Traditionally, people were using laptops and desktops to access websites through internet, but over the past five years, there is an enormous increase in the usage of portable and wireless devices, such as mobile phones, multitouch tabs etc. Since then many efforts were made to make the mobile web more accessible & reliable to provide best browsing experience to the internet users. One of the latest technologies that has been recently introduced into the market and that many consumer platforms have already taken initiative to integrate into their apps is ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ or AMP. Initially it was developed for publishers benefit so that they can provide faster content loads and better user experience, but later the technology was backed up by many platforms and apps like Google, Twitter, WordPress etc.
What exactly is AMP?
So far we know that AMP is designed to improve the mobile user experience, but technically speaking it is a HTML source code that builds the pages and loads them instantly on mobile devices. Most of us might have gone through the frustration of waiting for the website to load while shopping online through our mobiles, and some of us might have even stopped visiting few websites because of their slow page responses. The main intention behind AMP technology is not to improve the look and feel of the web page, instead to improve the load times irrespective of the browser or application. AMP has custom tags and properties, that has to be streamlined with other page elements such as content, images etc to custom design the web pages for faster speed. While AMP HTML allows integration of some CSS tags in page design, it does not allow the usage of any Java script code other than from its own custom built library. Since it is an open source platform, AMP allows users to access the source code, make changes or contribute their ideas to improve the functionality to get fast loading mobile web pages.
In what way AMP is useful for the websites?
The moment AMP project was announced on Oct 7th, 2015 by Google, Twitter & other publishers & companies, many websites got initiated to use this software for mobile integration. As we have already discussed, it works as the main element in performance optimization, where publisher gets complete control on all page elements to make it work faster. The way that Google AMP servers work is almost same as Content Delivery Networks where the content gets stored in the Edge servers for faster retrieval. Google AMP Cache servers store the cached versions of AMP pages so that they can be served faster in search results whenever required on the mobile versions. Today this technology has been in wide use whether it is for updating the content of the blogs dynamically or displaying the ads in an organized manner with higher speed.
