What’s the Alternative To AMP & Optimizing Mobile Sites
AMP stands for the accelerated mobile pages. These are the lightweight pages designed for mobile users so that they can enjoy a faster experience of the web pages to read and get engaged. Google gives more preference to the AMPs optimized for mobile users; however, it is set to change in the upcoming year. When developing a new website, you may think if it is worth creating accelerated mobile pages or not. Reading this post until the end can help you learn more about accelerated mobile pages. Besides, you can also get to know about its alternatives. Let’s dig deeper!
What Is Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)?
AMP is a Google-backed project that integrates across a range of Google products. AMP is not an SEO factor itself, but the speed is. AMP offers a fast and reliable web experience wherein, users can load pages faster. If you have created the AMP version of your website pages, you want to determine what impact it has on the users and how it enhances the experience and visibility of your website.
Alternatives That Can Eliminate the Need for AMP
Big content publishers, such as BuzzFeed and Vox have sufficient resources to develop their own custom AMP alternatives. However, not everyone has the resources to do so. However, publishers can replace the need for the AMPs by focusing on a few important things discussed in the below-given lists:
Related Article: How to Increase Organic Traffic in 2022
1: Optimize Your Site for Core Web Vitals
You can ensure the better performance of your web pages for both search rankings and user experience by complying with Google’s core web vital metrics. By doing so, you can replace AMP as the top-ranking factor. In the first place, you need to set up the real user monitoring, so that you can obtain your CWV score in real-time. Also, you can determine where the problem is coming from and take prompt action in resolving the error.
2: User Engagement & Interactivity
Keeping your users engaged helps you in securing your spot at the top of the search results and harvesting the most of your advertising endeavors. Quick loading time is not the only factor that yields a positive user experience. There are several things that can boost user engagement and interactivity, such as:
• Infinite scroll (new articles will keep uploading as you go down scrolling the page).
• Instant swipe (enables you to jump to the next article with a single swipe across the page).
• Related articles (you can find a myriad of the articles on a similar topic)
Including these, there are several other engaging options, that can boost your user’s experience.
3: Ease to Setup
Simplicity is one of the most favored advantages that keeps publishers continue using it. Setting up AMP pages doesn’t require much technical expertise or costly development. However, you can set up simple mobile-optimized templates via Word press plugins and eliminate the need for the AMP pages.
4: Preparing Mobile-First Index
After the announcement of Google to prioritize the mobile-first index, AMPs become more popular among the publishers. It means, your Desktop website will not be leading anymore and you need to switch to a mobile website that will take over the role. In such a case, you need to create a mobile-friendly website that loads faster, both on mobile and Desktop. This practice can be implemented as an alternative for AMPs.
FAQs
Is AMP Important For SEO?
While AMP is not a ranking factor of the web pages, loading speed certainly is. In 2021, it became one of the most crucial ranking factors that can give many advantages to the SEO of your website. Load time betterments are quite sizeable. If the median loading time of a webpage is less than one second, it goes well with Google’s core web vitals. Furthermore, it also improves the experience of the users, which can be reflected as:
• Reduced bounce rates.
• Better engagement leads to a higher time on site.
• Better rate of conversions.
However, when you keep important SEO factors in mind, the need for the AMPs can be alleviated to a certain extent.
How does AMP work?
To speed up the delivery of the content, AMP users stripped down code known as AMP HTML. In simple words, AMP is a way to build web pages that enable the pages to load much faster compared to the regular HTML. AMP works for the static content that isn’t changed based on the behavior of the users. It is an open-source framework and a whole host of companies can use it to serve content that’s been created using AMP HTML.
How to switch on from AMP?
AMP was a critical milestone in web development because its prioritized user experience. However, like with anything, more complex and customized solutions have emerged over time. Publishers may ensure that their mobile sites continue to provide a favorable user experience even without AMP by deploying solutions that comply with CWVs, increase user engagement, and provide additional flexibility. When you stick with some core web vitals and SEO tactics, you can move on from the need for accelerated mobile pages.
What are the limitations of AMP?
AMP is crucial for the fast loading speed and a better user experience. However, it has certain limitations as well. When it comes to the design, it uses a restrictive framework. Besides, it puts an extra burden to implement and remain valid with the upgrading AMP standards; but they hardly work fine other than this. Above all, AMP does not ensure the light speed without AMP cache; therefore, additional performance optimizations are required for additional speed.
