The change in the way people use the internet has changed with the increasing use of mobile phones. Small screen and better technology have made a huge impact on the traffic.
The year 2015 has seen the major shift and ever since the websites are talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages for WordPress.
Everyone who is with content creation, Web development, WordPress People, SEO experts or someone who is even remotely associated with web world is talking about accelerated mobile pages for WordPress.
This is only because it is bigger than imagined and have a huge impact on the way people access mobile world.
What is AMP Project?
Accelerate Mobile Pages as the name suggests are something that works with the website to accelerate the pages on the mobile.
In simple terms, AMP will enable any website to load faster on the mobile devices and will also provide a better UX as compared to any other website that does not have AMP to its rescue.
This has become an important weapon as instead of a choice it has more become a necessity. So does that mean that one just needs to add it to the WordPress and forget about it? Will it get the desired results all by itself with one having nothing to do any further?
Doesn’t Sound Correct? Right?
There are definitely a lot of things one must know about using AMP to make the site work faster and better. AMP is now common knowledge, major giants and leaders in the industry- Google, WordPress, pinterest are all using AMP.
One can easily find which website is using AMP as it is shown as a separate simple right below the link on the search engine.
The android apps also have a separate sign that shows the sites which supports AMP and that will be suitable for you. This makes it imperative that the developer should understand various different aspects of the same so that it is benefited from.
Custom HTML Elements for AMP:- AMP customized most of the media-centric HTML elements. The idea behind the same is that the functionalities in HTML must be extended and replaced by high-performance AMP.
This makes the task easy and does not require a lot of JavaScript editing and tweaks. AMP is well designed and some of its own HTML elements which are- amp-twitter, amp-youtube, amp-Pinterest, amp-analytics etc.
It is clear that these elements are meant for the third party. This ensures that any advertisement or media on the website does not bring down the browsing experience. Accelerated mobile pages keeps in mind that any loading issues are catered to at the right time.
Rules for AMP:- AMP was not structured in a day, it is organized and has specific rules for JavaScript and CSS. Anyone working with these should follow the customs properly. People who Love JavaScript for creating elements you can bid that idea goodbye.
AMP has a library of its own for JS and that is the only source one can use. The fonts that can be used can come only from popular sources as they are the only ones supported so clearly Google will be your primary aid.
For CSS things are a little tough, CSS must always be online which makes working with external sheet complicated.
An aid to the developers is that they can use PHP for external stylesheet when they are dealing with AMP.
Make sure that your CSS code is under 50 KB which is something difficult to achieve as minified versions also tend to run over 80KB. AMP has a support documentation that provides help to the developers for minimization.
Know How AMP makes the Working Fast: – There are a lot of ways that this is done, AMP is beneficial for sites which have made no investment in UX or the site is poorly managed.
AMP here can then make significant boost to the speed. It should be realized though that there are already existing ways in which can improve the page and load it faster.
These ways include- prerendering, prefetching, lazy loading which AMP makes an attempt to combine and tweak a bit for optimization this ensures a better browsing experience.
AMP works by loading the crucial elements first, this means that the visitors are engaged with the page, the rest of the media is uploaded a little later.
This approach along with the strictness of the coding rules ensures that the pages load faster and maintains the visitor’s experience.
It is not a page loading functionality but looks at it like an added benefit you receive for keeping things in place.
It is not just a speed maximizing option that most people like to call it. It is a beautifully and carefully designed platform that ensures that the user’s experience should be maximized and speed happens to be on the top of the list. The rules in place speed become an automatic by-product.
There are many other methods a website can use to make the page load faster instead of using AMP. As AMP has many other practical aspects to things as well.
There is so much that AMP provides that the website developers are at a better benefit by using it instead of ignoring it.
AMP has understood the pulse and has created features that will ensure that the website works better. It has now gained a special place in the search engine with the symbol right next to the URL which shows that SEO is directly affected by the use.
Major giants are using and talking about it as the future, which clearly shows that it is a wise choice to use it.
If you think you do not need it, think again Google is recommending the use and you for sure cannot survive without Google and hence whether you need or understand it or not you must start to use it.
Also, it does not involve a lot of work as there are simple plugins that make your site AMP ready and with such an ease there seem no reason why one must avoid using Accelerate Mobile Pages.