Google AMP Offers Best Mobile Page Speed

Faster Mobile Page Speed and Load Time is the Essence of Accelerated Mobile Pages

Updated 8.3.2022

Both young and seasoned mobile shoppers have high expectations today for a quality user experience on mobile devices. We live in a mobile-first world where mobile page speed is key!

Mobile users are looking for a great user experience – which starts by not having to wait for a webpage to complete loading. Taking that a step further, simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. To keep users engaged, mobile advertising campaigns perform best on sites that load fast and are highly relevant to the searchers’ intent. The days are past when mobile users are patient on the mobile web with a slow, clunky, and frustrating user experience. Today, your website needs a structured approach to offer mobile users a better experience.

Mobile load speed is critical — Google has repeatedly emphasized that over half of all online searches are coming from mobile devices. Business owners are recognizing that computing is increasingly ever more ubiquitous and that unprepared websites will find it tougher to catch up if delaying the transition to mobile. AMP is preferred by users because it takes an average of under 1 second to load a mobile page and it uses 10 times less data than non-AMP web pages.

Trends in Mobile Marketing by Age Groupings

Compared to older age groups, teenagers are using mobile devices more when shopping.

• 53 percent of online buyers ages 13-17

• 30 percent of online buyers 18-24

• 43 percent of online buyers 25-35

• 78 percent of all teen use their smartphone for shopping

“Teens are moving from texting to messaging apps and from shopping on desktop computers to shopping on their phones,” according to Google in a article titled Gen Z: A Look Inside Its Mobile-First Mindset

If your product or services if more often consumed by the younger generation, then a page’s load speed is of vital importance. Your business relies on showing up quickly in product carousel search results. Some recommend that the rule of thumb is to keep a page’s load speed under 2 seconds; however, we strive for 1 second and many of our AMP pages load just over half of one second. Millennials are reshaping the way product web pages are constructed, and the Think with Google mobile speed test will now tell you an average of users you are missing just because of slow loading mobile pages. Know your target audience and their consumer behavioral patterns.

Google adds new AMP Validation Tool

Google’s intent to push Accelerated Mobile Pages is unmistakable. An updated AMP testing tool is available in your Google Search Console. It combines AMP and structured data errors that you can update within its live preview to simplify your processes of ensuring code is valid. The tool is efficient on both mobile devices and desktop and utilizes Google’s “live web-search infrastructure” to evaluate your AMP pages with the real Googlebot. This means that the results show in real-time.

QUESTION: What is AMP?

ANSWER: AMP is the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-backed project that is an open standard so that all publishers and business sites can benefit from having web pages load quickly on multiple mobile devices. AMP pages support strong user interaction.

Google continues to offer new ways to show Internet users which sites are AMP ready. Officially launched earlier this year, the project aims to trim mobile page load times to under a second. While initially focused more on news publishers, the effort now reaches its intent to include e-commerce and ad landing pages.

On September 20th, Google Inside Search announced, “Today we’re excited to announce that we’re rolling out that faster experience to users across the world. Now when you search on your mobile device, you’ll see a label that indicates a page is AMP’d.”

If you are slowing a user down with a fancy widget or giant-size image, chances are they will go somewhere else. They want results fast.

Why is Page Load Speed Important?

AMP focuses more on the performance of AMP documents and how fast they load versus worrying about tantalizing aesthetics. If users don’t wait for your web pages to load and leave, they also cannot interact with your web content. Then, from a real perspective of usefulness, they have failed their purpose. The AMP project has added more features when building e-commerce AMP landing pages for AdWords advertising.

Gary Illyes stated at the Search Marketing Summit on the first of June 2016 in Sydney that Google will be revisiting page speed ranking factors. It is important to look at the page speed of your mobile web pages and how to improve them for the Google mobile-friendly algorithm. If you have a super-fast desktop web page, the mobile version may be really slow. In the past we were told this would not hinder mobile rankings, however, now AMP is rolled into the core of Google Mobile Search. On May 28th, 2020, Google revealed that there will be an upcoming page experience update that will enhance the existing Core Web Vitals metrics. That means that going forward, how fast your deliver your web pages is likely to directly impact business growth and key revenue streams.

On October 1, 2016, Google published an AMP Roadmap Update** that storyboards the latest in ways sites can load fast and offer live-updating blogs with <amp-live-list> and more. “We continue to work on better, more immersive video experiences on AMP pages and platforms, as well as growing the AMP format for e-commerce experiences. This includes further enhancements to form support, component support for product galleries, and tabbed content navigation.”

