What Is Google AMP And Why Is It Important?
What Is Google AMP: Did you know that:
- Almost 52.2 percent of all traffic generated in 2018 were through mobile phones?
- The time taken by a page on your website to fully load is a ranking factor?
- Around 40 percent of users leave the site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load?
So, what do they imply? Yes, your site’s mobile page speed matters.
With most of the searches happening from mobile phones (which mostly run on mobile internet resulting in slow loading of pages), even Google considers the mobile version of the page for indexing.
It is, therefore, extremely important that you ensure great user experience for people landing up on your website through mobile phones. One of the aspects of ensuring it is by improving your website speed. This is where AMP comes to the picture.
So, what is Google AMP? Let’s find out.
What Is Google AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. As the name suggests, Google AMP accelerates or increases the speed with which a page loads up completely.
Google AMP Project was started by Google in order to improve the website speed. With so many heavy elements on the pages, it becomes extremely difficult for web browsers to fetch all the elements fro the server and load the page.
With AMP, the pages are stripped down to their bare bones. Only the most important contents are kept. The size of the page becomes very small making it easier to load, which in turn means, less Bounce Rate.
Why Is AMP Important For Your Site?
As mentioned above, mobile internet connections are mostly slow and hence take a lot of time to load web pages, especially the ones that have a lot of images and files. Now, that’s a problem.
Like I said before, slow loading of pages, especially when it takes longer than 3 seconds, results in around 40 percent of users leaving the site. This means an increase in Bounce Rate.
Now, an increase in Bounce Rate, to Google, means the page in question is not useful. And if it is not useful to the users, there is no point of having it in its current position (in the Search Engine Result Page). So, the ranking of the page will drop.
Slow loading of page is bad for SEO and that’s where Google AMP comes to the picture.
Does Your Website Need AMP?
Well, I would recommend you implement AMP for your website. An increase in website speed not only results in improving user experience but also in building trust and authority. It will give the impression that you are serious about what you are doing and you really care about your users.
AMP implemented pages have better chances of showing up in the featured carousel of mobile SERP. They are also easily recognizable because of the AMP tag attached to them, thereby, increasing the possibility of getting clicked.
Implementing AMP also reduces the load on your servers provided you are generating a lot of traffic through mobile phones.
Cons Of Implementing AMP
You should also be aware of the disadvantages of implementing AMP:
- Implementing ads on AMP pages is not an easy task. Even if you do implement ads, it will be difficult to get revenue.
- Tracking AMP-implemented pages using Google Analytics is difficult. It needs a separate tag to be added to all AMP pages.
- You have to rely on Google because AMP pages are served from the cached versions saved by Google.
How To Implement AMP?
For self-hosted WordPress sites, there is a plugin called AMP (Official AMP Plugin For WordPress) created by Automattic. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and the rest will be taken care of by the plugin.
With platforms like Ghost and Squarespace, the AMP is automatically implemented.
Others can refer to this page of AMP Project’s official website.
This more or less covers everything about what is Google AMP. I hope I have been able to explain what is Google AMP and why is it important for your website.
If you have any query regarding what is Accelerated Mobile Page, feel free to drop a comment below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.