Google Announces Accelerated Mobile Pages Project To Speed Up Mobile Web

Today, Google has announced a new open source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to speed up mobile browsing and assists publishers and advertisers to increase visitors and improve public exposure of their content.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source framework for building lighter webpages that are optimized for mobile devices. This new framework is Google’s way of acknowledging rival initiatives such as Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, both of which offer fast-loading articles by cutting out cruft.

Modern web pages use many JavaScript frameworks and images, which results in huge size and takes longer to load. According to Google, whenever a page takes too long to load, readers tend to go elsewhere. In a response to the slow loading of webpages, the company has developed AMP HTML, a multi-platform framework based on existing technologies. In theory the effort should allow “lightweight” mobile webpages which nevertheless have video, animation, still graphics, and ads.

By using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), publishers can use any existing content management systems and host them in their own servers. The AMP initiative involves a new caching strategy in which publishers can take advantage of Google’s caching servers for faster distribution. Google is also offering their own caching servers for free to use.

An initial specification (https://github.com/ampproject) is being made available today through GitHub, and a demo (http://g.co/ampdemo) has been produced for Google Search. Other Google products like Google News will incorporate AMP over time, and the company has signed up just under 30 publishers, plus other partners like Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, and Adobe Analytics.

AMP is also a response to the rise of ad blockers. It is no secret that webpages with ads demand significantly more bandwidth and take much longer to load. Google hopes that by decreasing the page load time it can convince people to remove ad blockers.

The faster pages will appear when accessed through the open web, for instance through Google searches or links. Google is also partnering with tech companies such as Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, so perhaps we will eventually see AMP pages when opening links in their respective apps. The program is just in a preview phase for now, with BuzzFeed, Vox, and the Washington Post among the initial partners.

Although most of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising, the company is promising to support a wide variety of ad formats and networks, along with subscriptions and other paywalls.

Source: Google Blog