In our smartphone-reliant era, search engines prioritize mobile responsive websites. We build client sites with self-adjusting images, flexible font, and other search engine optimized elements to ensure that they serve mobile users and shoot straight to the top of results pages.
However, in the fast-paced world of web design, best practices don’t stay best practices for long. A new initiative is encouraging web designers to take mobile optimization up a notch through the use of accelerated mobile pages (AMPs).
We explain how AMPs work and let you know if they are something that your company should consider.
AMPing Up
Spearheaded by Google and Twitter, the Accelerated Mobile Pages project is an open source initiative that empowers web designers to create pages that load with unprecedented speed.
Webmasters achieve this by streamlining HTML code, leveraging CSS, and abandoning JavaScript entirely. The result is a website page that loads four times faster than the average standard mobile responsive page.
Are AMPs Right For You?
AMPs are quick to load and simple to build, but they are also trendy. As with all trends, AMPs suit some better than others. Whether or not AMPs are a good fit for your website boils down to your content, audience, and objectives.
Content
It is easy to see why AMPs appeal to companies pitching products and services at a time in which 40% of visitors will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load. Though AMPs do not automatically rank higher in search results, they can differentiate your business from the competition. Certain search engines mark AMPs with a small lightning bolt icon or place them in a carousel format at the top of the results page.
In addition to cutting load times, AMPs promote readability, making them the perfect pages on which to post brief news articles, listicles, and other snippets of bare bones information.
Do note that this readability and lightning fast load time comes at the expense of complex functionality such as the ability to support podcasts, videos, and long reads, like white papers and ebooks.
Audience
It is also important to keep in mind that the “M” in “AMP” stands for mobile. While it’s true that the majority of web searches are launched via mobile device, the results of a recent study suggest that this is only by a slim margin (51.2% mobile to 48.7% desktop).
What’s more, certain industries generate more mobile traffic than others. For instance, 72% of food and beverage-related searches are performed on a mobile device. This stands in stark contrast to searches for topics associated with the banking industry, of which less than 40% are conducted on the go. If your customers favor desktop, a sudden switch to AMPs may alienate them.
Objectives
AMPs can help your company impart information and stand out from the competition. However, their sleek appearance sacrifices functionality, limiting the kind of content that can be displayed and the devices it can be viewed on. As you can see, AMPs offer a pro for every con and what’s right for one company may be a poor decision for another.
Whether AMPs fit your needs, or standard mobile response is more your speed, Liqui-Site can help you elevate your style, streamline your processes, extend your reach. Contact us today.
