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Why and How to Boost the Speed of Your Website Through AMP Compliance
In today’s fast digital world, no one has time to wait while the slow-loading pages appear on their mobile phones. Everyone prefers websites and apps that load with lightning speed. As users have a plethora of options to explore, they don’t often wait to switch to another website once they feel that a website is taking forever to load. Consequently, the need for developing fast-loading and more accessible websites became predominant.
How Can I Make My Website Load Quickly?
Since more people are using the internet on their mobile phones and Google is all about enhancing the user experience, Google launched a standard called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in 2015. While it was initially created to speed up the loading of static content, Google AMP has now evolved into something more advanced that allows developers to create full-blown websites that load almost instantly, can be easily accessed anywhere, anytime, and offer a seamless experience to users.
What’s more, AMP is not the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages anymore. Now, it is simply “AMP”. That’s not us saying it but what AMP’s Tech Lead, Malte Ubl announced at AMP Conf ’19. Besides, AMP is supported by various web browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, UC Browser, and more. Meaning, you can now create AMP-compliant websites that will load quickly not just for mobile devices but also for other devices including desktops and tablets.
Do AMP-Compliant Websites Offer Real Benefits to Businesses?
Yes. Since AMP-compliant websites enhance user experience with the improved loading speed, AMP also benefits businesses in different ways. How? Apart from improving the load time of websites significantly, AMP-compliant pages also result in users returning and spending more time on websites. When users come to know that your website loads quickly, they are more likely to visit your website in the future and tap on the links embedded on the website.
That’s not all. AMP also improves the ranking of websites because page speed is one of the major ranking factors. All of this, in turn, boosts the human traffic on your website, increases the user’s engagement rate, and decreases the bounce rate simultaneously.
One example of “business success with AMP” you can find online is The Washington Post. This daily newspaper website posted 1000+ articles in AMP every day and reported the real benefits of being compliant with AMP as it saw an 88% improvement in load time with AMP content and 23% growth in the number of mobile search users who returned within seven days.
How Do I Know If My Website is AMP Compliant?
To make things easier for the web developer community, Google also launched the AMP Test tool the year after it introduced AMP. To test your website for AMP compliance, you can now use the enhanced AMP testing tool. This mobile-friendly tool is designed to:
- Analyze your AMP web pages with the help of a real Googlebot
- Test the validity of the AMP Markup
- Check the structured data on the page for AMP compliance
- Highlight the problematic source code for easy debugging
- Share the snapshot of results with your team to talk about issues and rectify them
- See the live preview of how a webpage may appear in search results (only if the page is AMP-valid)
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What Are The Steps To Test My Website For AMP Compliance?
It is quite easy to test an AMP page and check its validity if you follow the steps mentioned below:
- Step 1: Visit the official AMP Test page offered by Google.
- Step 2: Enter the URL of the AMP page and click on the Test URL If your AMP page has a canonical version, prefer entering the URL of the canonical version to get a more detailed AMP Test report.
- Step 3: Analyze the AMP status report displayed by the AMP Test tool for validity.
- Step 4: If the report shows warnings and errors, check them one by one. See what issues the page has, share it with your team if you want to, and open the code explorer to make the necessary changes.
- Step 5: Check if your page has structured data and locate the structured data link. Then, click on it to use the Structured Data Testing Tool to test the structured data.
If there are no warnings and errors and your AMP page is valid, the tool will show you a live preview of the AMP page as mentioned above.
The most common AMP issues include content mismatch, image with non-recommended size, domain mismatch, missing embedded video, crawl issue, URL not found, server error, etc.
How Should I Analyze The AMP Status Report?
As soon as you will be shown the AMP status report, you might freak out at first if there are so many warnings and errors in front of your eyes. However, everything can be fixed; so, stay calm.
At the beginning of the report, you will see all the non-compliant AMP pages of your site that are categorized by issues (valid + warnings + error). Click on the issue to see which pages have that specific issue.
When checking the AMP status report, you should look for two things:
- Zero errors
- Number of AMP pages
When it comes to fixing, prioritize errors over warnings because warnings are just suggestions. It is recommended to start fixing in the order the issues are mentioned. Alternatively, you can start by fixing common errors and then go ahead to sort out the errors that are unique to AMP pages.
The number of AMP pages in the report should be equal to the number of AMP pages on your website. If the count is less on the report, see which AMP pages are missing and find out why. Once you know, fix this issue as well.
Wrapping Up
Ensuring that your website offers a lightning-fast experience is not just an option or obligation for businesses anymore. To offer enhanced user experience and stay on the competition’s edge, it has become a necessity for businesses to develop AMP-compliant websites and test them regularly for AMP compliance so that their chances of ranking higher, attracting more traffic, and retaining visitors increase substantially.
Once you do these three things (rank, attract, and retain), you will notice improvements in conversions and bottom line just like many other businesses have experienced after making their websites AMP-compliant.