Google have announced that they are to update the AMP error report in the Google Search Console, making it more efficient at spotting and highlighting errors. This will allow AMP pages to be displayed more prominently to users searching on mobile devices. It is set to have substantial benefits for publishers of websites and blogs using AMP pages, enabling them to optimise their pages more efficiently for mobile users.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open source project that has received the backing of Google and Twitter. It is basically a stripped-down version of HTML, which takes out all the elements that slow pages down. It has been designed for the fastest possible loading speeds of web pages on mobile devices, and uses its own version of Java Script, which allows content not provided by that particular page, such as adverts, to be unsynchronised, so that it will not slow the loading speed of the page itself.
AMP was quickly adopted by many of the major news providers, for whom speed is of the essence as they constantly have to update their content. However, it is also valuable in social media, where instant loading is a necessity in order to retain reader and viewer attention. Consequently, the use of AMP is rapidly becoming more widespread, with many authors or websites and blogs now installing AMP plugins, to enable greater ease of social sharing of their content. Google’s support for the project is demonstrated by Google AMP Cache, which automatically improves performance for AMP pages.
In January 2016, Google announced that they would be incorporating AMP error report into Google Search Console. This has been designed to spot errors in AMP pages throughout an entire website. It offers an overview of a site’s performance, allowing webmasters to determine how many of their AMP pages contain errors, then breaks it down into specific URLs and types of errors, allowing for the quickest possible resolution, and optimised page performance.
The update was announced on 5th May 2016 by Google’s John Mueller, who made the announcement on Google Plus. This is the first update to the AMP error report, and is said to be able to spot many errors that went undetected by the first version. The update also offers more detailed categorisation of errors, allowing webmasters to fix them more efficiently.
