What is AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project aimed at creating better and faster mobile web pages. There are many big brands such as Google, Bing, Twitter and Pinterest behind the project.
Why should you use AMP?
Most of the content of a web page loaded on a desktop or devices with large screen sizes are not required in a mobile. Such excess content can drastically improve page load time on mobile devices.
AMP is specially designed for the consumption of content through “reading” and does not have any interactive components.
However, AMP improves the page speed and usability of web pages on mobile devices by stripping down all these excess contents. You can test this by visiting the AMP-lified version of this page.
Here’s the Pingdom speed test result of a normal version and AMP version of this page.
Page speed without AMP
Page speed with AMP
These images shows that AMP-lified pages load much faster than normal pages. This leads to better engagement, which reduces bounce rate and improves mobile ranking.
AMP pros
1 Reduces page load time
As we have seen, AMP strips down additional content and improves page load speed.
3 Better Search Results
AMP increases the chance of displaying your pages in a carousel format on the first page of search results.
2 Better mobile ranking
Although AMP is not a ranking factor by itself, it has a positive influence on mobile ranking because of its faster load time. You might have heard that Google announced that they consider page load speed as a ranking factor.
3 Improved server performance
If a giant part of your traffic is from mobile, AMP will reduce the load on your servers and improve their performance by caching the pages.
AMP Cons
1 Limited Widgets support
AMP uses a minified set of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Therefore, you cannot easily create widgets or features such as email opt-ins.
2 Ad revenue is reduced
Although Accelerated Mobile Pages Project supports ads, the potential to bring in revenue is severely limited.
3 Tracking and analytics related issues
You need to make changes to your tracking code and add it to all AMP pages; it consumes a lot of time and effort.
