AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) - The Design Key to a Faster Mobile Experience

We’ve all been to a website that takes forever to load, and most of us don’t have time to wait. In the web design and technology world, faster is always better! Ironically, nothing turns off a potential customer faster than a glacier-slow website. The web development world is always trying to refine their techniques and tools in order to improve load times and now there is a new design tool that promises to do just that.

What Is AMP?

Google has recently announced a new framework known as AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is designed to improve the experience for a growing portion of webpage users. This new web design tool is not only meant to enhance the experience for mobile web users everywhere, but increase customer satisfaction by enabling mobile web pages to load seemingly instantly wherever you are. Regardless of your line of work, the number of mobile users is rapidly growing, making accelerated mobile pages a strong factor to consider for your small businesses technology and marketing strategy.

What are Some of the Pros and Cons of This New Technology?

For business owners who already have a website, it will most likely mean a partial rewrite geared towards addressing the mobile/responsive layouts in order to accommodate the new AMP code. Adding AMP only improves the load speed for mobile pages, not the pages of PC-based sites. We believe that if including AMP generates more mobile customers by reducing the amount of visitors who leave due to a long load time or poorly formatted content, it will be well worth the additional cost of maintaining an AMP version of all, or just designated, pages. For businesses who are looking to create their first website that focuses on mobile users, now is the ideal time to consider implementing AMP.

For the most part, mobile users will only notice their pages loading faster, although Google did make use of a lightning bolt symbol within the search engine results to denote AMP-optimized pages. You can even see many popular news platforms and publishers like CNN, Washington Post, USA Today, and more.

There are no hard numbers yet as to how much AMP pages positively affect SEO rankings. However, AMP will affect the number of clicks a site receives, load speed, and overall user experience which all ultimately affect SEO rankings through both indirect and direct methods. As users begin to recognize that pages with a lightning bolt symbol means faster loading times and a better user experience, one can conclude that AMP pages will likely receive more traffic.

For more information on AMP and how it can improve the experience for your mobile users, please contact us. We would also be happy to look at your website to see if adding Accelerated Mobile Pages might be a strategic move for your company.