The search giant has also improved the user experience for ads, video content, and offers additional embed options for the AMP carousel, which includes an update to enable swiping over iframes. We are also told that soon developers “will be able to collect newsletter signups, enable basic site searches, and support other core forms use cases with the amp-form extension”. Keep your marketing research team active to stay current and flexible as search evolves.

Are AMP Web Pages Designed to Load Instantaneously?

AMP pages are cached for almost instantaneous loading on the web. The Google AMP Cache can be your proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all correctly implement AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves page performance automatically. When using the Google AMP Cache, your HTML document, all JS files and all images load from the same origin that is using HTTP 2.0 for maximum efficiency.

AMP pages that validate correctly are appearing more often in mobile search result carousels. Whether or not the speculations that there will be attempts to direct all mobile traffic to these versions is true, one thing is clear, you need your HTML pages to be as mobile-friendly as possible. Oncrawl.com is a useful tool to help you quickly spot and fix slow-loading pages. Adding JSON markup will improve your eCommerce sales.

The AMP specification summary stresses that a key purpose of these pages is to enable the search engine to calculate the resources required to render the page prior to displaying the content. This reduces the typical number of back-and-forth, repeated round-trip processes of TCP communications to establish what resources will be consumed by loading a page as well as all items on the page as well. The result in most cases is that the content delivery speed is optimized and ready for the Google Crawler.

“Today, the expectation is that content should load super fast and be easy to explore. The reality is that content can take several seconds to load, or, because the user abandons the slow page, never fully loads at all. Accelerated Mobile Pages are web pages designed to load near instantaneously — they are a step towards a better mobile web for all,” says the AMP project site.

How to Identify What Negatively Impacts Your Page Speed

What’s clipping the load speed of your site’s web pages may not be obvious, but need to be central to your search marketing strategies.

What commonly causes a page to load slower?

A significant volume of unoptimized images is commonly the first reason why websites load slowly. High-resolution images demand excessive bandwidth while loading. Avoid relying on plugins to manage the job by uploading larger-sized images and then compressing them or scaling them down. Do this ahead of time with Photoshop or another image compression tool. Otherwise, you are unnecessarily increasing the size of your web page and dragging download speed.

Tips on where to look to improve page load speed:

• Your web host: It is easy to find deals and then assume that if it looks okay that you pulled that one off nicely. Many site owners are unaware that the “deal” may appear to save you money but cost you dearly by damaging your page speed. After doing all the work of building a stunning site, loading before impatient viewers leave makes good sense. Be willing to pay for a better web host or hosting package that adequately accommodates the size of your business.

• Loading a page with off-site embedded media: One example is off-site video content, which viewers love, but can consume enormous load time. One way to improve on video load time is to host such content on your own server.

• Large and un-optimized images: While we all love large and high-resolution images, they often are too hefty of a load and can greatly hinder page speed. By using Google structured data to indicate an image and its topic, you can avoid the weight of embedded extra data and still be pulled up in image searches.

Many tools are available to assist with image compression – just know when to avoid the tilt toward over-optimizing to the point of a poor quality image. Or better yet, use a CDN to host your images and then add them to an image dataset. Add JSON schema to your products and featured article images for visual search.

• Some browser plugins and apps: Gone are the days of limited browser choices. It is best to test how your website loads and displays on all browsers, as the time it takes to load your site can vary quite a bit. Moreover, apps like Flash are now very old school and can damage a page speed considerably.

• Over-doing the number of ads: Those who click through from SERPs, an email footer or from a referral site to your web pages can find a high number of ads extremely annoying. Too many ads on a page diminish page speed and can take away from its primary content. It’s one thing to launch mobile ads, but another to keep speed in check and gain conversions from your evergreen sales funnel.

• Heavy WordPress themes: You may have been swept into the world of options a theme offers your web designers without stopping to think that many of such highly designed themes burgeoning with a myriad of exceptional effects may actually penalize your load page. Do you really need and use so many options? And if you think so, does it matter that much if viewers are leaving before the page ever loads?

• Widgets and Gadgets: Consider the makeup of the social buttons you are choosing from, forms, calculators, or comment blocks that may negatively impact your page speed. In the long run, you may find that a faster-loading option is just as visually appealing.

• Bloated code: If your HTML/CSS/JavaScript is not efficient, loads in a manner that causes delays, has unnecessary white space, or is too dense, it lowers a site’s load speed unnecessarily.

Next Steps to Obtain a Better Mobile Page Speed

Congratulations! You have accomplished a lot by identifying your content and conditions that will improve mobile page speed. But the world of digital marketing has advanced and there is more you can do to do to meet high user expectations. You may be asking about how to go about determining your priority task list for fixing the problem of sluggish web pages.

