AMP Project

AMP project to accelerate mobile browsing

Browsing on mobile phones is already a custom rooted in users, even in many places these devices already far exceed computers. But, at the same time, this navigation is usually slow and seems endless, since the loading time on these devices usually exhausts the patience of more than one. This is one of the great concerns of specialists in web positioning,given the high weighting that there is in the speed of loading in the devices within the Google positioning algorithm.

Despite the great technological advances, navigation through the mobile is not meeting the expectations that were had in it, especially with regard to speed. Therefore, the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project was created.

Table of Contents

What is AMP

This project is an open source initiative that tries to make web browsing through mobile faster and more comfortable for the user. Publishers, media and technology companies from all over the world have come together to carry out this initiative that will visibly improve the quality of mobile browsing and will predictably become an ally of web positioning on mobile devices.

With AMP, when searching for a topic on Google from a mobile device, pages that use this system load significantly faster. Sites built with AMP can load four times faster and use ten times less data than those not involved in the project. In many cases, it is even seen as they load almost instantaneously.

How AMP works

AMP basically works by having HTML pages with special tags cached on many different content delivery networks (CDNs), from among the contributors and editors involved in the project. By doing this, amp content is delivered from the nearest source with the least possible source.

This can be a hindrance for analysts, as you can never have full certainty of the origin from which the content is loaded, and third-party cookies can have trouble identifying the visitor. In addition, in order to drastically decrease the weight of the page and speed up the loading time, AMP greatly restricts the use of JavaScript and cookies. While this reduces the number of processes the mobile device must perform, it again poses a challenge to accurately measure unique visitors or acquisition. Apart from restricting JavaScript and cookies, the AMP HTML includes the AMP JS library and limits some parts of the HTML and CSS, allowing the construction of web pages with static content and with a very low loading time.

Also, there is no need to worry about the advertising that can be used in AMP, since the objective of this project is to offer support to different advertising formats, networks and technologies, in order to reach more audiences. Although it is still being studied what is the best advertising experience that AMP allows, the system is committed to helping to finance services and content for free on the network.

The project also wanted to include the HTML AMP Components, elements that replace or provide extra value to those that already exist in HTML 5 for the execution of this system and thus improve its implementation. All the information about these can be found on the ampproject.org page or on the githubwebsite, where their open source, apachelicensed, is also available.

AMP Collaborators

There are many important collaborators who have joined this project, and each one tries to contribute their grain of sand. For example, Google opens its global cache to speed up page loading, Adobe Analytics offers the possibility to analyze the pages that use AMP through special tags and wordpress has created a plugin with which any article that is made on your website, automatically generates an AMP-compatible version by adding to the end of the article URL /amp/.

According to statistics, people leaves web pages after three seconds if the content does not load quickly, which negatively affects not only the user who wants to obtain information online, but also influences the website that wants that person to enjoy the content that has been created for them.

Now, with AMP, web pages with a large amount of content will instantly load on any platform or device. Internet access improves substantially with this project, but it also opens the doors to new advertising formulas, which are already being studied.