Why Does a Website Need Accelerated Mobile Pages?

Offering website visitors, the best possible experience is critical for any business online, especially for local businesses, and AMP allows the web pages of the load faster to ensure customers aren't kept waiting for information about the business. In fact, according to a ThinkwithGoogle stat, conversions of a business can fall by 20% for every second delay in page load time. A top-notch user experience is everything for a business to get conversions and boost its revenue and in terms of visibility online, Google is incorporating the Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal from 2021 which they have labelled as the page experience signal. The 3 main factors of this soon-to-be ranking signal are loading (Largest Contentful Paint), Interactivity (First Input Delay) and Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift) and as per Milestone Research, AMP can contribute significantly to better the page experience score of a website or its most important pages and send out the right signals in Google's mobile-first index which will help the page rank better. An absolute, the page experience signal will also be an inclusion in Google's E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness) and the Quality Rater's Guidelines if not already, which is used as a benchmark by the search engine to perceive and rank a brand based on the factors highlighted by it. With AMP sure to improve the page experience signal of a web page, it's sure to increase its chances of climbing up the rankings, which means more visibility and increase in impressions, clicks, click-through rate and conversions for a business. Overall, giving customers the best user experience on a website should be the focus.

How does AMP work?

In a nutshell, AMP basically prioritizes the preferred content of the website visitor and strips down the HTML code to ensure fast delivery of the pages and enhance the user experience. In addition, for repeat website visitors, Google AMP cache helps retrieve the page faster. There are 3 basic parts of AMP: AMP HTML: This is basically HTML code that is limited and optimized for AMP AMP JS: This is the JavaScript framework for AMP without the inclusion of third-party JS which are executed through iFrames AMP CDN: This Content Delivery Network is optimized for AMP and caches the page for optimized loading when a user returns to the page

How do sites implement AMP correctly?

That said, let's get into details of how AMP works and how it improves the load time of a web page and improves the page user experience signal of a webpage: Once the pages have been optimized for AMP, they need to be validated for any errors and configuration issues and this can be done using an AMP validation tools, like Google's AMP Test.

Example of AMP vs. Non-AMP

What does Milestone have and do that would help succeed at AMP?

As part of the mobile-first technology, Milestone CMS offers businesses the opportunity of converting their highest conversion pages to AMP to enhance the user experience with fast-loading pages. Using Milestone CMS, businesses can configure AMP pages, validate them before going live and track the impact of the web pages that have been converted to AMP.

AMP Implementation

Milestone will help the business choose which pages need to be converted to AMP. Generally, the pages with highest engagement and conversions are made in AMP to ensure that potential customers have all the required information in a flash. Using Milestone CMS, the pages are then converted to AMP to ensure it meets the requirements and the right annotation tags are set up for crawl visibility. Learn more about AMP Implementation AMP is perceived as a stripped-down version of a webpage, but Milestone offers the below features to ensure that the web page is interactive and engaging and ensures that the UI between AMP and a mobile page is consistent, and there is no compromise on the look and feel. Listed below are some the features that businesses can choose to have on their AMP:
All the above-listed features can be integrated without compromising on the page speed of the web page. The team then sets up annotation tags for crawl visibility. Here's an example:

Validating AMP

Milestone then validates the AMP chosen by the business before publishing them. This is done using an AMP testing tool, like Google's AMP Test. The team checks for incorrect markup or HTML errors, if the JavaScript is supported, incorrect cross-domain referencing, invalid structured data elements, use of deprecated tags, or invalid CSS.

Tracking impact of AMP

We show businesses the efficacy of AMP is a priority for Milestone and we track the impact of AMP once it is published. This is done by:

• Setting up canonical tags for the page to be indexed
• Setting up a GTM (Google Tag Manager) container for AMP
• Creating events and tags to be tracked based on the AMP component
• Defining report variables to the business

To give businesses the best possible mobile-first experience, Milestone combines the benefits of AMP and Progressive Web Apps. While AMP will help with fast page load speed, the other advanced functionalities of PWA will ensure that your website visitors are getting the best of both worlds. Consider AMP as the entry to PWA. While AMP offers stellar page load speed, we use PWA for our clients to re-engage with their customers using push notifications and other features.