What is Google AMP and How it Works?

Google: Accelerated Mobile Pages / AMP

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-backed project designed as an open standard for any publisher to have pages load quickly on mobile devices.

When a page isn’t optimized for mobile use, you risk the chance of increased bounce rates—30% of users leave a page if it does not load within 3 seconds. The end product of AMP drastically improves the performance of mobile websites on the internet—so much so that the load time is often appearing to be instant.

How it Works

JavaScript may be used to modify almost any portion of a web page, but it may also be used to block DOM construction and delay the rendering of pages. To avoid the delay of rendering pages because of JavaScript, AMP allows for only asynchronous JavaScript. These AMP pages forbid the use of any JavaScript that has been written by the webmaster, and rather than using regular JavaScript, an interactive page must be comprised of only custom AMP elements.

Resources that are external, like iframes, ads, or images, have to state their size within the HTML of the page so that AMP is able to determine the size of each element as well as its position before all of the resources are downloaded. AMP will load the layout of the page before the resources have been downloaded.

AMP is conducive to extensions for things such as Instagram embeds, lightboxes, tweets, and the like. These things require additional HTTP requests and those requests are not able to block page layouts and rendering. Pages that use custom script have to notify the AMP system that it will need a custom tag eventually.

What is Google AMP