Google’s AMP 101: What You Should Know (and How to Get Started)

You’ve probably heard about the AMP project from Google.

It’s an important topic to know about, and in this post, you’ll learn exactly what it is and how to use it.

In this article, by experts at leading web design company in Mumbai you will learn in detail about AMP.

So, let’s get started.

 

What Is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages; it’s an open-source project that aims to make the web faster. When a user accesses an AMP page, Google attempts to preload content and resources required for the page. This means that AMP pages load faster than traditional HTML pages.

Google hosts AMP pages, so they don’t need to be downloaded from your site. They’re also cached for up to six months, so if someone visits your page from a search result or social media post, it will load much faster than before (usually sub-second).

As web development company will tell you that this means that AMP has the potential to increase your search rankings — if you’re using AMP on your website, Google will see this as an indication that you’re optimizing for speed and quality user experience.

 

Benefits Of AMP

AMP gives various benefits to the webmasters, such as:

• Better user experience on mobile devices – The main goal of AMP is to improve the user experience on mobile devices. It does this by speeding up the loading of pages and articles, so they take less time to load on smartphones and tablets. This means that users don’t have to wait as long for pages to load when they visit them from their mobile devices. This is particularly important for those on slow connections or with poor-quality connections.

 

• Faster load times for articles and pages: AMP provides faster load times for articles and pages than regular HTML content because it compresses images, reduces HTTP requests, and optimizes the layout of each page. These factors help optimize websites to be served more efficiently over cellular connections.

 

• Reduce the bounce rate: AMP doesn’t just load faster; it also reduces the bounce rate because users don’t have to wait for content to load before they can continue reading. This can help you increase your overall time on site and time spent per visit (Bounce Rate).

 

AMP Framework

AMP HTML

The AMP framework is made up of three parts: AMP HTML (normal HTML markup plus web components), AMP JavaScript (resource loading), and AMP caches (serving and validating AMP pages).

Although Google’s AMP cache delivers most AMP pages, other organizations can also use AMP caches. For example, Cloudflare, a performance and security provider, introduced an AMP cache in March 2017.

 

Web Stories

In 2018, Web Stories, formerly known as AMP Stories until April 2020, were introduced. Web tales are a tap-through style for delivering news and information on mobile devices.

 

AMP Email

Google revealed the new AMP Email part of the AMP architecture in 2018. Senders can use AMP for an email to incorporate interactive AMP components in their emails. Components can be displayed immediately inside the email in email clients that support AMP. When viewed in an incompatible email client, AMP emails display fallback HTML that looks exactly like a conventional HTML email.

A variety of AMP components are presently available for use in emails. For example, AMP for email can include interactive forms, polls, and product listings in emails, allowing recipients to enter replies and make purchases without ever leaving the email.

 

AMP Ads

Amp advertisements are a new type of digital ad that appears on AMP-enabled pages. These advertisements are distinct from typical HTML/JavaScript advertisements. Ads that use AMP HTML load as quickly as the content, enhancing viewability and driving engagement. AMP HTML ads are only delivered after they’ve been vetted, assuring that they’re malware-free.

 

AMP Components

The following three core components are used to create AMP pages:

 

• AMP HTML

The AMP HTML is just HTML, but with a few limitations to ensure consistent performance. This is the most basic AMP HTML file:

The majority of the tags in AMP HTML are standard HTML tags, although some are replaced with AMP-specific tags. These unique tags are known as AMP HTML components, and they make it simple to apply common tag patterns in a performant manner. In addition, the HTML tag promotes AMP pages to search engines and other platforms.

You can have both a non-AMP and an AMP version of your page or just the AMP version.

 

• AMP JavaScript (JS)

The AMP JS library ensures that AMP HTML pages are rendered quickly. The JS library uses AMP’s best performance techniques, such as inline CSS and font triggering, to control resource loading and provide unique HTML tags for quick page rendering.

Everything from external resources is asynchronous with AMP JS; thus, nothing on the website can prevent anything from rendering. Other performance strategies used by the JS include:

• Iframe sandboxing.
• Pre-calculating the layout of each page element before resources are loaded.
• Deactivating sluggish CSS selectors.

 

AMP Cache

The Google AMP Cache is used to serve AMP HTML pages that have been cached. All acceptable AMP documents are sent via the AMP Cache, a proxy-based content delivery network. The Cache automatically retrieves AMP HTML pages, caches them, and enhances page performance.

The page, JS files, and all pictures are loaded from the same HTTP 2.0 origin using AMP Cache to get maximum efficiency.

The built-in validation method in AMP Cache ensures that a page is guaranteed to work and is not reliant on external influences that could slow it down. The validation mechanism relies on assertions to ensure that the page’s markup complies with the AMP HTML specifications.

Every AMP page comes with an additional version of the validation system. When the website is rendered, this version may log validation problems directly into the browser’s console, allowing you to observe the intricate modifications in your code that can affect performance and user experience.

The three basic components of AMP work together to ensure that pages load rapidly. The following section will highlight the seven optimization approaches that combine to make AMP pages so fast.

 

AMP vs. Responsive Web Design

AMP and responsive web design are two different approaches to creating mobile-friendly websites. The main difference between AMP and responsive design is that AMP is a toolkit, while responsive design is a technique.

As leading website development company will tell you that AMP uses a small subset of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create web pages that load quickly on mobile devices. Responsive design uses media queries to adjust the layout depending on the device size, but it doesn’t affect how quickly the page loads.

