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According to the statistics, more than the 80% of the internauts use mobile devices to surf the Internet, and we all tend to leave a page if it isn't loaded within the first three seconds. In order to improve the page loading speed on mobile, Google has developed the Google AMP project (https://www.ampproject.org/).


In this article we'll cover the following subjects:


What is Google AMP

Google presented its open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages project back in 2015: based on open-source code libraries employing already existing technologies, its objective is to create light and high-performing  pages and adverts which can be easily loaded on any device. 


In practice, AMP pages are still based on HTML, CSS and Javascript, but they ignore all the secondary elements which can make the classical web pages more difficult to load and only focus on the most important contents and functions. AMP pages are then stored on the Google cache and loaded more quickly on mobile devices.


AMP pages are 10 times lighter than normal pages and therefore need less than half a second to be loaded.


Why you should use Google AMP

As we said, the contents loading speed is crucial to keep our visitors on our website.


Moreover, Google tends to give a higher ranking to AMP pages for the users who perform online searches on mobile. Not only Google reports on top of the search results the AMP pages, it also creates a carousel with the results on top of the SERP, the search engine result page.



To sum up, the most important advantages of using Google AMP are:  

  • improved loading speed;
  • improved SEO;
  • reduced data roaming usage for visitor of AMP pages;
  • reduced bounce rate, i.e. the relation between the users accessing a page and those leaving it without browsing any other content;
  • easy implementation.


Who you should use Google AMP

As explained AMP pages remove all the accessory elements which can slow down the loading speed, thus favoring simplest structures. 

This technology is then particularly useful for the websites having a lot of textual contents, such as news websites and blogs. In fact, most online magazines already use this kind of pages to display their contents.


How to implement Google AMP

Implementing Google AMP on your Blog and taking advantage of this technology is really simple:

  • Go to Step 3- Sitemap, select the Special Page Blog: Article Page and select on Edit, or double-click on it.
  • Activate the Create Google AMP pages including Blog contents option: in this way, an AMP page will be created alongside the normal version for each article. 
  • Use the Google AMP header picture option to import an image file to be used as AMP pages header instead of the regular one.


Some clarifications:

  • AMP pages are really simple: a part from the header picture and the contents, they display a bar reporting the domain and a link to the complete version of the page.
  • Because of the restrictions, AMP pages never display the side blocks, the slideshows are recreated using a specific element and some kinds of links are substituted with a link to the complete version of the page.
  • Because Google loads AMP pages on its own servers in HTTPS, the whole Website and the possible resources linked to the Blog need to be HTTPS as well, in order for the technology to work properly.