Imagine surfing the internet through your phone, looking for something specific, and your mobile browser takes forever to load the web page. It’s quite a frown-worthy moment, right? There was a time when such loading issues were a common menace for web app development companies, and they used to adopt different approaches to resolve this, albeit with little success.
Ultimately, two services emerged victorious and were able to escape the labyrinth of extra load time: Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles.
Both these platforms miraculously cracked the formula for conveniently delivering web content to their users by considerably optimizing the browsing speed. Along with seamless content distribution, their larger goal was exploring new ways to monetize content that allowed users to aim through ads and subscription models. But this solution remained a well-kept secret for a long time, inaccessible to other businesses.
Enter Google, which decided to launch an open-source HTML framework that loaded faster and delivered content instantaneously to its users, to compete with Apple and Facebook. These were called Accelerated Mobile Pages.
In this article, we’ll learn how AMPs came to be the highly popular solution that it is now, and how it has started revolutionizing the mobile browsing experience, delivering a lightning-fast, seamless experience to users worldwide.
What is an AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMPs were launched to boost the mobile user experience, as the number of people who depended on mobile devices to access information was going up every year. Google initially used Accelerated Mobile Pages to load the “top stories” section in search results. For this, they used three core components:
● AMP HTML
● AMP CSS
● AMP JavaScript
These three components boosted the loading time of web pages tremendously by delivering a lightning-fast browsing experience. AMP HTML is a new framework introduced by Google that helps create lightweight web pages. This created quite some stir in the web app development world.
Initially, AMP was introduced exclusively for news pages. A study by Edelman revealed that over 60% of users depended on Google News in 2016. Google was leveraging this by launching AMP Stay in the Game.
Gradually, they extended accelerated mobile pages to other web content as well. As web development companies were keen on developing quality content, the engagement was ignorant in the mobile browsing sector. Hence, Google effectively managed to clear this performance bottleneck using AMP.
Though it was Google that initiated the AMP open-source framework, multiple stakeholders were introduced to the project in no time. This included publishers, developers, and other tech giants who recognized the potential of AMP to supercharge the mobile browsing experience in the coming years.
The open-source nature of AMP made it easy for anyone to access, modify, and contribute to the project, enabling it to grow further. Google’s master plan clicked well as they chose to integrate AMP to their search results. This naturally encouraged regular updates and enhancements to the framework, pushing AMP towards continuous evolution.
How do AMPs work?
The three pillars of AMP are the optimized HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components specially formatted to suit this framework. Let us see how each of these components helps AMP render web pages and load them almost instantaneously in mobile browsers.
AMP HTML
The reason to use a special HTML structure for AMP is to render web pages faster while accessing them through a mobile browser. In the usual case, the same HTML component is loaded into the mobile browser as well as a web browser to access pages. But, to load web pages in a mobile browser, not all traditional HTML components are necessary. Hence, AMP pages are built by eliminating these extra components and ensuring that only the required elements are loaded into the browser.
Here is how a traditional HTML structure differs from that of an AMP HTML structure:
Traditional HTML:
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Example Image”>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…</p>
</body>
</html>
AMP HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html ⚡>
<head>
<title>Example Page</title>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”…”>
<meta charset=”utf-8″>
<script async src=”https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js”></script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<amp-img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Example Image” width=”300″ height=”200″></amp-img>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…</p>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, an <html ⚡> or <html amp> can always be seen in AMP HTML structure, and they often start with <!DOCTYPE html> tag. The lightning bolt symbol in the HTML tag denotes that the code is optimized and boosted for an accelerated mobile page.
The <link rel=”canonical” href=”URL”> tag is used to differentiate the AMP version of a website from its traditional counterpart. If a website has multiple versions, the risk of duplicate content penalties is high on the SEO front. Hence, this tag is used to establish the relationship of an AMP page with its other version.
AMP CSS
AMP Web pages require AMP CSS, a subset of traditional stylesheets, to load pages in mobile browsers. These stylesheets must be added inline within the <style amp-custom> tag inside the <head> section of the code. They restrict the use of certain elements in the mobile-rendered version of the HTML code and adhere to specific policies of AMP web page optimization.
In order to load AMP web pages faster, the total size of AMP CSS must not exceed 50,000 bytes. As this CSS subset is usually inclined towards using commonly used CSS elements due to limited CSS selectors, complex elements in the code won’t be loaded while rendering a web page. Web development companies often opt for further minification of AMP CSS files to shorten the size of the code and make pages load faster. One of the perks of AMP CSS code models is that they support responsive design principles. Web app development can be made more compact without losing the quality of content delivered.