Responsive design is a more general approach than AMP because it’s not limited to Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages specification. However, AMP has some advantages over responsive design:

It’s designed for mobile devices only — so it can be used for both desktop and mobile users by default. AMP also doesn’t require learning any new coding languages like HTML5 or CSS3; instead, it uses existing markup languages with some new features to make them work better on mobile devices.

AMP uses its cache system, which means that content isn’t affected by third-party servers as long as there’s an AMP version (although you still need to keep your server running).

 

AMP vs. Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

As we know, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a set of specifications that allow publishers to build fast-loading mobile webpages, and Google created it to help make the web faster while also improving search engine rankings. However, when It’s compared with Progressive Web Apps (PWA), we see many similarities and differences in a few key areas.

The main difference is that AMP is focused on making pages load faster and easier for search engines to crawl. In contrast, PWAs are focused on making applications more native-like within an app store environment.

Expert website developers in Mumbai will tell you that there are some similarities between PWAs and AMP:

Both are designed to make it easier for users to find your site or application when searching for content online through their browser or mobile device.

Both provide developers with tools and libraries for building fast websites/apps that can run on any device with any browser without installing anything from an app store like Google Play, Apple App Store, or Microsoft Windows Store.

 

How to Implement AMP on your website?

You’ll need to save at least two versions of each article page: the original one that users will see and the AMP version.

Because AMP doesn’t allow things like form elements or third-party JavaScript, you won’t be able to have lead forms, on-page comments, or other components that you would be used to seeing on a regular website. (However, there is currently a hack that uses iframes to solve this problem.) Conrad O’Connell was instrumental in confirming the hack.)

You’ll almost certainly need to alter your site template to suit the limits. For example, in AMP, all CSS must be inline and under 50KB. Due to their high loading complexity, custom fonts must be loaded with a special amp-font extension. This allows for better control of the loading process.

Multimedia requires special attention. Images, for example, must use the custom amp-img element and specify specified width and height values. (If the width and height characteristics aren’t already used, this can be a huge issue when converting a traditional website to an AMP design.) In addition, if your images are animated GIFs, you must also use the additional amp-anim extended component.

To embed locally stored movies through HTML5, a specific element called amp-video must be used, just like images. However, there is a distinct expanded component, amp-youtube, for embedding YouTube videos, which most web videos are.

Slideshows and image lightboxes are also supported via amp-carousel, and amp-image-lightbox, respectively, and social media, embeds for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Vine via their expanded components.

These tag and extended components are simple to utilize; however, they necessitate some forethought in your site design.

You must alter the original version of the article page for Google (and other technologies supporting the AMP Project) to detect the AMP version of your article. The following tag, which is effectively a canonical tag for AMP pages, must be present on the original article page:

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”http://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/”>

 

According to the AMP Discovery page, some platforms that support AMP will require Schema.org metadata to define the page’s content type. (Currently, GitHub lists “article,” “recipe,” “review,” and “video” as page-type examples.)

Furthermore, Schema.org metadata “is a necessity to make your content eligible to show in the demo of the Google Search news carousel,” according to the document. So, if you want to earn a future benefit from Google by using AMP, make sure your schema is correct!

 

How to Monetize With Ads On AMP Pages?

Third-party JavaScript isn’t allowed in AMP pages for performance and security concerns. Because most mobile revenue is predicated on adding third-party Javascript, here is where things become problematic with AMP. Other basic AMP monetization principles also make it difficult for publishers to develop their ad stack.

Publishers need a system that can monetize AMP pages to:

• Remove advertising from the critical path of page rendering.
• Prevent layout shifts while allowing for multi-size advertisements.
• Use ad types that are easy to dismiss or scroll through for users.

 

AMP recommends that publishers use the amp-ad component, a bespoke ad extension to the AMP library, instead of having header bidding JS tags stop the page for 2-5 seconds. For a second, this leverages Google’s own Real-Time Config (RTC) to call up to five separate endpoints. While RTC is a technically sound technique to monetize AMP sites, it has some significant drawbacks.

To begin with, five endpoints is the maximum number, and five endpoints called do not imply five bidders. In addition, connecting with other vendors for services such as viewability monitoring and audience tracking reduces the number of demand-side bidders you can contact. As a result, your cid competition will be smaller, and your CPMs will be lower if you call fewer bidders.

These 5 endpoints will force publishers to pick between ad revenue and capabilities such as weather widgets or data services, as seen in Google’s depiction of how RTC distributes advertisements for publishers.

Because of the single-tag approach, publishers will need to contact a developer when they want to add or delete a demand partner. Therefore, the interface of a good header bidding wrapper should be simple to use.

Next, there are restrictions on the types of bids you may work with when using AMP and RTC. The following ad suppliers are now supported:

• AppNexus
• APS
• Automatad
• Browsi
• Criteo
• IndexExchange
• The Ozone Project
• PubMatic
• OpenWrap
• Salesforce

Google pushes publishers toward their own monetization solutions by promoting and rewarding the AMP architecture, despite its restrictions and limitations on monetization. However, using a different system with closed reporting might be a serious concern for large publishers.

 

Conclusion:

This article talked about the basics of AMP and how you can move your own site to an AMP-enabled one. If you are an entrepreneur and looking for an e-commerce web developer service to do this for you, just contact us. But if you are a reader and enjoyed reading this blog and want to learn more about such topics, you can start with our previous blog on content readability: know how good your blog post is.