Last edited on July 18, 2021 by Digitiz
AMP is the acronym for “Accelerated Mobile Pages” or, in French: “page accelerator on mobile”. It is a file format that allows you to speed up the display of a web page when viewed on a smartphone or tablet.
This format was created by Google and is detailed on the official website AMP Project. This site presents the advantages of this technology, and also provides all the technical documentation for its implementation
Launched at the beginning of 2016, the AMP format is now completely mastered by web agencies, and available by default on site creation software recent.
Why a new format for mobile sites?
With the rise of mobile internet, Web consumption has evolved enormously in recent years.
We consider that the web is consumed at 50% from mobile support such as a tablet or smartphone. This percentage rises to 60% on weekends.
Issue; 3G and 4G technologies, as powerful as they are, do not allow the contents of a web page to be loaded quickly.
Take the test! Google has created a tool that allows you to test the loading time of your website from a mobile.
Does your website load in 8 seconds? Too bad, you have just lost 50% of your visitors from a mobile medium. Different studies demonstrate the direct impact between loading time and loss of turnover.
The Internet user remains the most impatient being in the world, your site will be skipped if your page does not load within 2 seconds.
What exactly is AMP?
The purpose of AMP is to speed up the loading of a page on a mobile device. For this, he will to expunge oneself from different technical elements of the page and generate an AMP HTML file.
This AMP file will be staticthat is to say that the page will no longer be able to adapt according to the behavior of the Internet user.
The technology developed by Google uses a framework open source and can therefore be used by everyone without restriction.
What impact will the AMP have on a site?
Impact on page loading
The easiest way to answer this question is to discover the difference between a page benefiting from AMP format and one page without.
Google created a demo to promote its technology: https://g.co/ampsearch
As you can see from this demonstration, it is mainly the loading time which is optimized. This will therefore have the direct benefit of lose fewer visitors impatient.
Impact in search results
Google has indicated that it will present sites offering AMP to Internet users as a priority in order to provide them with a better user experience. More clearly, sites in AMP formats are better referenced in search engine results.
Very concretely, between 2 sites offering an equivalent response, Google will promote the site using the AMP format.
Sites in AMP formats also benefit from an AMP thumbnail visible to Internet users from mobile.
Impact on the graphic rendering of your page
To speed up the loading of the page, your CSS – that is to say the graphic style of your page – will undergo a drastic diet. As a result, the style will be reduced to its simplest form.
Likewise, the images will not be loaded only if the Internet user makes a downward movement indicating that he wants to see more.
Should we switch to AMP format?
If your site includes a blog or news section, the answer is unambiguous: YES!
Google’s promise is strong:
- Speed up the loading of your pages,
- Be better positioned in Google results,
- Make it easier for mobile users to read articles.
The constraints are acceptable:
- page weight limited to 50 kb,
- dynamic elements disabled,
- Greatly simplified CSS style.
On the implementation side, you will need to be supported by your agency. The subject is technically complex and can quickly have harmful impacts on your visibility if the development is poorly carried out.
While waiting for the transition to the AMP, what to do?
The challenge is more than ever to have a mobile friendly site, it is no longer a fashion but a reality. Soon, sites will mainly be visited from mobile.
Your site must therefore be fast and adapted to these new modes of consumption. The various analyzes demonstrate that the heaviest elements on a page are in more than 60% of cases, images.
Here is a procedure that will allow you to prioritize your optimization actions while waiting for your agency or website creation software to offer you AMP.
1. Identify heavy images on your site.
Download Screaming Frog which will allow you to analyze the first 500 pages of your website for free.
This will help you identify the heaviest pages on your site. It is surely the latter which host unoptimized images.
2. Optimize the weight of your images
Once you have collected your heaviest images, you now need to optimize them without losing quality.
Here are 2 magical, free online tools that will allow you to optimize your images with the best quality versus weight ratio.
Conclusion
Whether you have an e-commerce site or a showcase site, the AMP format has obvious benefits, especially since it risks quickly becoming a standard. However, this format is not yet at its final stage and will still evolve quite a bit to integrate more and more elements.
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