Google AMP: What Is It? Should You Be Using It?

Google AMP Explained

Google launched AMP on February 24th, 2016. AMP was an acronym that stood for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”, and was an Open Source HTML Framework which was originally developed by Google’s Project called the “AMP Open Source Project”. It was optimized for mobile web browsing, so that web pages could be loaded at high speed. It was meant to compete with Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles. The objective of our present article is What is Google AMP.

Objectives

Google AMP was designed to showcase capabilities even better. The Objective was to help Content Creators to use it to bring the Web to life. It was aimed at creating lightning fast websites that would not only be high performing; it would function across all devices. It was meant to establish a standard for any publisher to load web pages with speed and efficiency on to mobile devices. So web pages are loaded almost instantly on to mobile phones, when using AMP. This produces the User’s own URL, in the format: site.com/page/amp. The URL is compatible with almost all Web Browsers, like Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Expressing the objective in simpler manner web pages that have static content meaning pages that don’t change with User behavior or are not interactive can be effectively built with AMP. AMP allows these pages to load many times faster than normal HTML.

Importance of AMP

Google AMP is important because it can potentially improve usability by loading web pages almost instantly. This increases the Visitor’s drawl period on the website concerned so that the Visitor’s engagement with the content on the website is far greater. This reduces bounce rate, and makes for greater Visitor interest and interaction with the content on that particular web page. Potential sales of ideas, goods and services, offered on the web page, can improve dramatically, and the website owner will find the mobile ranking climb up immediately. In Google’s mobile and desktop indices, web page speed is an important ranking factor. A single second delay may lose the browser’s interest. Google AMP Caches transmits HTML pages, caches them, and automatically improves the performance of the page. This is achieved by AMP traffic using different Client IDs from those of web traffic. AMP pages are fast loading and show separate traffic patterns, form their web page counterparts. Mobile pages that are built with AMP are likely to be much faster than existing mobile pages. AMP works with Google so that mobile search results can be selectively prioritized by allowing Visitors a birds-eye view of the AMP version of the page.

Uses

Typical uses for AMP are:

  • When page load speed is extremely slow.
  • When bounce rate is too high and needs to be lowered immediately, or have to discontinue the website.
  • When most of the traffic is from mobile devices.
  • When the budget on paid advertisements is quite high and the advertisements must succeed.
  • When factors like Google ranking, quality score and page experience is far too low, and is a cause for concern.

Plugins

Some of the best AMP Plugins for WordPress (WP) follows:

  • Schema and Structured Data for WP and AMP.
  • PWA for WP and AMP.
  • Glue for Yoast SEO and AMP.
  • The Official AMP Plugin for WP.
  • AMP It Up.

Disadvantages

Google AMP was initially heavily criticized for potentially giving additional control over the web to Google. Basically, Google has forced Websites that are News Publishers to use AMP. Creating AMP articles versions for circulations, thus keep AMP alive on artificial respiration, so to speak. This is a Google forces websites swap dependent on it to make, or large forego volumes of latent traffic. The problem of annoyance is vitiated by Google providing no “disable” option for AMP, even if Users object.

Cures

To remove Google AMP from Google Search, one of the methods is as follows:

  • From the canonical page in the source code, remove the rel= “amphtml” link.
  • Then, configure server to return either an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently or 302.
  • Finally, a redirect should be configured to the canonical page from the removed AMP page.