Should You Be Using AMP?

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a project that aims at increasing the speed of page load times on mobile. Most notably it is backed by Google who uses mostly AMP results for it’s news carousel at the top of mobile search pages, as below.

Gold AMP Carousel

Is it OK because your website isn’t news focused? Well, not anymore it’s not. A few months ago, Google mentioned that they would be rolling out AMP results into the main search rankings – and according to numerous sources, people are starting to see them appearing in search results.

If you’re running a WordPress website, you’ll be pleased to know that there are plugins out there, that can easily add this functionality to your site (which is simply adding /amp to the end of your pages). However, getting into the news carousel (the holy grail) is much harder as you’ll need structured data too (and most likely will need to be part of Google News). Saying that, from my own personal experience, it seems like it’s only selected publishers who seem to be part of the ‘inner circle’ that appear in the holy grail.

Moving away from Google, Microsoft’s Bing App will now support AMP too, which according to Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager looking after the integration of AMP at Bing, ‘we started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages’.

Even though it’s unlikely to get you any quick wins, it’s likely AMP will only continue to grow, so if you can install it on your website with relative ease, e.g. install a plugin, then you should do it – if not, then I’d recommend you start looking into it.