPs, your users may enjoy your site much more when it performs better thanks to its proper preparation for mobile devices. Making pages' load within five seconds seems to have the most positive impact on user participation and conversion, which is especially useful if you run an e-commerce website or a site that earns most of its revenue from Google Ads.
Placement In The Local Carousel
AMPs are also positioned on a carousel placed above all other search engine results in Google SERPs. The carousel is horizontal, allowing users to scroll through the AMPs sideways without having to scroll down. It appears for wide searches and high traffic, but as the algorithm continues to learn, you can get more and more AMP results. However, it is important to keep in mind, like other search functions, that the position in an AMP carousel may not be permanent.
AMP Disadvantages
JavaScript And CSS Limitations
For the most part, AMPs allow very little in terms of brand and individuality. That is largely because loading times suffer a lot when web designers use JavaScript and, to a lesser extent, CSS. By minimizing all types of plugins and visually attractive elements, mobile pages are significantly accelerated, but they are very simple visually since they sacrifice the style of the brand.
Cached Page Versions
One of the ways in which AMP makes pages load so fast is that it allows Google to display a cached version of that page for users. Google retains the pages that appear in search results, which means that it does not even display the original content of the site, only a cached copy.
Complex Implementation
Although the implementation of the AMP Project guidelines is designed to be easy to use, conflicting information and constant updating of the standard can make this technology confusing. Although some content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, have AMP integration tools available, they often conflict with
best SEO tools like Yoast. Implementing AMP is not the easiest method yet.
Browser URL
When an AMP is positioned in Google carousels, the URL of that page is seen in the SERPs. However, when the site is accessed, the URL that is visible is from Google. Another drawback is that when implementing AMPs, a copy of their respective mobile page is generated; something that when there is duplicate content in search engines is considered problematic.
If you are intrigued to join the initiative of converting your business site into its AMP version, we advise you to get detailed information about how the implementation process for your particular site would work, as well as the cost and resources required to carry it out. Perhaps in order to get a better idea about the benefits you can get from the implementation of an AMP, it is worth considering creating a test page to analyze exact data about a potential improvement in the time in which your users visit your page - the percentage of organic traffic that you would be attracting to your website which developed by
app developers and the conversion numbers in sales.
