The Necessity of Google AMP in the Mobile Age

In our last AMP article, we covered how Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages work and how you can utilize them to help boost your mobile ecommerce.
Since then, Google has continued to enhance its mobile user experience. Rolling out new AMP updates like AMP Bind, which allows internet retailers to create product pages with interactive elements for color and size selection. As well as giving Adwords users the ability to use AMP pages as landing pages for their ads.

But that’s not all.

The new AMP updates also utilize Google’s Brotli to reduce document sizes by a further 10% and compress images 50% more efficiently without a loss in quality.

These additions, coupled with applications like AMP Lite – Google’s optimized version of AMP for users with a slower internet connection or a low-end smartphone – have allowed Google’s AMP pages to load nearly 30 times faster than their non-Amp counterparts.

So why the focus on mobile pages?

If you spend the majority of your time in an office – home or work – you may be used to conducting most of your online activity via a desktop. For the rest of the world, however, smartphones are king.

Think about it.

When was the last time you waited until you had access to a desktop to look up a restaurant or search the IMDB of an actor whose movie history you can’t remember?

The joy of owning a mobile device is its near instantaneous access. You not only have the whole of the web at your fingers, but you can take it with you anywhere you go.

Consider this:

As of 2016, comScore Mobile Metrix® reports that Americans spend an average of 87 hours a month browsing the web on their smartphones, as opposed to the 34 hours they spend browsing on a desktop.

Looking at places like the U.K., Italy, and Spain, the numbers are similar. Most people are accessing the web through their phones.

But why?

It’s simple – affordability.

Many people don’t have the money to invest in both a phone and a computer, so they go with the more logical – usually cheaper – choice.

And in developing countries with larger populations like Nigeria, China, Peru, and India, this distinction is even more noticeable.

For example, in a study conducted by MIT, 620 out of 690 million internet users in China go online via a mobile device. That’s almost 90%!

Following the Trend

So what does this mean for the future of web pages?

It’s hard to say. As smartphone technology continues to advance, the stripped down versions of AMP pages may change.

However, as it stands now, that easy mobile access is key.

Want to AMP up your page? Contact us today for a quote!