What is Google AMP?

People in the modern world, particularly internet users, tend to be impatient – they hate waiting for things. That is the key reason why around 25 per cent of your website visitors are likely to leave the website if it fails to load within six seconds. Fortunately, in the year 2016, Google launched the best solution for sluggish mobile website pages. They named that solution the “Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP). It is a technology that can load each website page within one second and reduce the data usage by around ten times for regular website users.

A quick introduction to the Google AMP

First, Google AMP is a form of website publishing technology that allows users to build website pages that can load instantly on various mobile devices. Since the inception of this technology in the year 2016, more than 25 million people have managed to publish 1.5 billion AMP website pages. To build an AMP page, you just need to create a different version of your website and ensure that it follows the project standards of AMP. After the website is up and running, it will have a unique URL and will be compatible with most web browsers for mobile devices such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
Someone who visits your AMP webpage through Google search will realize that it loads faster. Google hosts the pages on their servers, and they will serve up the web content directly on their site. The technology is more like the Facebook Instant Articles that allows the users to read articles without having to leave the Facebook mobile application. However, Google AMP does not limit you to embedding AMP webpages on their platforms as the Facebook Instant Articles does. Most search engines, content management systems, social platforms and eCommerce websites – including Bing, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium, Twitter, Squarespace, WordPress, eBay, Tumblr and the BigCommerce – support Google AMP. Google is also known to give preferential treatment to the AMP pages when ranking pages. AMP is a requirement for the news stories that need to rank in mobile search results.

On the downside, the AMP pages’ boosted search ranking and enhanced loading speed come with drawbacks. Any backlinks to the AMP pages that users find through Google search will not transfer any links equity to the website. When it comes to advertising, the publishers do not benefit as they benefit from link building. In the year 2016, AMP introduced AMP Ads initiative to offer publishers with adverts that load around five times faster than before.

Should you opt for the Google AMP

With the soaring popularity of AMP, Google has gained more control over the internet publishers, particularly content creators who target mobile devices users. However, you have to remember that the technology will load your webpages faster than before and provide your audience with exactly what they need – pages that can load instantly.