How do I fix slow loading Web pages?

1. Migrate to HTTPS from HTTP for a Secure Mobile Experience.

2. Adopt Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

3. Structure your Web Content Better.

4. Change DNS Servers.

Remember, speed isn’t everything thing. Valuable and unique content that meets E-A-T requirements is more important. Stay outside the echo chamber. Provide information gain with every new content piece about a topic covered elsewhere. Avoid repetition and possible duplicate content issues by providing something new, timely and interesting.

1. Migrate to HTTPS from HTTP for a Secure Mobile Experience

Google stated ******* that websites that have updated to HTTPS (Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol) vs. the HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) gain a small site ranking improvement. While many argue that the boost affects less than “1 percent of global queries”, it still is favorable and is likely to “strengthen over time.”

The ‘S’ in HTTPS represents “secure”. Websites with HTTPS in place are more secure than websites without it. No one needs to be reminded that security is a top issue. When migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, be sure to add 301 redirects each of your HTTP links to the new HTTPS links; hire a professional if needed. Next, re-submit your site index to all major search engines which prevents ‘404 page not found’ errors.

Now you are a step closer to gaining the benefits of the latest full features for mobile AdWords advertising. Next step is to engage Accelerated Mobile Pages – especially for pages that best support your brand.

2. Adopt Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

The AMP Project is an open-source initiative that responds to user demand for improved mobile-optimized content that can load instantly and from everywhere.

AMP Improves Mobile Page Speed by Offering Static Content

With today’s eruption of big data, companies are making better and more logical decisions from that data, which fuels searchers involvement, and as this happens, the way web content is produced and monetized changes. Instead of drawing from trillions of unstructured web pages, a semantic graph (commonly known as the knowledge graph or knowledge base) is buttressed by highly-structured data.

3. Structure your Web Content Better

Publishers and information providers in the digital marketing space are forced to accept that market no longer depends on unstructured information but Google Mobile Search is moving forward in immense strides with structured information and its ensuing semantics graphs. The alteration in search is already upon us. Those who prefer the use of mobile devices, talk to their cell phones and get answers, most without awareness that they are using a semantic graph. But SEO’s and SEM’s need to know the process of search going on behind this.

Wikipedia******** states that “a graph database (in theory at least) is significantly faster”. AMP pages permit Google, Twitter, and possibly others, to quickly cache, pre-load and pre-render AMP content because it’s designed to be static.

“AMP documents are from the ground up designed to be efficiently pre-renderable. Browsers have long supported pre-rendering through the <link rel=prerender> tag, but they need to be conservative about this mechanism because prerendering can be expensive. With AMP HTML we added the ability to tell a document: render yourself but only as far as what is visible above the fold and only elements which are not CPU intensive to minimize the cost of pre-rendering. With this mechanism in place, referrers of AMP document can initiate rendering of docs before the user acts much more aggressively so that in many cases the document will be done rendering by the time the user clicks.” – Google AMP Project

4. Change DNS Servers

How does changing DNS servers improve load speed?

If you improve your DNS servers it may speed up the amount of time it takes to resolve a domain name. This is different from a user’s overall internet connection. That is each person’s choice, meaning that improvements in your average download speeds for streaming content or downloading large files are affected by their Internet provider. Google Cloud and OpenDNS attach your IP address to the DNS requests. This means that data is loaded from a server closest in proximity to the searcher. If you can pull your web content from a closer server, it improves overall internet speed.

Study Proves that You Need Fast Page Speed

Slow loading websites frustrate users who may be your potential buyers. It also negatively impacts publishers when users don’t wait, so they never see your content. DoubleClick published an September 2016 article titled “The need for mobile speed: How mobile latency impacts publisher revenue”. Their findings after analyzing 10,000+ mobile web domains conclude that:

“53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.”

“The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.”

“Mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.”

6 Advantages Businesses Gain by Improving Mobile Page Load Speed

According to the Google study, websites that can load around the 5-second mark versus those that average a 19-second load speed do significantly better. It states that “We also found a correlation between mobile speed and both pageviews per session and session lengths. And as people spend more time on the site, ad viewability also likely increases, as display ads must be on the screen for one full second to be considered viewable.”

Gain the following advantages from faster loading mobile pages:

1. 25% higher ad viewability often as a result of faster loading pages

2. 70% longer average sessions due to ease in navigation

3. 35% lower bounce rates because users stay on page longer

4. Quick visibility in Mobile SERPs displaying Google Now Cards

5. The potential for higher profits: please them and they will come back!

6. You show up fast: 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less

“One out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds”, according to Allison Mooney, Head of Insights and Trends at Google and Editor-In-Chief of Think With Google. His September 2019 The need for mobile speed: How mobile latency impacts publisher revenue article also says that “that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds”.

