In early 2016, Google rolled out its Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, which is designed to deliver content at lighting speed for the mobile web. Slow mobile experiences are currently the norm when it comes to using the internet on mobile phones and has left many users frustrated and disenchanted with the mobile web.
As the shift toward mobile continues, more and more businesses are beginning to focus on developing content that can render properly and load quickly regardless of the device that is being used. Although responsive design was originally touted as the solution to this problem, so far it has failed to meet the expectations.
However, Google AMP is now promising to fix the problem by rolling out AMP-enabled results to its search engine pages. These AMP will deliver consistent rendering and content that loads so fast, you’ll no longer have toA wait.
With other companies attempting to jump on the bandwagon with their own projects, AMP still remains as the project with the most promise. As a result, we’ve declared AMP as the future of mobile and here’s why.
Improved User Experience and Content Visibility
AMP promises huge improvements for the mobile web experience. By eliminating the intrusive advertisements and other elements that make mobile pages load slowly, AMP allows your users to focus on your content and take the only the actions that you want them to take.
Cleaner Code
AMP is an upgrade over responsive websites because it eliminates the use of unnecessary code. AMP HTML bans tags that often cause trouble on mobile browsers and makes use of new elements that have been specifically designed for AMP.
In addition, AMP JS is the only type of JavaScript that is allowed on AMP’s. AMP Cache hosts all of the required resources in a single location with only the content that is stored in Google’s cache being listed by the search engine results.
No More Bloated CSS
With traditional website pages, CSS tends to get bloated. In AMP HTML, only inline styles are allowed and the inline style sheet is limited to a maximum size of 50 kilobytes, helping pages to load faster.
AMP’s Prioritize Resource Loading
This feature allows AMP’s to load important resources, which are those that are visible in the viewport or above the fold, first. AMP’s can do this by forcing users to specify resources statically so that the AMP’s runtime can decide when to load or prefetch resources instead of the traditional way, which requires all resources for a page to be downloaded upon the initial page load. As a result, only one HTTP request is required to layout the entire page instead of multiple requests.
AMP Is Open Source
AMP has been set up as an open source project in order to encourage publishers to adopt AMP as an industry-wide standard for mobile web development. In fact, it is much less proprietary than the current alternatives, including Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, which we think will make it attractive to average users.
The Bottom Line About AMP Pages
Although AMP is still relatively new, it has been positioned by Google as a means to revolutionize the mobile web. When it comes to mobile browsing, the problems that slow-loading web pages cause simply can not be ignored and must be resolved.
In addition to offering many robust features that tackle the problems that responsive design simply hasn’t solved, it is fair to say that AMP’s will be getting more and more attention in the future as they appear in the mobile search results.
However, it may take adoption by some major brands before AMP’s begin to catch on as the new standard. With global news websites being touted as the ideal test subject for AMP’s, we may start to see some major changes.
Please note: At this time Octatools is optimized for mobile, but we know it can be improved. We are working hard on allowing you to scrape email addresses on your phone.
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