AMP JavaScript
If you notice, that certain web pages take forever to load on your mobile screen, it is most probably because of excessive JavaScript content. AMP JavaScript is a library developed specifically for Accelerated Mobile Pages to load the contents faster.
The built-in components in the AMP Javascript library enable the loading of essential elements such as images, videos, carousels, forms, and more in an optimized manner. Along with this, lazy loading techniques are adapted with the AMP JS library so that, non-essential components are loaded only when they are required, thereby further reducing the load time. All the users who are relying on AMP projects for web app development can access this library with no delay as they are made available with the help of global CDNs.
To make sure the performance of AMP web pages is not affected, the web developers have restricted the integration of third-party JavaScript components to the project. Instead, they support integrating third-party functionalities with the help of extensions and other AMP components.
Implementing AMP on Websites
If you are looking forward to implementing AMP for your website, it is important to understand the framework and the required components to optimize your content. Referring to the official AMP documentation will give you an idea of what is required to create AMP-compatible sites.
Once you become familiar with the concepts and specifications of accelerated mobile pages, you can try modifying your existing website by transforming the codes accordingly. This can be done by changing certain tags of the HTML code to the AMP-specific ones. This process will let you identify errors, if any, in the code and optimize it further to ensure a seamless user experience.
By implementing AMP analytics and tracking, you can analyze the performance of your website once all the changes are executed. You can measure the performance of your site with the help of Google or Adobe analytics which are tailor-made for AMP sites.
Advantages and Limitations of AMPs
Web app development took a considerable leap when Google introduced the AMP framework to the mobile browsing landscape. AMP offers many benefits that makes it an optimal choice for publishers and other content creators who are aiming to reach out to a large audience through mobile devices. But, it is also to be noted that AMP has some downsides too. Let us compare and contrast the advantages and disadvantages of AMP to understand the framework better:
Benefits of AMP
- Faster Page Load Time: Slow-loading web pages are always a buzzkill for users who are trying to access information through their mobile phones. AMP boosts the page load time to ensure that the content is accessed almost instantly by mobile users. This is one of the biggest reasons why web app developers depend on AMP more.
- Enhanced User Experience: As the load time of web content is reduced considerably, a better user experience is ensured compared to traditional web apps. This helps users navigate through multiple pages without any delays.
- Higher-Visibility: Google prioritizes AMP websites, especially for web searches from mobile devices. This will automatically invite higher click-ratios to the websites increasing user engagement.
- Mobile-Optimized Experience: Accelerated mobile pages optimizes web content to be delivered seamlessly through different handheld devices. The web pages can be scaled effectively without affecting the page load time.
Drawbacks of AMP
- Design Flexibility Limitations: As the AMP framework restricts the usage of complex CSS and JS components, the possibility of customization and adding extended interactive features is limited.
- Complex Structure: If you are switching an existing site to AMP, the complexity of the process will be comparatively high. This is due to the effort involved in transforming the existing codebase and handling complex functionalities without tampering with the website’s efficiency.
- Limited Feature Set: As the speed and effectiveness of the website increase dramatically, it is made possible by compromising on a lot of other features such as advanced integration, dynamic content support, etc. Hence, before switching to AMP, it is essential to understand its limitations.
- SEO Challenges: Even though Google will consider an AMP site with high priority, the search engines might ignore the site in case of content duplication or canonicalization issues. Hence, it is important to carefully implement and monitor the changes while adapting to AMP.
Final Word
As the number of people depending on mobile devices to access web content started to escalate at an exponential phase, AMP made an entrance creating a revolution. Web app development companies found this framework a great relief as it enabled highly optimized mobile browsing facilitating active user engagement.
As web app browsing continues to evolve, AMP’s open source is housing more intricate features by developers contributing to the code. By understanding the benefits and limitations of AMP, web-developing companies can leverage its features to create highly optimized and efficient mobile browsing experiences. Connect with Expeed Software for creating highly efficient AMP sites and to make your business spread across a vast pool of audience.
Expeed Software is one of the top software companies in Ohio that specializes in application development, data analytics, digital transformation services, and user experience solutions. As an organization, we have worked with some of the largest companies in the world and have helped them build custom software products, automated their processes, assisted in their digital transformation, and enabled them to become more data-driven businesses. As a software development company, our goal is to deliver products and solutions that improve efficiency, lower costs and offer scalability. If you’re looking for the best software development in Columbus Ohio, get in touch with us at today.