The study results examined the correlation between web page load speed and the amount of revenue potential. “While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.”

The Push for Video Ads and Accelerated Mobile Pages

What are video AMP Ads?

US ad agencies know what clients hope to see in the future – Fast loading Google AMP ads. Amp-video in amp is a standard html5 video used to play direct video embeds. Some recommend that during market upheaval and realignment that it is the best time to out-spend your rivals. The buying habits of digital mobile shoppers mean that smaller file sizes for video and using video AMP ads are the future. There is lots of proof that Google is bringing its Accelerated Mobile Pages technology to the forefront of mobile ads.

On July 21, 2016, Jessica Davies of Digiday told the American Press Institute that talks to agencies about what they want to see from AMP ads. One creative director emphasized the importance of making sure AMP ads are scaled, which will force advertisers to adopt the format, while another agency said they wanted to see ads that use less mobile data for the user. Agencies are trying to get to the point where we can deliver rich experiences like video that can be delivered fast and don’t slow page loads.”

Consumer shopping preferences are no longer linear. A higher percentage of search queries with buyer intent is coming from mobile phones and lead to those who buy in-store. Additionally, some buyers add items to their shopping carts from a work computer but make the final purchase decision later from a tablet. Most buyers research products online from a mobile device first, and then either travel to the store to see and touch the item before buying, while others use local search from a mobile phone to find and visit the store, and later complete the purchase online.

The key point is that somewhere in the process, have a fast mobile product page that offers clear user interactions. The ability to >be found and answer search intent fast is necessary for a business to be successful today. A great Mobile Site Speed Score and User Experience Score can help increase foot traffic to your business locations. In addition, implementation of valid Local Business schemar markup helps.

Google PageSpeed Insights makes a quick task list of important fixes and those that would be good to improve on. Gain critical and free page speed insights and design your user interface to accomplish more for your business!

Effectiveness, Ease, and Emotion of your Mobile Users

When running this test for hillwebcreations.com, site statistics are: “According to PSI, this page is estimated to require an additional 0 extra roundtrips to load rendering-blocking resources and 1.0 MB to complete the rendering. For an average page, 4 round trips and 2.7 MB are required. Fewer round trips and bytes lead to faster pages”.

What are the most important things to do to appeal to mobile users?

Prioritize visible content: Optimize the core experience for mobile users. Developers who are willing to work with SEO’s to ensure that visible page content in the final version works for the user experience without scrolling. To provide a better experience on Apps, field research says that voice interaction is a key to participant’s experience.

Humans are emotional creations and those who visit your site are a human interacting with your site. Their emotions are a part of the experience. This must be considered for your SEO efforts to be effective. Your search strategies need to be current and measurable.

Leverage browser caching: When a site is set-up, expiration dates or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources will instruct browsers to load previously downloaded resources through the local hard disk instead of over the network. These cache times involve a trade-off that weighs stable URLs in documents versus the ability to change the same responses. When served from the AMP Cache (meaning what you find in Google Search), historically, the URLs are replaced with versioned URLs that have indefinite cache time. This will continue to see change in the 2020’s in response to developers who requested that AMP URLs remain onsite. We all know that continual improvement is the core of effective SEO.

The Biggest Culprit of Slow Loading Mobile Pages

Excessive number of page elements.

The more elements you load up on a web page, the more that page weighs and adds complexity to user interaction. A Google study discovered that the average web page today is a heavy 2,486 KB, which is typically due to a hundred+ assets hosted across multiple and diverse servers. Often this is comprised of unoptimized, unmeasured, and unmonitored — and therefore slowing down web page speed. This often creates load speed volatility. By testing and following proven guidance for making a business website successful, you can improve your chances to resolve mobile load speed issues.

Not only that, the search behemoth finds that having complex pages correlates to fewer conversions, which can negatively impact business growth and ROI. If you are not mobile-ready, user interfaces designed for mobile are where other sites are gaining a lead in obtaining new sales. It pays off in the long run to optimize your site’s speed performance.

SEO professionals can resolve this issue by setting “performance budgets” or goals for your mobile pages. This could mean determining that your mobile pages should load within two seconds (your set “budget” for each page). Now that you have a benchmark, discard unnecessary page elements that bulk upload time that hinders that threshold. Conduct a Technical SEO audit to locate which third-party scripts on your site are impacting load times. And to reinforce it – move to AMP! HTML AMP pages are your best option today.

