AMP Pages: AMPing it up in WordPress Development

Claire
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The next generation in web design is upon us: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). So what are they, how do they benefit us and what are we doing about all of this at Moove Agency?

Accelerated Mobile Pages allow publishers to streamline content templates with an open-source framework named AMP HTML. Websites that opt into this framework will benefit from speed improvements, leading to a 15 to 85% performance enhancement, according to Google.

The move is a response to the vast number of people who now access the web on their smartphones. Since we can’t wait for telecoms companies to provide 10G networks, we need to act now.

That’s how AMP came about: the web community had to speed up the web itself to provide a quality smartphone web experience.

Open-source project

AMP is an open-source project launched last October led by Google. Dozens of technology companies and ad-tech businesses have been pooling their skills in a bid to improve everyone’s mobile web experience. In essence, AMP makes pages fast by using a stripped-down form of HTML that’s much faster to load – in Google’s own words: AMP pages should load instantly.

Technically speaking, AMP removes cumbersome HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements, resulting in a stripped-down page that only includes the most vital content (text, images, videos, and of course, site ads).

Lightning speed

What makes AMP pages load so quickly?

Google has a strict set of optimisations that significantly improve page loading times:

  • Allow only asynchronous scripts
  • Size all resources statically
  • Don’t let extension mechanisms block rendering
  • Keep all third-party JavaScript out of the critical path
  • All CSS must be inline and size-bound
  • Font triggering must be efficient
  • Minimise style recalculations
  • Only run GPU-accelerated animations
  • Prioritise resource loading
  • Load pages in an instant

Advertising

Lightning speed will be possible while still being able to use adverts. Google has built a platform that will serve adverts from AdSense, Outbrain and other advertising platforms so that advertisers won’t have any drop-off in revenue.

What does this mean for publishers?

As a content marketer or news publisher, you care about search-engine rankings. Since Google is behind AMP project technology, if you use AMP pages, your content will get a prime location in Google’s mobile search results. That’s a strong incentive for publishers to use AMP pages as soon as they can.

AMP and WordPress?

WordPress has been involved in the project from the start. As you would expect of a CMS that powers 25% of the entire Internet, there’s a plugin out there for the automatic creation of AMP pages.

It’s currently in its alpha stage but we expect that it will soon run smoothly and will be able to turn your standard posts into AMP pages with no additional wordpress development work. However, custom pages, custom post types and other, more complex forms of content will always need a developer’s input.

AMP and Moove Agency

Moove Agency has always been on the leading-edge of new innovations in web design which is why we implemented AMP for our client CharityJob. The AMP pages on CharityJob’s blog provide users with a stripped-down, ultra-fast version of an article which ensures rapid delivery of content, even on slower 3G mobile networks. We configured their AMP pages so that visitors coming from search engines such as Google are automatically directed to the AMP version of the articles. We also configured canonicalisation to prevent content being indexed twice in search engines.  

We’re configuring AMP pages for our clients so that they can enjoy the immediate benefits of this technology; please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss implementation on your website.

 

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