In The Know – AMP Up Your Mobile User Experience

How Accelerated Mobile Pages Provide the Future of the Mobile Internet Landscape

Creating web content is often a trade-off between user experience and monetisation or user acquisition. Currently UX is largely defined (as a subset) by page load speed and ease of navigation, and with access to the web migrating largely mobile-wards, creating an effective balance, where everyone wins, is nigh on impossible. Or at least it was, until the AMP project arrived.

AMP or ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ is an open source platform devoted to making the mobile web faster and more accessible. Google are the brains behind the platform, launching the AMP initiative in February of this year, from its advent at the back end of 2016, to help identify and prioritise pages that use AMP HTML, and since then they have strongly hinted towards AMP becoming a ranking factor in the near future. Not only that, but due to their fast page load speeds, AMPs already receive a significant SEO boost, and since Google’s platform launch, they have been giving prominent placement to AMP content, even over organic listings.

As part of their own research, Google identified that an AMP version of a page can load anywhere between 15-85% faster than the non-AMP version of that page, and, considering their mobile-first mentality, (they have begun creating separate mobile and desktop indexes, with mobile becoming the primary index),  why wouldn’t they prioritise AMPs?

We all, as users, understand the aggravation that comes with navigating to a content page, only to have to wait seemingly ages for it to load, only then to be inundated with interstitial ads, and getting so physically wound up with how badly a page is built that we call it quits and look elsewhere. Google recently identified that as many as 53% of people will give up on a page that fails to load within 3 seconds, and AMP aims to make sure that the entire mobile internet loads almost instantaneously, whilst stripping back everything that could get in the way of a positive user experience. The way that AMP HTML does this is by scaling back content to provide the user only with what’s necessary. Not only are site loading times improved, but the site is rendered cleaner, all while maintaining monetised ads that aren’t too javascript heavy in order to ensure that publishers are getting paid as they would for a regular site load.

As a benefit to publishers, faster loading means faster content consumption, meaning that in turn you’re going to receive a larger number of visitors on a more frequent basis. If not only Google, but also social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest are able to label AMP pages as such, then there is considerably more scope for achieving clicks than using regular non-AMP pages, especially when the user recognises that clicking on a link is only going to take them 5 seconds to read a particular article, rather than 5 minutes.

When it comes to AMP pages, content is still King, but UX is Queen. AMP HTML could be the most important development for the mobile industry that we’ve seen in a long time.