AMP Pages Explained

An AMP or an accelerated mobile page is a Google and Twitter designed light weight HTML project to enable mobile pages to get loaded quickly. Such solutions have emerged in response to projects from other online and mobile giants, such as Instant Articles project from Facebook or Apple News project. This is an open source project meaning you have access to this project without any special permissions or rights and you are allowed to make changes in order to modify its content to suit your specific requirements. So, now that you have some context on AMPs, it is important to understand what makes these pages so fast.

What Makes These Pages Load Fast?

If you are a programmer and familiar with languages, such as HTML, CSS or Java, you must be aware that there are certain tags used by these languages. AMPs limit the usability of all the functionality of certain elements in these programming languages to allow streamlined features only to operate. JavaScript is fundamentally not allowed to execute to make sure the best practices are followed. The idea here is to provide mobile pages with more flexibility and speed for readability so that images would not take time to automatically load. Instead, these are loaded only when scrolled to view. The other advantages pertain to hosting these pages are designed in such a way that they can be cached. When you observe these put up on the Google search results, all you see is a cached version hosted by Google i.e. gstatic.com.

Revenue Generation

When it comes to a revenue and profit generating business model view point, here is the good news. Google has built a platform to serve advertisements from some of the most popular advertising platforms, such as Ad Sense, Outbrain and so on. The best part is that you are still in a position to accrue all the money as Google does not grab a single share of it.

Extended Functionalities Offered

Even being cached pages, AMPs offer extended analytical facilities, such as Google Analytics, Omniture, etc., on top of advertisements you put up on your webpage.

What impact does it have on SERPs?

Until now it has been highlighted that AMPs are all about mobile only or to do with similar devices, such as tablets and phablets. It assures great readability power for you to be able to scroll across images and open links at super fast speed.

How do I start off?

So, here’s the critical question “how do I start off with building AMPs for my site?” Some of the important things that are noteworthy in this context ensure that your AMPs are valid. These pages being created with limited functionalities of HTML have strict rules on the usage of some functionality, such as tags, the order of the pieces of code, etc. You simply cannot use certain elements – if you are doing any of that, your page is rendered to be invalid to be hosted.

Your AMP pages can be validated using a developer tool residing in Google Chrome which takes you to a page allowing you to validate. You simply ask if the page is an AMP page and the tool indicates any problems with it.

CMS's, such as WordPress, come with plugins which help in creating multiple pages with AMP functionalities and help in streamlining the building of pages.