Mobile Internet: A Guide to AMPs

One of the key factors in creating and maintaining a website is page loading speed. Websites with slow loading speeds, particularly when accessed from a mobile, are likely to cause frustration and often mean that a visitor will not bother waiting at all and will simply look somewhere else to find the product or service they are looking for. Here we present a guide to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs).

What are AMPs?

AMPs are an open-source initiative that has been designed to create web pages that load almost immediately, in 0.5 seconds or less. This enables site owners to vastly improve page loading speeds, delivering a better experience to website visitors. AMPs are simply a faster, more-effective version of standard HTML web pages and, operated in much the same way, utilise a stripped-down code known as AMP HTML.

How do AMPs work?

AMPs comprise three core components which work in unison to create fast-loading mobile web pages. These components are:

• AMP HTML: this comprises standard HTML code with custom restrictions and tags
• AMP HS: a JavaScript library designed to ensure speedy rendering of AMP pages via the management of resource handling and asynchronous loading
• Google AMP Cache: fetches AMP pages before caching them and automatically making performance optimisations as required

What are the benefits of AMPs?

To the user, the principal benefit is the lighting-quick loading time of pages. A reduction in the use of mobile data when using 3G and 4G connections is also a big plus point to mobile users. Website operators benefit from an increase in both user engagement and search engine visibility through higher results-page rankings.

AMPs can be used on any website, regardless of what type of product or service it offers. They are especially suited to sites that publish blog posts and news articles, which can subsequently feature in Google's dedicated AMP carousel.

They've been around for a few years now, not sure if AMP won't be superseded by PWA incorporated in to BrickCMS4 

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