AMP: what are Google accelerated mobile pages

Ever heard of page loading issues? We bet you have. It’s crucial: page loading speed strongly influences the user experience of a website. Especially from mobile, the slowness of loading is one of the main reasons why users loose patience and decide to abandon the page. To avoid this loss of traffic, in addition to the various techniques of content optimization, there is something really interesting: Google AMP. The acronym means “Accelerated Mobile Pages” and it’s an open source project promoted by Google to create pages with increased loading speed on tablets and mobile devices.

How do they work?

AMP is based on AMP HTML language (based on a HTML framework), CSS and Javascript, but it contains rules that help eliminate all non-essential elements that slow down page loading, reducing their weight. Visually, what is returned to the user is a more “minimal” version than the original page, where content is the protagonist, menus are slimmer, and non-necessary buttons, widget, and icons are eliminated. For these reasons, this type of page can be an ideal solution for informative or textual websites. For other more complex sites (such as e-commerce), the choice may not be as convenient. Let’s discover together the main advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

Decrease in loading time

Being free from “heavy” elements, pages can work faster and break down the loading time. As already said, a slow website is between the first reasons of abandon by users and that’s why being able to provide slim and fast pages can decrease significantly the bounce rate and increase the traffic to your website.

Improvement of mobile SEO

Pages built in AMP tend to be displayed at the top of screen on smartphones and tablets. For certain type of content, Google also seems to prefer them for the so-called “Top Stories” that are positioned in the carousel at the top of search results.

Improvement of server’ performance

If the amount of traffic from mobile devices on your website is very high, using Google AMP can help reduce the load of requests on the servers and improve response times. Additionally, Google will automatically save a cached version of the page to show to mobile users.

Open-source project

In addition of being completely free, a big advantage is the ability for anyone to contribute to the development of Google AMP project, making it faster and adaptable to changes. It’s very likely for this reason that new features and formatting improvements will be implement over time.

Disadvantages

Reduction of  advertising earnings

The Google AMP open-source project supports advertising banners, but their capabilities are currently limited. They are not easy to implement, so it is necessary to carefully evaluate whether to use them if advertising traffic represents an important component for our website’s goals.

Less detailed statistics

To use Google Analytics with AMP, it is necessary to implement a different tag, which must be added on all pages that us this type of standard. There are actually plugins that facilitate this procedure, but it is still an additional step that could make more difficult to collect website statistics.

Lack of contact forms

This can truly be an insurmountable problem if the goal of your website is to gather contact information and visitor data to encourage them to send a message or sign up for a newsletter. The project developers have yet to introduce the option of adding forms to content optimized for Google AMP, and it is not yet known when this lack will be addressed.

Lack of  external style sheets or Javascript

The inability to modify an external style sheet implies significant limitations on the pages design. If the layout of the website, graphics, and branding are important components of the strategy, this limitation can be a considerable disadvantage.

Effects on domain authority

One of the factors that affects search engine rankings is the authority of your domain, which is determined also by the number of links pointing to your site. The problem is that if you use Google AMP technology, your AMP pages will be hosted on Google AMP Cache (for obvious reasons of speed) with a URL like google.com/amp/tuosito.it/tuapagina/amp and not directly This means that you could loose potential links and therefore authority of your domain, which is an important factor in SERP ranking.