Accelerated Mobile Pages – How Does It Work & Is It Helpful?

In today’s mobile-first era, ensuring the website is mobile-friendly is vital for every business. Not just that. The performance of the site has to be impeccable. You may have a phenomenal, innovative website. But, if it takes time to load or lags, it will impact your sites and business’ success rate tremendously. According to research, webpages that take more than four seconds to load experience high bounce rates. We don’t want that happening, do we? So you understand how important it is that your site performs exceptionally. Even a one-second can make a massive difference.

As per Statista, more than 60% of Google search queries come from mobile devices today. Keeping that in mind, marketing experts have been focusing on optimising the site experience specifically for mobile users. A website’s loading time plays an enormous factor in its ranking. Faster your website loads, higher is the Google search results ranking.

For many years marketers struggled to get valuable leads and decrease bounce rates due to website performance issues. However, this changed with the introduction of a simple web feature. Fortunately, today, you can easily enhance your mobile site’s performance by making a few easy tweaks to your mobile site. And yes! We are talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?

AMP has been a game-changer for businesses. Google first announced Accelerated Mobile Pages on October 7, 2015. But it was only in February 2016 that AMP pages started appearing in Google mobile search results.

Accelerated mobile pages are nothing but shortened forms of HTML. It makes your mobile site much more lightweight, ensuring it loads faster. And the best part about Google AMP is that it is an open-source initiative, meaning you can customise it to your liking. And all thanks to this incredible feature, marketers have been able to, not just reduce bounce rates, but reach a wider audience as well!

How Does It Work?

What you must understand is that Accelerated Mobile Page is just an alternative feature. The original version of the page remains unimpaired. All you are doing is urging Google to consider the alternative and faster version of your website to show up on mobile search results.

Advantages & Limitations Of AMP –

It goes without saying that Accelerated Mobile Pages offer a plethora of benefits. However, with the advantages, there are a few restrictions as well. Let’s first see what the advantages are, and then we can discuss the limitations.

Benefits Of AMP –

Great For SEO

As AMP pages load faster, users are automatically more likely to visit additional pages on your website. Hence, reducing bounce rate and improving the quality of leads you gain. AMP enhances the overall user experience, which is an integral Google SERP ranking factor. Additionally, it will also boost your website traffic which is only a positive for your business.

Improved Website Visibility

It’s no news that Google displays webpages that are mobile optimised on its SERPs. With AMP, your webpages have high chances of being featured on the top Google search results. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you will have a substantial disadvantage and miss out on a lot.

In-Depth User Tracking

User data is crucial for every marketer. This information is vital to any sales or marketing strategy. Luckily, AMP helps you understand the user’s location, the pages they visited, and more. And this is possible with the help of their excellent analytical tools. The date your collect helps you closely monitor your campaign’s success, lead generation, etc. Also, you can quickly modify your strategy if needed.

Enhanced Ad Support

The next incredible benefit of AMP is that it makes more space for ad optimisation. It has more lightweight code and removes the on-page distractions, such as social sharing buttons, navigational menu, pop-ups, etc. AMP ensures your mobile ads are more user-friendly and flexible. Not to forget, it improves their visibility as well! Users can find your webpage easily, interact with it more, leading to more conversions. Isn’t that fantastic!

Now let’s get to the disadvantages –

Limitations Of AMP –

Limited functionality

AMP implementation guidelines are pretty strict. It may not allow you to extend all the functionality of your regular website on your mobile site. And this can be a significant disadvantage for feature-rich websites like an eCommerce website.

Google Has More Control

When you use AMP, Google can take a significant amount of control regarding when and where to show your content. And this does not sit well with many. The main reason being, what Google thinks is the best interest for you may not always align with what you consider to be beneficial for your business.

Is Using Accelerated Mobile Pages Worth It?

Setting up AMP is one of the many techniques one can use to ensure their web pages load at lightning speed. However, using Accelerated Mobile Pages for your website is a decision that you can only make after careful consideration. Sure, it works wonders for your mobile site and hence your business. But not all marketers can execute the implementation flawlessly.