“I’ve heard of something called AMP. Does this make sense for my website? Can I safely ignore this?”

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are the flavor of the season. Anyone with a personal or business website has heard of AMP as the ‘new thing’ but may be unsure about what they are or should he look at implementing them or not. The use of AMP pages is a global initiative aimed at increasing page loading speeds. This Google project is being thoroughly supported by large organisations like Twitter, New York Times, BBC and Twitter.

In this article, let’s try to understand whether an AMP offers any significant benefit compared to regular web pages:

Top 5 reasons to have an AMP page

1. Faster Speeds

Accelerated Mobile Pages do exactly what their name suggests. They load much faster than conventional web pages. Recent testing has shown an AMP to load up to 85% faster than a regular web page. Currently page loading tolerance on mobile phones has come down to a mere 3 seconds. If your page doesn’t load before that, chances are the user will move on to another website.

2. SERP rankings

AMP is a Google initiative and Google has begun factoring and slightly favoring AMPs in their website search engine ranking criteria. Currently the ranking criteria for this is a minor one but that may change in future. This is based on the fact that user experience is much better when pages load fast and those are the websites which Google wants to display first.

3. Better Publisher Visibility

If your page has AMP, search results will clearly display a green AMP symbol. Having this will definitely help make click through rates shoot up. Users will begin looking for AMP pages as they seek faster load times.

4. Higher Chances of being in a Google Display Carousal

A recent look at the results returned on any Google search shows a separate carousal for AMP pages. Which means your website will have a higher chance of being visible upfront and being clicked on.

5. Separate Tracking

Having AMP pages will also allow you the ability to better track the performance of these pages via separate analytics. This will help to understand whether you code modifications for increased speed are working or not.

Though still a minor ranking factor, AMP pages are slowly beginning to replace conventional web pages. Changing your old pages is a one time tweak, best done with the help of someone proficient in coding. At present around 16,000 AMP pages are produced/modified daily, this number will clearly grow in the coming years.