AMP is going live, based on Google’s promise last October that it was imminent and would provide a solution for those on mobiles with slower internet connections. Using AMP, publishers can streamline their content with the help of templates that work on an open-source framework. This reduces the heavy burden of HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements by providing a more basic page that only has the text, videos, images and advertising that are important to the user. Sites using this new framework are faster to load, with content appearing all across the world in a flash on multiple platforms and devices, irrespective of the phone, tablet or mobile device the user is on. According to Google, AMP will lead to anything from a 15-85% improvement on performance, as mobile users click through to AMP partner sites from the search results page. Google have noted a 29% drop off rate if mobile users experience a slow site or app, including one that doesn’t give the information expected. There’s a 58% drop off rate if pages take as long as 10 seconds to load. Although unconfirmed by Google, various anonymous sources reported that Wednesday February 24th was the date for our diaries for AMP to go live, but Google were ahead of this, pushing out AMP results via their news carousels late on Monday February 22, with roll-out currently taking place across all mobile platforms. There’s evidence AMP is now on iOS in Safari and Google Now but bizarrely enough, not yet on Chrome. Some international users (e.g. in India and Spain) have tweeted to say they’ve seen AMP on their mobiles so it’s only a matter of time before the whole world benefits. So how does AMP look? The new results are flagged up with a very apt white lightening symbol in a green circle, followed by the name AMP and the time the article was released. At the top of the page, there’s a call to action linked to the original search query with the option to return to the search page. It’s interesting to note the top news results that aren’t in the carousel don’t bear the AMP mark and risk loosing a large chunk of their mobile traffic as a consequence. However, if all news results were to change to AMP for every mobile user, irrespective of their connection speed, virtually all mobile news-related traffic would be adversely affected. Speaking at the State of Search conference back in 2015 in Dallas, Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said that AMP was the next big thing for Google and they would be aggressively pushing it in 2016, whilst offering increased support in the Google Search Console for publishers.
24th February 2016
