What Google AMP Web Standard Means for Web Designers | Shocking News
Recently, Google released their new web standard called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). With this, Google is looking to drastically speed up the load times of mobile web pages, especially when linked from the search results. The standard is a bold implementation and effort to push websites to provide users with results, faster. This blog post is an effort to give you a good idea what AMP means for web designers, why Google is doing this and how Create My Mobile Website views this new standard.
Backstory
Google has a big problem with the mobile web today. We now know that mobile searches count for over 50 percent of searches worldwide (and growing), but many websites have not been optimized to be mobile-friendly. Even if they have been optimized, many are still slow to load on mobile devices due to poor implementations such as large image sizes, too much reliance on JavaScript and overall large file sizes. Google search relies on the ability to link to websites around the world, and if those websites do not meet user expectations, those searchers are less likely to use Google. This is why Google is pushing web designers and developers to build better mobile websites, and provide a better overall mobile experience, through efforts like AMP and the changes to their search algorithm.
Simply put, mobile phones have less resources than desktop/laptop computers. Wireless networks are still slow when compared to the broadband speed most desktops have access to. This means processing power on mobile is not as strong and anyone who tries to load a desktop or poorly built responsive site on mobile is going to do so quite slowly. A big part of the problem is that many websites load large JavaScript files that have two issues:
(1) They are big files that take longer to download.
(2) They take an especially long time to download on mobile browsers, because the smartphone is underpowered.
If you’ve ever opened a website on your phone and seen a white screen for a while, the browser is probably having a hard time rendering the page because it first has to parse a large JavaScript file — this delay is exactly what AMP looks to solve.
With AMP, Google is looking to set a standard for how web designers and developers load and display content on web pages. The ultimate goal of this new initiative is to drastically improve load speeds, thus creating a better user experience and lowering bounce rates.
How it works
Google’s AMP gives strict rules of what web developers can and can’t include on pages. Every element on the page must be specifically formatted using Google’s standard; any pages that don’t, will not be considered AMP-ready. Right now, Google is providing a limited set of elements that are allowed in AMP based pages: Images, Audio, Animated Images(GIFs), Advertisements, Tracking Pixel, Video, Image Carousel, Image Lightbox, iframes, Instagram embeds, Twitter post embeds and YouTube video embeds. Currently, these are the are the only elements allowed, but more will be added later.
While implementing AMP, you must use Google’s pattern for developing the page. Because the AMP specification is so specific in how pages are built, it ensures that web pages will be downloaded and displayed very quickly. Following this specification prevents web pages from becoming too large or overloaded with ads and tracking scripts.
At its core, Google AMP is about building very basic HTML and CSS pages and limiting the amount of JavaScript to levels Google finds acceptable. By limiting and controlling JavaScript, they know that websites can load up to 85 percent faster.
Why is Google doing this?
As mentioned earlier in the article, Google relies on websites delivering good user experiences when linked from their search results pages. Many websites, especially news-focused websites (Washington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed, etc.), have been doing a poor job of giving mobile users a speedy and relevant experience. This is why Google has launched AMP with 30+ publishing platforms. Google knows that if publishers follow this standard, they can ensure that users opening these pages will get to the desired content much faster and thus drive greater engagement.
We applaud Google for creating a strict standard that will guarantee great results for people who implement AMPlified pages (see what I did there?). But at the same time, this is a brand new standard that they are recommending. With the backing of large publishers, it looks to be a very promising standard, but it is still in its early days.
What are your thoughts about AMP? Feel free to let us know in the comments!