So the Internet is all abuzz with the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. This is a project that has been spearheaded by some of the biggest tech firms and publishers. The catalyst has been the steady increase of content consumption on mobile devices. Think about it – how often are you reading articles, getting your news or watching videos on your smartphone or tablet? For most people, the answer is an awful lot.

The issue is that a lot of sites are not mobile-friendly – you have to wait a long time for pages to load, the content is wider than the screen, it doesn’t scroll properly. There are a whole raft of problems that users deal with every day in consuming mobile content. The net result is that users then bounce off of sites, and they lose trust in search results, since the search engine is what brought them to that site in the first place.

AMP looks to solve this problem by making pages load really fast on mobile devices and be easy to read. All of the fancy code-heavy elements like headers, footers, sliders are stripped out. It’s a new form of HTML language (sorry to be technical), and people like Google are saying that this is going to change the way we view content on our phones.

What Does AMP Look Like?

WordPress have been behind the AMP movement, so it is not surprising that they have already launched a plugin to enable AMP on WordPress sites. We loaded it onto one of our client’s sites and this is the result:

This is the “normal” responsive version of this blog post.

How Will People See AMPs?

Users won’t immediately see the AMP version of a page if they navigate to it on their mobile devices. Delivery of AMP content will be handled by AMP consumers such as Google Search. What this means is that if you do a search on Google from a mobile device, Google may chose to show you the AMP if it feels this is the best format for you to view the content.

Will AMP Effect Google Search Results?

Since this is literally brand new, nobody can answer this question definitively –  we will need to wait to see if we start seeing more AMP content in mobile searches. However, since Google has been a driving force behind the AMP Project, I think we can safely say that enabling AMP where applicable is, in all likelihood, going to give you a boost in mobile ranking.

Does Everyone Need To Start Using AMP?

Definitely not – if you are a small business with a 5 page website, then its not necessary. If you blog regularly, and have a lot of content on your site that is aimed towards a wider user base, then you should be speaking to your web developer about AMP.