Google’s obsession with speed continues with the recent release of their Accelerated Mobile Pages framework.
Google see speed as an important factor in the quality of a website and openly admit that the loading time of your website plays a part in its search ranking. They make available tools to measure the speed of your site, that provide feedback on changes you can make to speed your site up. They even have The Google Gospel of Speed part of which states, “When you speed up service, people become more engaged – and when people become more engaged, they click and buy more.”
In a blog post announcing the release of AMP Google highlight some of the companies that are already on board with the framework.
“This is the start of an exciting collaboration with publishers and technology companies, who have all come together to make the mobile web work better for everyone. Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn are among the first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages.”
So Google are deadly serious when it comes to making the web a faster place. Now you can come along for the ride!
The aim of their Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, AMP for short, is to speed up the delivery of content. The idea is that you can build a template based on AMP and integrate this into your website. Google will detect this when returning your website for a relevant search on a mobile device. Then deliver your content at the top of the search results in a carousel like feature.
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The result is quite amazing, content formatted in this way loads almost instantly and does offer mobile users a much improved experience. SEO’s notice how the Google AMP results are at the top of the page!
Is it for Enterprise only?
At first you may think that this ability to reach the top of search through a technical implementation like AMP is reserved for larger companies. If you use a custom CMS implementing AMP may indeed be costly.
Your CMS provider may even have no intention of supporting AMP at all. But AMP is freely available and relatively easy to implement.
If you want to get started developing with AMP, Google have made all of the code Open Source. You can download it today on GitHub.
If you’re a WordPress user you’re in luck!
WordPress are well aware of the benefits of the AMP framework and have announced they are developing a plugin to support it. As WordPress user you won’t have to lift a finger, just install the plugin and your content will be AMP ready.
WordPress are quick off the mark too. Attending Google’s press release they announced that the plugin is already in development. You can see it in action at WordPress.com.
Try out AMP for yourself by visiting g.co/ampdemo on your mobile device.
Welcome to a faster web!