The average person expects a website to load in two seconds or less. Two out of every five people will abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. Time is money – and if your website takes too long to load, it’s money you’ll be missing out on.
A fast-loading website is critical to the success of any business that strives to market or sell using its website. When mobile websites first emerged, they were a faster, sleeker alternative to desktop sites. However, as Internet speed has grown and as the mobile audience has increased, many mobile sites are now plagued by the same problems as regular websites. An abundance of ads, pop-up windows and videos have dragged mobile Web browsing to a crawl. Worse, bad ads that redirect users to malicious sites is a problem that’s only getting worse.
Google has stepped into the fray, throwing a life ring to websites that are willing to streamline their mobile site. The end result is AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.
You may have already seen the benefits of AMP without even realizing it. When doing a Google search, you may have noticed certain search results that display a little lightning bolt icon. You may have also noticed that, upon clicking these links, the site looks a little different. Most notably, though, the site loads much faster than normal. These are AMP pages. And you can provide this same type of experience to viewers of your website.
The reason why these AMP sites are so high up in the search engine results is that Google has prioritized AMP pages over other sites that load more slowly. Above all else, Google wants search results to be top-quality and leave the user with a good feeling. And since Google search positioning is such a high priority for marketers everywhere, it’s in your best interest to make sure your site ranks as highly as possible. AMP can help you to achieve this goal.
Google makes it easy for sites to become AMP-compliant, laying out all of the technical requirements that need to be met. In particular, forms and third-party scripts are banned, video and media content must meet specifications and ads can only be shown from approved ad networks. To make sure that Web developers meet the needs of the AMP program, Google offers a tool that lets you know whether or not your website is compliant.
The proof of AMP’s success is in the numbers. Not only are users more likely to click an AMP link than a non-AMP link, but studies show that users who browse AMP sites spend twice as long on those sites than regular Web viewers. Additionally, e-commerce sites that utilize AMP have seen their sales increase by as much as 20 percent.
The good news about AMP is that you don’t necessarily have to provide cutting-edge news in order to benefit from AMP. The metrics show that Google will prioritize any site that uses AMP formatting, and that the resulting traffic increases are well worth the time and effort of Web developers. It’s the perfect marriage of search engine and website, of a dedicated business and a quality customer experience. To learn more about how to get set up on AMP, contact us today.
