The Power of AMP
If you haven’t yet read our blog post on what to expect in the May 2021 Google update, then you might not know that moving forwards, Google will be really nailing down on the user-friendliness of a website – which means the page speed of the website and AMP may be a crucial part of SEO.
The changes for non-AMP content to become eligible to arrive in the mobile top stories feature on search engines will roll out in May 2021.
This means any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and prioritised by Google, whether implemented from using AMP or any other web speed technology, they will see good results.
Read this post on what AMP is and how it can help speed things up for the mobile version of your website.
What are accelerated mobile pages?
AMP means accelerated mobile pages in short.
AMP is essentially a stripped-down “cleaner” HTML copy of existing webpage content that results in a faster load time than standard HTML5 webpage documents.
Most if not all websites can serve AMP pages by implementing the rel=amphtml tag into their HTML.
AMP simply reduces the need for additional CSS requests and removes certain on-page eliminates, including heavy pictures, CTAs, and backend code. This leads to an increase in speed greatly for mobile.
The best way to think of AMP is that it is HTML on a diet.
Pages with AMP code contain a three-step AMP configuration which we have broken down below:
- HTML: A stripped-down and unique markup of traditional HTML code which include unique tags.
- JS: Is used to fetch resources and stripped down to eliminate unnecessary rendering
- CDN: This is an optimised network designed to cache pages and adapt them to AMP code immediately.
How does AMP affect your website?
AMP speeds up the webpage load time by enabling AMP caching. This will greatly affect the loading time on your website for a fast speed mobile-friendly website, making it a great option if you are looking to improve your SEO performance.
So, let’s get technical… Google invests in this functionality by preloading AMP documents using a single iFrame in the background of a search results page, so that pages appear to load near enough instantly.
AMP documents can be pulled from the AMP library directly off of its original server. (The AMP library consists of a document with AMP HTML and AMP JS).
The impact AMP has on the SERPs
The most important aspect of AMP is of course the impact it has on search engines.
Accelerated Mobile Pages, as quite literally in the name are for mobile and tablet devices meaning that the loading speed time is for these devices only, which won’t have an effect on the desktop speed score, however, having an impressive mobile speed score will result in an overall higher SEO score.
Typically AMP is for news-related terms, so if you have heavy content rolling out on your website’s blog this could be something you want to consider because most of this is focused on reading contents and the load time for the user.
It’s important to know while AMP caching does offer improved speeds and is often favoured by Google search results, adopting AMP for your website does come with a few obstacles.
For instance, AMP only works if a user clicks on the AMP version of a webpage, as opposed to the canonical version.
There have also been studies that have shown that the AMP library can reduce the number of server requests to fetch a document by as much as 77%, but the AMP version is not always served if it’s not implemented correctly.
Tracking data for AMP pages on Google Analytics, Ads or even DoubleClick is still quite limited, although analytics for this is continuing to develop.
The biggest issue with AMP is that you are sacrificing a lot of UX elements of your webpage. AMP HTML prioritizes efficiency over creativity, really meaning that you are cutting it down to the basics.
Is AMP for you and our future?
So, should you implement AMP on your website? It is not always necessary, but there are huge benefits, and with the new core update looking to focus on page speed load time it may be something you ought to look into.
Many SEO experts are saying that the future is AMP, simply because SEO continues to move away from computers and onto mobile devices! If you think AMP is something you would like to implement then get in touch with our SEO specialists today.
