Understanding The Concept Of AMP Pages

An Accelerated Mobile Page or AMP refers to Google's and Twitter's project intended to make really fast mobile pages. It's an HTML page designed to be lightweight and designs really fast loading. This is designed to be the open response and Maintain flexibility and control and reduce complexity in your code.

What makes AMP fast?

It's like a diet HTML so certain tags of HTML you just can't use like forms. You can use most of CSS, but some parts are not allowed to be used. Then JavaScript is basically not allowed at all. You have to use a JavaScript library that they provide you with, and that provides things like lazy loading.

So the idea is that the whole platform is designed just for readability, speed. The reason, AMP pages load instantly is because AMP restricts HTML/CSS and JavaScript and allow faster rendering of mobile web pages. Unlike regular pages, AMP pages are automatically cached by Google AMP Cache for faster load times on Google search.

AMP pages allow third-party JavaScript by restricting them to iframes so they can’t block the execution of the main page. Even if they trigger multiple style re-calculations, their tiny iframes have very little DOM, the time it takes to do style-recalculations and layouts are restricted by DOM size, so the recalculations of the iframe are very fast compared to styles recalculation for the page.

Only inline styles are allowed. This removes one or more HTTP requests from the critical rendering path compared to most web pages. Also, the inline style sheet has a maximum size of 50 KB. The AMP declares 0 HTTP requests until fonts start downloading. This is only because all javascript has the async attribute and only inline style sheets are allowed so there are no HTTP requests blocking the browser from downloading fonts.

Also Read: How To Maintain Threads In iOS Applications

How does this work?

For starters, you will need at least two versions of any article page: The original version of your article page, and the AMP version of that page. In the source code, in order for Technologies that support the AMP to detect the AMP version of your article, you will need to modify the original version of the article page by including the following canonical tag for AMP pages.

You have to rewrite your site template to accommodate the restrictions. It prioritizes resource loading, loading only what’s needed, and prefetches lazy-loaded resources and optimizes downloads so that the current most important resources are downloaded first. Images or ads are only downloaded if they are likely to be seen by the user, above the fold, or if the user is likely to scroll to them.

You likely will not be able to have lead forms, on-page comments and some other elements you may be used to having on your page handled specially.  For example, for images, <img> tags are replaced with an equivalent or slightly enhanced custom AMP HTML tags and must include an explicit width and height.

There is also support for things such as slideshows via amp-carousel and image lightboxes via amp-image-lightbox, as well social media embeds for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest via their own extended components which aren’t difficult to use.

Also Read: Developing Two Horizontal Scrollview in Flutter

Performance and speed are very important factors in terms of retaining and converting visitors, no doubt, but in order to drive traffic to the website you need to rank in search engines and optimizing it with the use of the very framework backed by Google, means your company has a better chance of ranking higher in results pages. Using the AMP framework will not only help your business to stay on top of trends but boost your website traffic and stay ahead of the competition.

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