AMP : A powerful HTML framework
Hello everyone, so I suppose you must have been hearing this term for the first time, but let me tell you, you have been using this very frequently if you read the news regularly on your phone. Let me show you some news…
So what’s common in them? You must have observed nowadays when you click on a news link from google search, the page loads within milliseconds, irrespective of your internet speed. Basically AMP means Accelerated Mobile Pages. So the bolt logo beside the news company name which you can see in the pictures above define the pages as AMP. So by now you must have got that AMP is a technology to boost your page loading speed. Well to some extent, but there is more to it.
If we go by history AMP was launched in 2015 and started appearing in search results in 2016. But it was very limited and not of many benefits but the recent developments to it have made it more fascinating and especially news houses have been benefitted a lot. India Today a leading media company, got an increase of 23% revenue on its AMP pages as compared to non-amp pages. Mr Nagpal, India Today’s Head of Technologies, says “AMP has helped our brand reach a large untapped set of engaged users in addition to offering superior monetization. AMP is a must for any publisher looking to grow their digital business.”
Speaking on the technical part, AMP is an open-source framework developed by Google in collaboration with Twitter to create better, faster experiences on the mobile web. At its core, the framework allows you to build lightweight experiences for mobile by simplifying the HTML and following streamlined CSS rules. To ensure fast page load on mobile platforms, AMP restricts the use of any Javascript. The only exception is for AMP scripts, which are optimized with page load acceleration in mind. Google caches your AMP site on its own servers which makes the browsers load your site real quick.
And it’s super easy to create AMP pages by just following the documentation at amp.dev. By now you must have had a doubt that if you restrict JS, how can we add extra features. Well, what AMP takes away with JS, it provides with a library of easy-to-implement components. You can create animations, load content dynamically, modify the layout, and more using AMP’s vast component library. There is Instagram like stories, youtube, twitter and many other components which will add appeal to your site.
Are there any disadvantages of AMP? Well, not a disadvantage but kind of different use cases. Generally, e-commerce like sites would be difficult to create and manage using AMP but websites like News, Portfolios get the big advantage of great SEO, faster loading etc. So, all kind of sites can’t get much from AMP but still to some cases it can be very beneficial.
That’s all for a piece of brief information about AMP, you can refer to amp.dev for more awesome tutorials and success stories or I would love to have a discussion over a cup of coffee.
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