Earlier this year Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project aka AMP and just shared some more news on it going mainstream in February 2016. As the name suggests, these pages are formatted to load faster on mobile devices than mobile optimized pages.
Is Faster Always Better?
Every business wants their pages to load fast on mobile devices. The load time of a website is listed as a ranking factor, so technology that makes load time faster must be better, right? In theory, yes, but some aren’t in love with AMP, at least not yet.
Here’s Why Not Everyone Is Amped About AMP, Yet
No One Likes Change
AMP is another change Google is rolling out with the intention of improving the mobile user experience and, in the process, has made it so all of us now need to make more changes to the existing website pages we have already published.
Sacrificing Bells and Whistles for More Speed
To be more specific, in order to speed up load time AMP html strips many features that we all have come to rely upon for purposes beyond page loading time. We will all need to adjust the digital marketing strategy that we spent countless hours researching, honing and launching to achieve the results we want with AMP html. Here is a page on WordPress’s site without AMP. Here is the AMP version.
Google’s “May” Statements
According to Google, “AMP pages MAY get a ranking boost” and “MAY be labeled as ‘fast’ or something similar much like the mobile-optimized tag”. As Google has shown us in the past, “mays” can quickly turn into “may nots”.
Google Wants You to Test Out AMP
Want to get a head start on everyone else? The best way to find out what you can and cannot do with an AMP page is to try it out. Google said “Content you publish to your sites today will be eligible to show up in the demo now, and soon in Google search.” There is a AMP WordPress plugin. You might want to test it out too.
At Advice, we’ll start out by creating a few pages with AMP html and see exactly what kind of boost we get in search results come February 2016. Want more news about Google? Click here.
Google says AMP html will be the next big thing in 2016! Do you agree? Let’s discuss.
