Basics of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Update
June 17, 2021In early October, Google announced several technical updates to their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. This project, originally announced by Google in 2015 to improve speed on the mobile web, helped with rendering of content pages on mobile devices.
The new updates will include scrolling animations, improved sidebars and better support for video analytics. Here are some of the basics you need to know.
New Capabilities
There are several new capabilities within the AMP project:
- Scrolling animations: This enables parallax effects, zoom or fade-in changes and starting or stopping animations
- Responsive sidebar: Enabling changing display format based on the width of the viewport
- Native video analytics support is now present
- Improved Client ID information, which enables consistent ID recognition as users migrate between pages under AMP and those not
- Fluid-ad support for publishers, which enables them to request ads where ad size is not known
Goals and History
The original open-source AMP project was announced in 2015, with the primary goal of speeding up mobile web pages. It originally worked mostly with rendering of content pages, but it has expanded since. AMP now includes ads and analytics – ads were introduced in mid-2016. AMP-enabled content pages moved out of the “top stories” section and into main search results in August of 2016, an important development.
Basic Results
AMP causes pages to load at roughly four times the original rates they had been showing before the project was implemented. They also use just one-tenth of the data that’s eaten up by pages that are not built using AMP, according to research from Google itself. In addition, AMP-powered mobile display ads are reported to load up to five seconds faster than traditional display ads, and many publishers on the DoubleClick exchange reported higher eCPMs on their AMP pages also.
The project does have some controversy when it comes to AMP URLs versus publisher URLs, but Apple attempts to solve that in iOS 11 with Safari changes to AMP URLs, moving them back to publisher URLs when shared.
For more information on the Accelerate Mobile Pages project and recent updates, or to find out about any of our internet marketing and SEO services, speak to the experts at SEO Werkz.
