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What Is AMP and Why Is It Important?
Recently, there has been quite a bit of buzz around a certain acronym in the world of digital marketing and search engine optimization. That acronym is AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The reason this concept has gained so much attention with expert SEO agencies lately is due in part to Google’s new mobile index, which it unveiled earlier this year. Since Google began using mobile experiences as a ranking factor, accelerated mobile pages have become an industry standard for websites and blogs. AMP makes web pages load fast and efficiently for mobile devices, even if that means sacrificing a few design elements here and there.
How AMP Works
AMP is a standard of open-source coding for web publishers. Many aspects of a website, when viewed on a desktop, are not necessary for mobile devices, therefore, AMP mitigates load speeds and other discrepancies in user experience by eliminating some of these aspects. Oftentimes, desktop websites will appear clunky and hard to operate on mobile devices, but with accelerated mobile pages, content is organized in such a way to support mobile browsers, which might not always function at the highest speeds, to begin with. Speed is an important ranking factor within Google’s new mobile index, so the primary goal of AMP is to shorten load times.
Differences Between AMP and Non-AMP Web Pages
The biggest difference between accelerated mobile pages and pages without AMP is simplicity. As mentioned, many of the unnecessary components for mobile-friendly user experiences are stripped away, creating a simplistic, optimal aesthetics and functionality for mobile devices, like cell phones and tablets. Other differences between AMP and non-amp web pages include:
- Accelerated mobile pages use a streamlined version of CSS.
- Javascript is not allowed at all on accelerated mobile pages.
- As a result of AMP Javascript libraries, images might load lazily.
Accelerated mobile pages put speed and readability above all else when it comes to prioritizing aspects of a website. Web designers primarily implement AMP to standardize the responses of mobile pages. With PageSpeed being an important factor in an SEO campaign, AMP can highly increase the efficiency of page load speed and qualify a webpage to be listed in an article carousel within search results.
Integrating AMP
Accelerated mobile pages can be relatively easy to integrate into various types of websites, including those hosted on Wordpress. In fact, Wordpress offers its own plugin to support accelerated mobile pages. Simply download, install, and activate the official Wordpress plugin to integrate AMP into Wordpress sites. Some Wordpress themes come with AMP already in place. Integrating AMP into sites that are not hosted by Wordpress is a bit more challenging but far more rewarding. In order to integrate accelerated mobile pages into a site that isn’t on Wordpress, you will need to visit the AMP Project’s website and hard-code the accelerated mobile pages, yourself or hire an SEO expert.
The Benefits of Using AMP
Publishers benefit most from implementing accelerated mobile pages. This means that websites and blogs that are content-heavy will get the most out of AMP. With services for organic SEO, AMP sites can be found ranking high in organic mobile search results. AMP is best used across the entire site in these cases. While AMP might affect certain search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, not every aspect of a website will benefit from AMP. You can easily transition blog, news, and update pages into AMP, rather than integrating it throughout an entire website.