Enhance Your Mobile Web Pages with AMP!

Have you optimised your website for mobile view, or created a brand new mobile website in anticipation of the highly talked about Google Mobilegeddon? If you haven't jumped on the bandwagon, this is a great time to do so!

Smartphones and tablets have changed the way we get information. Today, people around the world consume a great amount of information from their handheld devices, and this trend is just beginning. Just this year, Google had announced that the number of mobile search has overtaken desktop search, putting a greater importance of the need of a mobile website. Having a mobile website allows one's site to be ranked differently on mobile search platforms. Your site may rank differently on desktop search and mobile search, even for the same keyword. The benefits and importance of having a mobile site now is greater than ever

RELATED: Mobile Search Overtaking Desktop Search: What You Can do About It

If you already have a mobile site ready and optimised, congratulations! You're well on your way to take on the rising trend of Mobile search. However, similar to standard websites, if your mobile webpage takes too long to load, you may lose a reader or a conversion. Here's what you can do to better enhance your site's loading speed for a better experience for all your visitors.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project

With the goal of improving the performance of the mobile web, Google, along with many other publishers, declared the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project.

According to Google, the project "relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages."

Here's a video to show how it will look like:

[embed]https://www.google.com/images/google-blog-assets/amp-phone-10062015.mp4[/embed]

Source: Google Official Blog

What exactly is an AMP?

In simpler terms, an AMP is like a "reduced" HTML that takes away certain elements to make the page load faster. Pages on this platform will be designed for just readability and speed, and rely heavily on cache so that Google can present the content or information without actually having to fetch it from your site.

To understand more about how an AMP works, you may refer to the AMP Project FAQ page.

Furthermore, the AMP project is of open-source, allowing people to share and contribute their codes or effort to make the mobile web even faster. Imagine the possibilities if everyone were able to commit to the AMP project. Like WordPress, the open-source Content Management System (CMS), it's rising success can be attributed to the contribution of it's users. It is now the most popular CMS in the world, allowing users to benefit from its simplicity and scalability.

Benefits of an AMP

To our understanding, the AMP project will greatly benefit users with blogs or community forums, or for websites with the intent to distribute content or information quickly and effectively. Other than boosting the speed and performance of mobile pages,  AMP promotes the distribution of content and information in the online space, which eventually may lead to higher turnovers via advertisements or subscriptions.

How to Get Started?

Good news! Since the official announcement of the AMP project a few months ago, there is already a sizable contribution to the project on GitHub. If you are savvy with HTML source codes, you may look at this page and see how to get started with AMP.

For WordPress users, fret not! A plugin is available, providing the support for the AMP project. With the plugin active, the content on your Wordpress site will have dynamically generated pages that are compatible with the AMP project. Please take note that this plugin is still in the early stages of development; however, there are  a few great reviews on the effectiveness of the plugin!

Final Notes

Are you on the AMP project now? If so, do let us know in the comments below and share your thoughts or even review on it. We look forward to your comments!