Accelerated mobile pages and why you should use them..!
I am Nandan, And you probably know me as a "Software Engineer who "hacked" an Airline to retrieve his luggage".
I am a full-time Software Engineer, Tech Speaker, and mentor. I enjoy talking about Web Development, Machine Learning, Natural language Processing, Machine learning Accelerated Mobile Pages, Progressive Web Apps, Cybersecurity, Chatbots, etc.
My claim to fame was when I posted a series of tweets on Twitter about data privacy issues on an airline’s website and the tweet got viral for all the good reasons. The story was covered by all major media portals all around the world including BBC, Saudi Gazette, Times of India, Boing Boing, Lallantop etc. and I have been interviewed by some major radio channels and podcasts.
In my free time, I like to indulge myself in activities like Photography, Gardening, Snooker, or Boxing. I am a proud owner of many plants, I sometimes talk to them (mostly pep talks).
Did you know that on an average, smartphone users touch their phones 2,617 times each day?
With increasing mobile usage the average number of internet searches from mobile devices has also increased. A whopping 33% of electronic device users use their smartphone as their primary device for internet use.
But are these mobile websites fast enough??
Let’s see the current scenario is -
On an average it takes a whooping 214 server requests per mobile page.
19 Sec is the average page load time of mobile websites.
77% of these mobile sites take more than 10 seconds to load on a 3G network.
So what can we do to have high performance website loading on mobile phones?
One of the ways is what Google has come up with a solution to enhance our mobile search experience by launching The AMP Project or The Accelerated Mobile pages.
What is AMP?
AMP is a google backed project designed as open-standard for any publisher to have their page load quickly on mobile devices. It makes websites really fast . An average AMP page takes 0.7 second to load. This is Google’s answer to Facebook’s instant articles.AMP websites are pretty easy to build. You can start developing your own AMP Page in just five minutes.
Click Here to create your first AMP.
See what AMP looks like-
- Open up your Google app and type in “ XT summit 2017 “.
- Click the very first result.
- Pretty fast loading speed, right?
As you also probably noticed, the lightning bolt icon on the website. AMP also puts result on top without much of hassle. In some cases, you don’t require to use webmaster tool at all. And your AMP page will be in the top of the search engine results page.
The previous website was a little too small for you to feel the difference.
- Now try searching “XT summit 2017 demo”
Summary-
From the above examples you can see how AMP makes your website load much faster than normal websites. It really feels like instant.
Following links are for further reading and it has everything that is required to get one started -
The AMP Project : The Official AMP page
AMP Test – Google Search Console : To test if your page is AMP compatible or not. You can also index your page to google once your page passes the test.
Google Webmasters – Support, Learn, Connect & Search Console – Google : A better approach to index your AMP page.
PS: This post is an extract of the talk i had presented on AMP & PWA at Sapient’s XT summit 2017 organized in the month of June.
