We’re in the business of constantly challenging how people find your business on mobile and discover your products and services. In the process, we are redefining customer service and positioning you as an industry leader. Can you do business better?
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is the latest in shaping and improving customer experience online. With AMP, Google seeks to revolutionize how the world becomes increasingly connected, now primarily on mobile search. In the digital marketplace, mobile is the platform of choice, and it is where today’s market lives, shops, and looks up a wide variety of products, services and directions often on-the-go. For your business to respond to the market’s fast-changing needs, it has to be found first across platforms, most importantly, on mobile. With Google’s AMP, your business will be able to provide complete customer experience and support the mobile-centric user experience.
AMP Basics
Google seeks to improve user experience on mobile and better connect users with content they need, and content that is optimized to inspire meaningful interactions. AMP is a new way of building sites, opting for lightweight design and lightning fast loading speed on mobile devices. With this, a new breed of websites gives users a customer experience that is ‘made for mobile’, and rich in content especially built and optimized for viewing, consuming and interacting with on mobile devices.
The Technology Behind AMP
AMP is built on the principle of pure speed and best possible viewing on mobile. By taking the core of HTML, using a streamlined version of CSS, and running on an off-the-shelf JavaScript library from Google, lightweight versions of these three essential website-building platforms are used to engineer sites and pages created for mobile – visually a whole lot different from the full desktop version we were used to for so long, but just as functional and powerfully converting.
AMP’s goal is to make content more widely accessible to users, and foster better engagement on mobile where many now live on. The current practice in search is indexing, wherein a search engine such as Google tracks your website and includes it in search results when your content is a match for the keywords and search phrases entered by the user. To do this, Google fetches content from your website; but not anymore with AMP.
Because AMP is a platform for building a new breed of mobile web pages, content published is designed to be heavily cached. This lets Google host your content, instead of fetching it. For your customers, this means easier and guaranteed access to content they need – a risk previously associated with host servers.
Here’s what AMP is made of:
AMP HTML: AMP uses HTML, but with a few restrictions to improve performance and use custom AMP properties. Regular HTML tags are still mostly present, but some are replaced with more AMP-specific ones. These custom elements allow for common patterns to be easily implemented across different mobile sites.
AMP JS: Google AMP’s JavaScript library supports faster rendering of AMP HTML pages. The AMP JS library has all of AMP’s top performance features, manages resource loading, and offers custom tags for fast rendering.
AMP Cache: With AMP, Google offers a caching option through a proxy-based content delivery network that delivers all valid AMP documents. This works by fetching AMP HTML pages, caching them and improving mobile pages. This can be used to present cached AMP HTML pages to mobile users, and confirm that the pages meet AMP HTML standards, and work perfectly on mobile without any glitch.
Why Switch from Responsive Mobile Pages to AMP?
Many websites are now built with Responsive Web Design (RWD), allowing these to flow smoothly when switching from desktop to mobile view. At this point, many business owners find AMP redundant, or think it’s just an update to RWD. But AMP is no mere update; it’s something of its own, and it is more than merely responding to a change of views requested.
While both RWD and AMP use HTML, CSS and JavaScript as building blocks, they do so a little differently. Essentially, AMP uses a lighter, stripped down version of the three to build sites that load fast and flow on mobile in a way that content looks as if it was conceived and designed just for mobile, or for mobile first.
Both AMP and RWD seek to improve the user experience and better support the mobile-centric lifestyle of the smartphone generation and smart, modern consumer. But their common thread ends there.
Custom-Tailored vs. Flexible User Experience
Responsive Web Design (RWD) builds and designs a website that works across devices, easily switching from a desktop computer to a mobile device. RWD targets flexibility.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) promotes a made for mobile user experience, providing a custom-tailored user experience at the onset by encouraging website owners and developers to build mobile-ready pages on its platform for fast delivery to mobile users.
While RWD defines optimal user experience based on flexibility of access and flow across devices, AMP’s priority is mobile, catering to the market that lives on the go and depends on the functions of their mobile devices to match their lifestyle.
Current vs. Redesigned Website
AMP is available both as a building platform, and as a code that can be added to a current site. Regardless, when pages are published on mobile, both are AMP pages, complete with all the elements of content built especially for mobile, and for mobile first. For websites that are already performing well and just need to incorporate AMP to stay on top, adding the code to the existing site means not having to build a new site from scratch.
In the case of RWD, adopting it requires replacing a current site. This requires a re-design to accommodate elements that enable it to flow seamlessly across different types of devices. Clearly, the costs associated with replacing a website, and simply adding a code to a well-performing platform can be very different.
Static Content vs. Custom Applications
While RWD smoothly integrates elements such as web forms and custom applications, and make these part of the mobile experience, AMP – being relatively newer – can only accommodate static content, such as news articles, landing pages, and blog entries, among others at the moment.
However, AMP is constantly changing and growing along with innovations to the mobile user experience – all in response to how the market consumes and interacts with content on their mobile devices. With these, upgrades are always being developed to better support life on mobile platforms.
Innovating on the Mobile User Experience with AMP
New technology seeks to improve our current way of doing this. As business owners, the goal is to ensure each customer’s happiness and satisfaction; when this is achieved, business succeeds, and apart from profit, your brand of customer service gives rise to a following among happy customers whose trust you earn, and feedback use to grow your business.
For these happy customers to find you in the digital marketplace, and set you apart as their choice, your website must be a place of meaningful interactions with your products and services, and their customer experience pleasant and replicable for potential customers. As the market moves online to locate the products and services they need, Google’s search algorithm constantly changes to respond to user feedback, push up sites that not only satisfy every user’s search criteria, but also provides them with a good customer experience once they are directed to said site their search matches. This means that being found by search users is just the first step. To rank well in future searches and avoid being pushed down, or eliminated by Google in the search results it supplies, your site has to contain not just content that is relevant, but flows well and promotes ease of viewing across devices – now, on mobile, in particular.
RWD may satisfy the requirement of seamless flow across devices, but it lacks AMP’s native speed. Because AMP pages are built especially for mobile, and for mobile first, speed and user experience is guaranteed to be optimized for mobile use. AMP is now the standard, not just for mobile-friendliness, but mobile use itself.
The Need for AMP
Your business has to be as mobile as the market these days, and AMP is here to support that. AMP runs on speed native to mobile, allowing content to be published and optimized for mobile interaction in the fastest manner possible. With an AMP site, your business improves customer service by being found easier on mobile, and serving your customers with content they can easily interact with on their mobile devices.
With increased mobile optimization, the easier it is for your business to connect with potential customers, set yourself apart from the competition, and foster a conducive space for shopping your products or subscribing to your services on mobile devices, and amidst busy, fast-paced lifestyles. With AMP, you can be the standard for online customer service, and in effect, convert more leads, bring in more sales, and grow your business.