With a total of 61% (Q1 2015)* of UK’s adults using a mobile handset to access the internet, people today consume a large amount of information on their phones. However for many publishers and advertisers on the web, displaying all the required information on such a compact device has proven to be difficult. If a web page takes too long to load its bounce rate increases significantly as loading speeds massively effect the user’s experience.
To compete with the likes of Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, Google went back to the drawing board and after discussions with publishers and technology companies they cobbled up a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The project’s objective is to push the performance of webpages with rich content such as videos, animation and graphics. All these features will work alongside smart ads and load instantaneously. The code used in Accelerated Mobile Pages is designed to be universal, performs on any tablet or phone.
AMP is also Google’s answer to Ad-blockers which have become very popular on many mobile devices proving that unblocked pages demand more bandwidth and have slower loading times. Google hopes that fewer people will use ad blockers if pages load quickly and run smoothly, instead of looking at a loading bar detracting from user experience.
A new open framework, called AMP HTML has been built from existing web technologies and will allow website designers to create light-weight webpages. To demonstrate the performance of a faster mobile web, Google have created this demo:
Similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles it aims to minimise HTTP requests, fully displaying the layout of the document and only downloading images when they’re likely to be seen. Therefore as soon as you tap your finger on the article link there will be no loading bar, the full article will be displayed instantly. However third-party Javascript code cannot work with the new AMP and CSS properties such as animations, filters and transitions are currently banned.
Google have announced that nearly 30 publishers from around the world are working on this project and are planning to integrate the new AMP HTML pages gradually in other products such as Google News. The first technology partners to integrate this new framework will include Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn. For now the project is in preview phase with a few initial publishers such as BuzzFeed, Vox and the Washington Post and more.
*Ofcom - http://media.ofcom.org.uk/facts/
Written by:
Jason | Craig | Michelle | Nick
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