Have you amped your site up to the next level of mobile web speed delivery, Google AMP?
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Stone Temple’s Eric Enge explains what Google AMP is, and covers the pros and cons of implementing it for your website.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
Resources
- Should My Website Adopt Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
- State of Search Conference Dallas
- Google Page Speed Insights Tool
- See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Transcript
Mark: Eric, first off, what is AMP?
Eric: Mark, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s an open source limited set of HTML and JavaScript coding techniques designed to speed up the delivery of webpages on mobile devices.
Mark: Since Google helped develop AMP, is it now automatic? I mean, will my webpages just use AMP when people find them through a mobile Google search?
Eric: Well, no, and I bet a lot of people wish it was, but it’s not automatic. In fact, to use it, website owners must alter the technical back end of their webpages, and that can be challenging in some cases.
Mark: What does AMP actually do to my webpages?
Eric: For the search user, AMP is really about getting pages that load almost instantly, which is really cool for them, and people like that. For developers, it’s a whole new process for coding pages, where you have limited access to types of JavaScript which can only come from the AMP supplied library, and other techniques for coding. So, here’s an example:
On the left is one of our pages from stonetemple.com as it appears on a desktop browser, and on the right is the same page rendered by AMP. You’ll see, on the one on the right, that the menu at the top and the search box have been stripped out. Now, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. You can learn to code the pages the same way, but it’s harder. So, in this case, it’s a WordPress plugin that’s causing it to look like that.
Mark: But is speed on mobile so important that I might be willing to show users a different version of my pages?
Eric: The short answer is yes. First of all, as people get more and more experienced with developing AMP pages, they’ll be able to make those differences and the look and feel between the pages look a lot smaller. But there’s also a lot of evidence that shows that pages that are faster, even by small incremental amounts, are really important to users in mobile. Users are far less tolerant of slower page loads on mobile devices.
According to SimilarWeb, bounce rates are higher in mobile than on desktop, and that can have an effect on your bottom line. On mobile, even the tiniest delay can cause a user to leave and go to someone else’s site, maybe even one of your competitors’.
Data shows that bounce rates are higher on mobile. Can AMP help solve that?Click To Tweet
Mark: In fact, Google ran some tests in the past that seemed to show that page load speed directly affects revenue, as you said. But, Eric, how about in the real world? I mean, AMP has been out for a while now. So, are any businesses seeing results from it?
Eric: Well, at SMX West 2017, Ranna Zhou of Google showed actual results from a number of popular sites. For example, after implementing AMP, Snapdeal showed a 59% increase in daily traffic, and a 52% rise in daily orders. LinkedIn found that people spent almost 10% more time on pages served by AMP. And there are many more results she presented like this.
So, we’re in the middle of conducting an in-depth look at how AMP is impacting a number of major brands that implemented it. I’ll be revealing the results of that study in a keynote at the State of Search conference in Dallas this October, and in a blog post about the same time. We’re already uncovering some amazing findings, so viewers will want to check back in with us when we release it.
Mark: How much does AMP actually impact page load speed?
Eric: The difference can be significant, depending, of course, on how fast your pages already load on mobile browsers. I did a check of our own site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. As you can see below, we went from a mobile speed rating of 43/100 for a non-AMP version of one of our pages to a score of 88 for the AMP version, a pretty dramatic improvement.
So, AMP is still young and there’re some challenges that remain. For one thing, it can give false results in analytics in some cases. They also need to improve how it delivers ads and support for e-commerce sites and the like, and for video, as well. But, Google’s working on all of those issues and making a lot of progress.
Mark: Okay. So how do I decide whether or not AMP is right for my site?
Eric: Right now, I think, it depends on one of at least three factors.
- First, the type of site you have and whether or not good AMP support exists for that type of site right now.
- Second, the presence of the right set of features. For example, heavily video-centric sites or sites using a number of different ad delivery platforms might want to hold off on AMP for now.
- Finally, the level of effort involved in implementing AMP. For example, both WordPress and Drupal have AMP plugins or modules that theoretically make implementation a lot easier, but if you’re on a different platform, it might involve a lot more custom coding.
Mark: Thanks, Eric. Our viewers can learn a lot more about AMP and get help in making a decision about it for their own sites in Eric’s comprehensive guide to AMP here.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
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