Since February last year, Google has been keen on promoting its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project which enables users to quickly access articles on mobile devices. Now the feature is rolling out to Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web.
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project is an open source initiative that aims to provide users faster web browsing experience when going online on their mobile devices. In order to make mobile browsing more responsive, Google is pushing for more open framework AMP HTML, which focuses on efficiency and performance.
AMP loads similarly to traditional HTML pages, but the library includes common core functions and limits features of HTML that are slow loading on mobile browsers. This is especially important for modern smartphones as the bounce rate, the rate users will prematurely leave a slow loading site, is approximately 58 percent for sites loading in 10 seconds or more. As the load times increase, more users give up and tend to browse other sites.
AMP heavily features caches for common elements in sites. To reduce load on potentially weaker servers, loading the most recent cached version stored in the cloud ensures that load times are minimized as end users have multiple sources for the information they are requesting.
The initial technical specification was announced in October 2015 and is currently being used by thousands of content platforms and publishers, including Twitter, Google, Wordpress, and Chartbeat, to efficiently support mobile browsers.
By using the AMP project, Google News aims to deliver the best stories with the right user interface for their end users. Included with the new update to Google News is a new AMP carousel, which is a container that can hold up to 14 headlines for quick browsing. Any AMP supported content sites are marked with the AMP lightning bolt icon indicating that the external content site supports the AMP protocol.
Performance wise, AMP has been benchmarked to show that AMP-enabled sites load in just 25 percent of the time compared to non-AMP sites. Mobile bandwidth is also significantly reduced, since AMP also includes compression and efficient streaming algorithms, reducing transfer size by up to 10 percent on media rich pages. More publishers are joining the AMP project as new features are rolled out, including monetization options and AMP-enabled traffic analytics, ad revenue, and subscription management options. New features are added to the project rapidly as more publishers join.
Photo: Spencer E. Holtaway | Flickr
