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Accelerated Mobile Pages are being launched in February
BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Starting with February 2016 Google is accelerating the mobile web, meaning they will speed up traffic on mobile pages.
Google’s project is called AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The pages that are going to be sped-up are mostly pages in Google Search. However, others will be linking to AMP as well, such as LinkedIn and Twitter and Pinterest has already started testing the AMP in mobile apps. Other partners to the project are Viber, Tango or LINE.
The aim of AMP is to facilitate the use of web on mobile devices by making it move a lot faster. Although mobile web has the advantage of being, well, mobile, it also has the disadvantage of being very slow. This is usually because of many ads that continuously pop-up on your screen and obviously slow down the loading of the page. Another reason why mobile pages are so slow is that they are not correctly designed and develop.
In their wish to make the page more attractive, some programmers may get lost in the details and ad some fonts, images or tracking scripts. This will definitely make the pages work slowly on a mobile device, despite the fact that they could look and move incredibly on a PC.
Facebook and Apple have also taken measures against slow web pages. Facebook has the Instant Articles app that posts directly in the news feed, while Apple allows its iOS users to block content, especially ads, within Safari.
AMP contains an open framework based on already known web technologies, but what’s different about is that it is designed to load pages very fast, regardless of how much data such as photos, videos or animations they may contain. It also runs media from Youtube, Vine or Twitter a lot faster.
For all publishers who are using WordPress and want to enable the AMP can do it beginning in January. Many big names from the publishing industry have already lined up for support. Some of them are BBC, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, The Washington Post and many others.
However, analytics companies such as Google Analytics, Chartbeat or Parse.ly will have to wait until February to receive their AMP support.
According to Pinterest, which has already tested AMP pages both on Android and iOS apps, these pages use 8 times less data and load 4 times faster than any other traditional mobile page.
Until the official launch in February 2016, Google will keep making announcements about their new partners and everything important about the AMP.
Image source: www.bing.com