AMP offers Benefits Beyond Improved Mobile Speed

The great thing is that businesses don’t have to add AMP to every single page site-wide all at once.

For eCommerce websites using a popular Content Management System (CMS), getting AMP pages up and running is key. It matters not only for load speed but for maximizing the latest mobile feature found in AdWords advertising. AMP is ideal for all forms of static web content including news-related pages, reviews, videos, recipes, movie listings, product pages, blog posts, and more. We find it less beneficial for single-page apps that are comprehensively dependent on sliders, dynamic or interactive features, route mapping options, or social networks.

Once you’ve improved your page load speed, boost your content by partnering with marketing influencers.

We find that our clients can maximize budgets and timelines by conducting a Site User-Friendly Audit and a Competitors Audit first to help determine which pages are already positioned to gain the most benefit by going AMP. Then we complete the transition to AMP by taking a client’s existing site progressively through the process. In the process, we pay close attention to fixing all e-Commerce SEO technical problems.

Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool**** that serves up a report detailing ways to improve your site. It comprehensively covers whether or not you need to enable compression, leverage browser caching or minifying your site’s CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code. Then if you need help fixing things, give us a call.

“The process of optimizing your site for mobile is part-and-parcel of a user’s experience online. Today’s connected world has tasked marketers with thinking outside the box. As the connected world becomes more mobile, our job as marketers will require us to continue this line of thinking and focus on usability.” – Kaila Strong wrote on Act-On*.

Increase traffic to your mobile-ready pages by making the most of your Google My Business Listing. For those seeking medical services, getting your Healthcare profile on Google right is critical.

Go Mobile AMP to BE FAST and BE SEEN

Mobile ads have generated a speed problem, and Google is working fast to speed up the ads. We know that native mobile applications are in high demand and are gaining a reputation for being faster. Mobile devices continue to get more powerful with every release cycle, which improves load speed; native apps are smart to take full advantage of that power. Every business needs to win new customers that use mobile. If heavy design pieces are slowing your site, revenue should be more important to you than how your site looks.

Users love images – the bane of fast loading sites. They are also the backbone of most forms of mobile advertising. When you are ready, consider using a proxy to transcode your images in real-time for a faster loading mobile site. The number of images, resolutions, and image views you want on your site will only grow in time. A proxy can transcode web images based on policies, path, or query parameters, which gives you the benefit of having agility while saving costs.

Additional Tools to Test your Mobile Speed

* OOKLA – speed test for Android ***

* Bandwidth– Internet Speed Test for any Device, Upload/Download/Ping Speeds, HTML5 speed test for your broadband service or mobile carrier ****

* Oz – Broadband Speed Test for iPhone Speed Test (https://www.ozspeedtest.com)

* Google Mobile-Friendly Page test tool*****

* Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Validator

AMP Pages Highlighted in Google Search

Google’s open-source AMP project offers business sites the chance to significantly speed up mobile web pages to better reach mobile device users. This week, Google announced that AMPlified pages will be highlighted in mobile search results more than non-AMP content. This is also true for your Google Posts. Google emphasizes that this update doesn’t currently modify the search results, but there’s heavy expectation across the digital communities that AMP will likely become a ranking factor in the near future.

Such speculations are generating heated dialogue among many search marketing professionals, such as whether or not to optimize for Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm. That’s is a norm in the midst of change, but it is best to acknowledge that the technology is here to stay, so those who act on it are already seeing the benefits. One example is quickly aligning with the Google BERT algorithm and how it uses natural language processing.

CONCLUSION: Move Quickly to AMP it Up and Gain a Faster Site!

Now you are ready to really make headway. We are poised to help you enhance your site’s attributes for Google Mobile Search and local search optimization.

If you’re experiencing problems gaining visibility online, or showing up in Google Maps correctly, don’t waste your money on a “miracle” solution by attempting some “quick fix” risky SEO tactic. Enlist a digital marketing expert and have the problems resolved. Then, invest your dollars into servicing your website properly and gaining detailed Search Progress Reports that prove you have improved your mobile load speed score. You’ll likely save time, money and frustration in the long run.

Call 651-206-2410 to move forward faster and with clarity. We’d offer tailored-to-fit Digital Marketing Services that Improve Lead Generation

 

 

* https://www.act-on.com/blog/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-optimizing-for-mobile-in-2016/

** https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/amp-roadmap-update-for-end-q3-2016/

*** http://www.speedtest.net/mobile/android

**** http://www.bandwidthplace.com/

***** https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly

****** https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

******* https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

******** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database