AMP Up Your Web Pages: How to Optimize Mobile Download Speed

More than ever, people are accessing webpages and opening assets on their phones instead of on their desktops, which makes optimizing your website for mobile an incredibly important aspect to your SEO and overall inbound strategy. Ensuring a great mobile user experience for your website visitors will put you ahead of sites that don’t bother to consider that most internet users access the internet on their smartphones. AMP will help you do that.

Designing pages with content that looks good on mobile platforms as well as on computer screens is an important part of mobile optimization, but page load speed will impact your page views and engagement dramatically, since:

• the average time for a mobile page to load is 19 seconds (Webpagetest.org, 2016),
• some people are willing to wait only 6-10 seconds for a page on their phone to load (Kissmetrics),
• 50% of visitors are lost after 5 seconds of loading, but
• many users abandoned a page after only 3 seconds (Doubleclick by Google).

With a faster user experience, your visitors are more likely to view your content and relevant media and CTAs, and in turn, engage with your products.

In response to the growing number of website users visiting pages on their mobile devices instead of on their desktops or laptops, Google responded with their open-source project, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which has now become the heart of mobile optimization. AMP, as its name suggests, enables a faster loading period of your pages loaded anywhere on a mobile device, including within other apps, from email, and from social platforms.

Viewers of ads and pages created in AMP format will benefit from the almost instantaneous satisfaction of being able to view their content quickly after clicking, whether it’s from their email app, social media app, or directly from a browser app search. AMP can be used with almost any configuration of media on any platform, including e-commerce sites, without overloading the user’s phone.

To apply AMP to your web pages, a website URL can either be created in, or converted to AMP format. Building an AMP HTML page has been made easy by the Google project; they provide a step-by-step tutorial on exactly how your website administrator can go about making the change, so that all of your pages, particularly those linked from social media, can be viewed without an eye-rolling amount of load time.

According to AdAge’s breakdown, the reason AMP is so much better at being faster than traditional mobile pages is that it allows only the most essential information like cookies to load with each page, and content also isn’t downloaded until the user has it in view on their screen. AMP content is delivered not from the original server, but from the cloud, further enabling a quick delivery after the click.

Once your pages are optimized for mobile, Google will also take load time into account when ranking your pages. That’s good for your organic search results, great for the visitors to your site, and best for the content you’ve worked hard to create. Once everything you have to offer is available to your visitors, all that’s left is for the content you’ve created to enable engagement.

You can test how your site performs on mobile by entering your URL into a Google program that evaluates page load time. The Google service is a starting-out point for you to see where you stand. We can help you implement AMP as well as many other methods for making your website an invaluable tool for visitor engagement and lead conversion. Let’s talk about how your site can benefit from AMP and any other optimization tools. Our upcoming breakfast event will also build on new SEO strategy tools. This time, our HubSpot partner will talk about content pillars. Check it out to learn more!

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