With over 60% of traffic coming from mobile devices, mobile speed is super critical when it comes to search rankings and higher organic conversions.
Early 2015, Google introduced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Project), a project that makes your website load under a second. More importantly, for websites that are AMP compatible, Google’s search page pre-caches them; the result: when user clicks on a result, the pages in blink of an eye, usually under 300ms.
Today, there are over 4+ billion AMP pages, and every major content provider such as WordPress or e-commerce provider such as Shopify offers AMP compatible websites, most of the times, it’s free.
Now, free comes at a cost. As product people, we spend lots of time branding our websites, making sure the fonts are correct, styling the top navigation bar, fine tuning the layout, getting the footer right, adding that extra width to the button, we <3 the pages that we build.
The de-facto AMP plugins however, offer a very reduced experience.
WordPress AMP plugin: The most popular plugin in the market for WordPress websites, also has the most risk. The internals of this plugin are straight-forward:
– The plugin uses a set of “standard” templates.
– Reads your website posts and pages from the DB.
– Adds those pages to the AMP template.
The above process makes your website AMP compatible, however, you end up losing quite a few things in this process:
1. The pages no longer have your same branding and UI/UX layout that you spent so long building.
2. When user visits your website from Google, the AMP page shows them a specific experience, however, when they click to learn more, they are directed to the full version, which is completely different than your AMP version.
3. For users who are used to your branding experience, when coming from Google, they see branding of a website that is completely unfamiliar to them.
The video above showcases difference between the free plugin that comes with WordPress and the pages built by WebFives. Notice how the free plugin removes all the branding experience, while WebFives maintains the same experience to the original website.
Trust is the most important thing when it comes to online behavior and as a product owner, its your responsibility to build it, offering same experience between AMP and non-AMP pages is the first step towards it.
At WebFives, we help build that trust by providing a seamless experience between AMP and non-AMP pages. Founded by engineers who worked at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we have over 250K+ pages AMP’ed and big brands such as TuftAndNeedle trust us to get higher conversions.
