The Web as we know has always been this slow and ever loading series of web pages. No matter how high-bandwidth internet connection we have, some web pages are made in hell, with all their ads and unmanaged databases, which take ages to load. So that’s all about to change now, Introducing the Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Google AMP is a way to build web pages for static content, well that’s a bummer right? Cause all the slow pages are usually dynamic! But it’s a start and the development of AMP is continuous. AMP is somewhat similar to the instant articles that you see on Facebook. For starters, it is a great way to boost traffic to your website. If your web pages load fast and the contents it has to offer are just that good, then you’ve hit a jackpot. Also, the AMP pages appear on the top of Google search list! If your site is based on WordPress, you have a plugin to convert your web pages into AMP. Any static web pages can be converted to AMP using simple HTML codes, to do so, you have to either create an alternate version of the web page for AMP or convert the whole website to AMP. Google provides a cache that can be used by anyone for free, and all AMPs will be cached by the Google AMP Cache.
To this day, over 600million AMP documents have been created by some major sites like eBay, Reddit, Shopify, WikiHow to name few. The speed is possible because of the Google’s Cache Server and also many restrictions that you have to put in your web page, to make it load faster, like most of the Javascript is not allowed, you cannot use certain HTML tags like forms, and you have to use streamlined version of CSS. So yeah! a lot of restrictions, but in the end, it’s totally worth it.
We have already seen traces of AMP in Google search here in Nepal as well. AMP uses 10 times fewer data than the non-AMP pages. Previously it was limited to Top Stories section on Google search, but now it is included in all Google mobile searches. To know it’s an AMP page just look for the bolt icon like in the Facebook Instant Articles. AMP is insanely fast, it takes no less than a second to view a web page.
The Ads are still there but they won’t be affecting the performance. Now this has got me really excited, what if all the web pages could open this quick? But the downside to all this, is that, all of the web pages will be stored in Google’s server, so, Google will be controlling all of that data which raises questions for privacy!
