Accelerated Mobile Page Part 1: Introduction

Introduction

Accelerated Mobile Pages are pages built with a specific custom subset of HTML that is built to be extremely fast on mobile sites.

The AMP project is backed by both Google and Twitter, any project backed by two giants like these deserve a closer look.

Any AMP pages are stripped down versions of HTML with very restricted elements you can use. CSS is also restricted, not all properties can be used, as for JavaScript itself none can be used, except the AMP js wich is a library built by the Amp Project which builds the actual AMP page.

The reasoning behind all of this is that now, Google itself will take your AMP page and move it to their server, so when a user requests your amp page through google.com, or the like, they don’t need to hit your servers anymore because google can send them the page itself.

Should I Care

Like most things in the world, it depends. AMP pages are very restrictive, there can be no custom functionality or animation or anything like that its all handles by the AMP library.

However if you are a publisher, blog writter, or your site has anything to do with people reading then yes it would be a good thing to implement.

Since the project is backed by Google it might be a good idea to look into the SEO benefits they might provide.

AMP accesible pages will show up as a carousel at the top of the google search results which means your pages would have first crack at users.

Analytics

One worry of people with Accelerated Mobile Pages is tracking and analytics. Fear not google has already solved that.

One of the requirements of an AMP page is having a rel=canonical tag in the head pointing to the non-amp version of the page. This will link both pages together ensuring all SEO ‘juice’ goes to the correct page.

As for analytics, it’s still not implemented 100% but google has promised that both ads and analytics will be compatible. As of this writting the only analytics is a tracking pixel but they are working on implementing a framework that will work with all tracking platforms.

Next Steps

This is a multipart article since AMP pages are such a big thing to deal with. In the next article we’ll jump into the actual code and what it takes to get a simple amp page up and running.

Keep an eye out for new on AMP pages since it doesn’t look like they will be going anywhere soon.

Read part 2