Heya everyone! It’s been a couple of months now without me posting anything on this blog. But, I got to know of an interesting project that got me back here…

AMP, acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project initiated by multiple organizations to enhance user experience on mobile web. We all love to read content. We all search on search engines to check some information & mostly that search engine is GOOGLE. At times, it takes a light year for content to be loaded. Every time we open a page, the HTML & CSS changes more than a couple of times (as per the screen resolution) prior to the actual page we see.

As per a report by Google, 40% of the users bounce off the website/webpage, if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. And believe me my friend; you must be one amongst them. Mostly, we get irritated when the page takes time to load and no one benefits from it; neither the user nor the publisher. Even the ads on the page have negligible chances of being clicked.

AMP is supposedly the solution to this. As the name suggests, Accelerated Mobile Pages are for Mobile Browsing and shall load quickly. As per AMP, page shall be stored in Google’s AMP Cache Server. This means when a user opens a webpage, the content will appear to be pre-loaded. The page will be crawled by Google & stored in it’s AMP cache. So, the image, content block, ads are pre-known to Google with their respective location and sizes or dimensions.

For Example, you search “Dhairya Bagga” on Google using your mobile phone. The first link you find is of “Entwined Allusions”. So if I implement AMP on my blog, content will be already present when you open the link. Images & Videos space shall be seen vacant till they load and at the last Ads load. So, user gets to read the content as soon as he/she opens up a URL and bounce rate decreases significantly. The webpage gets more traffic and the chances of a user clicking the Ads increases too. Everyone benefits from AMP.

Accelerated Mobile Pages is a new terminology. Google Web Developers are trying to work on this, testing it. One of the tests was implemented on The Washington Post. Where every page of The Washington Post was pre-loaded with content or I should say appear to be pre-loaded.

The HTML tags are not changed much while implementing AMP-HTML.

For Example: <img> tag changes to <amp-img>. Ad tags change from <ad>to <amp-ad> and so on.

AMP seems to be that magic-wand that will load up your webpage within a blink of an eye.

But a few questions that I came across while going through AMP were:

1. Is it feasible to really store web pages in abundance? There has to be a threshold for AMP Cache Server. It is next to impossible, storing every page preloaded.

Putting a threshold will certainly be partial for many Brands.

2. Google Web Developers are saying to make a new version for AMP. Won’t it increase the cost of development?
3. With things under way, the scope of AMP seems to be restricted to media or news brands. Can it be taken to the next level? Can e-commerce websites like Paytm, Flipkart, Amazon be made AMP-Friendly?

No matter what may come in the next six months or so… AMP seems to be a knight in the Game of Chess!

For further technical details on AMP, please click here.