Not satisfied just with giving mobile-friendly websites higher rankings in search results, Google is now backing a project called AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages. And Google will start rewarding AMP’d websites in early 2016. Twitter, Pinterest and other publishers are following suit as the speed-trend takes off.
If you’ve ever loaded a sslloooowwww website with your mobile phone, even if it is technically “mobile friendly,” you know how frustrating it can be to wait and wait for the content. Google has a well known “need for speed” and figures most mobile phone users do too when they go searching online.
In a recent announcement, Google said it will “begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google Search as early as late February, 2016. Twitter will begin to experiment with linking to AMP content provided by publishers early in 2016. Pinterest, currently testing publisher AMP pages in their iOS and Android apps, found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.”
Does advertising have anything to do with this? For sure! Expect to see AMP ads zipping onto your mobile screen in 2016 as well. Of course this is how Google makes money, but it will also be a boon to mobile phone users who surely don’t want to waste time waiting for paid ads to load!
The popular content management system WordPress, which produces pages on millions of sites including ours, is also jumping on the bandwagon and has launched a new AMP plugin which it is encouraging webmasters to start using right away and help them get the bugs out.
Pretty soon you won’t be waiting at all for your mobile pages to load! If you want to learn more or get your web pages AMP’d, contact us today.