According to statistics from techjury.net in 2021, nearly 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile browsers. That means in 1000 potential customers that visit your site, half of them do so via mobile devices. This goes to show how important it is to enhance your mobile pages to drive more traffic and optimize your SEO efforts.
If you’re unsure of how to optimize your website on mobile platforms, worry no more as you’ve found the right post. In this article, you will be thoroughly introduced to a tech-based solution called AMP which aims to optimize the mobile experience for your customers through increasing page speed.
1. What is AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a web component framework, which aims to enhance user experience with a faster loading speed of mobile pages through storing website information in Google’s AMP Cache.
AMP pages always come high on the list of priorities of Google on mobile devices because these pages take less time to crawl. In other words, with AMP, your website is going to be user-oriented and mobile-friendly, which are important factors for Google to rank your site.
2. Pros and Cons of AMP
2.1. Pros of AMP
– Enhance user engagement
The loading time of AMP pages is below one second, according to Instapage, which means when your customers enter your AMP pages, they’re going to get the information they need immediately. Therefore, the interaction time between customers and your site is longer and they have more time to learn about your website and products.
Besides, the fact that your page could load instantly right after clicking is already a plus for most customers. The initial positive impression is a motivation for them to keep looking at the products and services that you’re selling on your AMP pages.
– Maximize your profit
As reported by neilpatel.com, 1 second of delayed loading time might lead to 7% of conversion loss. Therefore, if you want to optimize your profit and increase ROI, please make sure that your pages meet customers’ needs in terms of loading speed.
AMP could be the ideal solution to handle the issue of page speed as it aims to accelerate the loading time of your pages, whether it be advertising pages, landing pages, or your home website.
– Improve your SEO
As mentioned earlier, good user experience (UX) and page speed, and mobile-friendliness are crucial ranking factors for Google, and they are also what AMP aims to serve. Therefore, by taking advantage of AMP, you can send a message to search engines that your pages are qualified for higher places on mobile result pages.
2.2. Cons of AMP
– Unable to add Javascript from a third party
AMP contains HTML tags that hinder external elements and therefore, you can’t use Javascript from a third party. This means that you can no longer use analysis and tracking tools for your marketing campaigns.
– Hinders Google Analytics
Google uses the cached version of the AMP page instead of accessing the server. This is one of the reasons why AMP pages load really fast. Although caching allows your pages to load faster, Google analytics is then unable to track your traffic. You can still use Google Analytics tracking, however, if you configure it and apply your own tracking code to your AMP pages.
3. Which website should Use AMP?
While AMP is beneficial, it’s not always a must for all websites. And the benefits offered by AMP are more relevant to some sites than others. Let’s look at some points below to determine which websites are best fits to use AMP to optimize their mobile experience for visitors.
- AMP is commonly used by websites that contain a large number of articles or blog posts. Therefore, if most of your published content are not blog posts or articles, then AMP might not be needed.
- Also, AMP is not necessary if you have many articles or blog pages but are already utilizing CDN, which is a group of servers that aims to optimize our page performance with functions such as image hosting, caching, and lazy loading.
- Besides, if you are taking advantage of external tools for marketing or traffic tracking, then you want to perform testing to make sure these plug-ins work with your AMP pages. Because as mentioned early in this article, AMP tends to hinder Javascript or tools to make pages clearer and easy-to-read for site visitors.
- In case you already published a mobile version of your pages or adopted methods such as adjusted CSS code to optimize your mobile website experience, then it’s recommended that you do not use AMP. This is because another AMP page published might lead to complications for your page’s performance.
4. How Do I Install AMP On a Website?
4.1. Websites on Shopify
To install AMP on the Shopify platform, you will need to use third-party plug-ins. Let’s look at some Shopify apps that allow you to publish your AMP pages.
AMP by Shop Sheriff is a feature-rich plug-in that offers Shopify website owners many options for customization. This app allows you to utilize AMP best practices, provides detailed guidance, and warns you of any potential issues before trying out a function.
FireAMP’s aims to simplify the setting up of AMP for your Shopify website. This is clearly demonstrated in the app’s interface and features.
A highly recommended tool for Shopify merchants would be SEO Booster as it not only allows you to install AMP but offers many other advanced features to optimize your SEO to the fullest at a reasonable price.
With SEO Booster, you can publish AMP for all your pages including home, product, collection, blog, and blog post pages. Just go to “AMP” in the left-sidebar and enable the Publish button and then you’ve already done the job. No need for coding or technical skills.
You can also see the preview of your AMP pages on mobile browsers on the right side of the app interface. Personal technical support is available from SEO Booster if you wish to adjust the design of the AMP page.
Add AMP by SEO Booster for FREE
4.2. Websites on WordPress
AMP is quite easily set up on WordPress but It’s important to note that it might be more complicated to remove AMP once you decide that it’s not for you. If you want to uninstall AMP completely, you need to set up 301 redirects to your original pages.
However, if a large portion of your traffic comes from mobile browsers, then it’s quite sensible to consider installing AMP for your WordPress pages. Similar to Shopify, there are many plug-ins on WordPress to help you set up AMP for your website. Let’s take a look at some notable tools below:
This powerful plug-in developed by the Official AMP project supports the serving of AMP pages, provides AMP validation features, allows you to automatically generate AMP-valid markup, and many more!
Boasting a rating of 4.2 out of 5, this WordPress plug-in for AMP is highly recommended for site owners who wish to turn their web into a mobile application and run it for digital marketing. The developers also provide high-class support to make sure you’ve got a smooth and productive experience with the app.
4.3. Websites on Drupal
Installing AMP would be highly beneficial for websites’ SEO on Drupal. To set up an AMP module in Drupal is quite simple. You just need to do 3 steps: Download, Enable, and Configure!
These three steps are clearly demonstrated in this detailed instruction from Specbee.com. Just follow them and you’ll be able to install AMP for your Drupal website shortly.
5. How to Track Working Status of AMP pages?
After AMP has been set up, you should examine the working status of your AMP pages often to ensure they are valid and error-free. The fastest measure to check the validity of an AMP link is using Google’s AMP test.
If you have more AMP pages, you can take advantage of This FREE tool which allows you to verify up to 100 AMP URLs in bulk.
If you wish to track your AMP’s working status daily, weekly, or monthly, take a look at this tool called Free Bulk AMP Validator from regrowth. It allows you to auto-keep track of up to a thousand AMP links.
Finally, if you want to verify the validity of your unlimited AMP pages, some advanced paid tools such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or DeepCrawlmight will be able to do the job.
Conclusion
In short, AMP could serve as a useful solution to increase page load speed and create an uninterrupted mobile experience for your site visitors. While this could ultimately benefit your SEO and improve rankings, it’s important to note that it’s not the only way, and the benefits brought by AMP are more applicable to certain types of websites.
It’s recommended that you do some research beforehand to determine whether AMP is the right option for your website. If yes, just take advantage of the plug-ins and tools introduced in this article depending on your platform to implement AMP and track its validity status often. That’s how you can leverage this web framework effectively to make your website more mobile-friendly and user-oriented.