Why should you Implement Google AMP on your website
As we see an increasing penetration of mobile devices into our work and personal lives, the mobile search is gaining an exponential momentum. The mobile user interface and the connected mobile technologies become the focal area of work, research and implementation for users, developers and creators alike.
Mobile search enabled by Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is thus the core to mobile user web experience. The penetration and acceptance of AMP across development, plugin, analytics, Content Management Systems and Analytics, has been changing the contours of mobile web applications and websites ever since its launch in the year 2015. While the early adopters of the open source AMP were media sites and quite understandably because it made their websites faster, the technology and approach has spread far and wide into several industries as additional advantages of an excellent user experience were brought to the fore rather than the unidimensional aspect of speed.
So while speed ha a direct correlation to traffic on the website, conversions and thus sales, the user experience moves beyond the first time sales to a repeated purchase and thus a progression on the loyalty ladder and advocacy by the user. With the increasing paucity of time the user wants to spend on the website and the costs of mobile data initially propelled the AMP forward and the users preferred abridged versions of the websites while browsing on the screens of the mobile phones.
The efforts of implementing are worth and pay off as the bounce rates reduce on the websites as AMP is implemented and also the user experience metrics show an upswing in the user engagement levels. There have been some failures as well, especially when the efforts have been lacking. The approach of using an AMP plugin and forgetting about it, may not always be successful. The pages need to be worked upon to make the look alike , if not similar to the ones designed for responsive websites. Hand coded AMP pages have thus been more successful in comparison, statistically speaking.
AMP’s competitors like Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News, are more proprietary than AMP and that makes the chances of it becoming the widely adopted standard, quite high. Googles AMP has thus also faced criticism of domination the market and thus a threat to the concept and practice of open internet. Although an open source the framework has thus been viewed as a proprietary one and that has hindered a widespread adoption of the same.
Google has ever since been working in the direction to make the AMP features available without the need to implement the framework. The approach is thus to make it integrate with the future open web standards.
Given the overall advantages of speed, user experience and the derived benefits of higher traffic, sales and revenues coupled with users repeat purchases and increased advocacy, Google AMP offers an opportunity to have a higher play in the mobile web space, which is becoming more and more mainstream as the mobile data becomes widely available at a lower cost than before and the mobiles make an increasing penetration in the lives of citizens of the planet.
