Accelerated Mobile Pages

The Unconventional Guide to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

  • September 26, 2019

ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP, for short) is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. It is a project that is designed to make websites and online pages fast. It is an HTML page designed to be light and increase speed when loading web pages thereby improving the user experience across devices all over the globe.

 
Getting started with AMP is getting to know its 3 parts which are:
  • AMP HTML: is a markup language based on HTML. Built with custom tags, properties, and many restrictions. Difficulties are to a minimal when using AMP HTML.
  • AMP JavaScript (JS): is a JS framework for mobile pages which determine loading order for web pages. Ideally, JS is not allowed within the AMP framework.
  • AMP CDN: this is an optional content delivery aspect of AMP. It caches AMP pages while also imparting the necessary optimizations.[irp]

How to Get Your Site on AMP

To get started, there are two things. First, you want to make sure that your AMP pages for your sites are valid. Because it’s like a subordinate of HTML, which is very strict on how you build the HTML. All tags have to be arranged in certain orders and certain places. You can’t use certain things. Doing any of that would make your AMP page invalid and they probably won’t be using it. In order to validate your AMP pages, you can use a tool built into Chrome. Use the developer tools in Chrome, there’s a system there, which you can look up on the AMP project website. Where you can visit a page and you can request it to validate, “Is this an AMP page?” and it will tell you any problems with that page.

The second thing is working out how to streamline building pages. If you’re on the type of CMS, then you definitely want this to be an integral part of your process moving forward. You want AMP pages to be something that all pages or as many pages as possible have an AMP version of those pages. Popular platforms, like WordPress, already have plugins available and basically, for a lot of the pages. It will do a lot of the work for you in creating those AMP pages.

AMP Analytic Tool

Analytics in Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is very smart. In other to prevent multiple analytics tracking from slowing down a site, it chooses one analytic tool that will report the data as many times as needed. There are two ways to activate analytics functionality with AMP for your website:[irp]

  • The Amp-Pixel Element: This is a simple tag used to count page views just like any other tracking pixel would, using a GET request. There are various variables that can be passed through it, such as Document-Referrer and Title.
  • The Amp-Analytics Extended Component: This is slightly more advanced than the amp-pixel. It can be used to set up analytics on your site because it allows for a greater level of configuration for analytics interactions.

Our Digital Marketing superheroes here at Verhaal will be more than happy to help you setup AMP and learn more

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