⚡About 5% of worlds leading websites when searched on Google have a small lightning symbol right next to them in the search result. The ⚡ seems to be appearing everywhere and when you click on it, the page loads at blink of an eye.
There is bit of a history on how the lightning bolt aka AMP was invented and why it is extremely important in today’s world. Below is the complete run-down:
In 2014, Google realized that 55% of website traffic comes from iOS and Android. Now, while we are at home or in office, WiFi speeds are decent, however, in today’s busy world, most of us are on road and coffee shops where Internet speeds are super slow. With an average website taking 4.6 seconds to load, Google wanted to come up with a solution.
In 2015, Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Project (AMP) and open-sourced it.
Under the AMP project, Google issued a certain set of guidelines, mostly technical; having no Javascript and ensuring CSS is less than 50kb. Along with these guidelines, Google also whitelisted core websites to allow certain bits of javascript; for eg: you could embed youtube videos under a special tag, and introduced a set of standards for tracking and analytics. The tracking standards now cover all major publishers, including Facebook, Google, Display Ads and everything between.
Once AMP was introduced, everything related to AMP made it a marketeers dream:
- Pages load under a second, always. This means users spend more time reading rather than waiting.
- Tracking enabled marketeers to retarget customers, show specific ads, the whole gamut.
- In addition, Google started prioritizing websites that load fast in their search algorithms. This meant, if your website was AMP compatible, it will rank higher than before.
Getting AMP symbol on your website while not complex, is not simple either. Here are some ways to make it happen:
- WordPress websites: If you are hosting on WordPress, there are a wide variety of plugins that are AMP compatible. These plugins while awesome, at times, make your website look completely different when the results appear in Google search and the move is risky.
- Shopify websites: Shopify has its own app store and a simple search on AMP returns free as well as premium plugins. The premium plugins either come at a single cost or on a month to month basis. Either of them can do the job of getting the lightning bolt.
While out of box solutions seem simple, they can actually have a negative impact on your customers. Remember, that when you first build your website, you spent long hours to get the branding, fonts and user experience perfect, the above plugins mess things up at times.
To really harness the true power of AMP, reach out to us at [email protected], we have over 250k+ pages AMP’ified and our solution is used by some of the best brands in the world, including TuftAndNeedle, Teslanomics, BullsAndCrypto and more.
Click here to contact us and get started right away.
-anurag
