No, unfortunately this article does not actually discuss guitar amps (one of my favorite things). That would be more fun to write about! But what we are talking about is a technology that is very important to your website marketing – AMP, which stands for “accelerated mobile pages.”
Your website absolutely must be mobile friendly. Google is now showing preference to websites that work properly on mobile devices. The pages must load quickly and be optimized for small mobile screens. Text should be large, and the navigation should probably be a dropdown list. If your website looks exactly the same on desktop and mobile screens, you are probably missing the mark.
Google provides a tool you can use to test if your site is mobile friendly:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
One technology that can make sure your site works meets Google’s qualifications for mobile friendliness is AMP.
AMP is an open source technology endorsed by Google. What it does is allow Google to present a super mobile-optimized version of your website to devices performing searches on mobile devices. So every page of your website that you want to appear in mobile Google searches should have an AMP version of it.
The syntax of AMP code is slightly different from standard HTML. So you can’t just save a copy of your existing web pages. They will have to be created separately. There are two ways to incorporate AMP into your site:
- Manually code an AMP version for each page you want to show up in mobile search results; or
- Use a content management system plugin that automatically creates AMP versions of the pages of your site.
Now you may already have a website (and I hope you do) that is very mobile friendly. So in theory, you could argue that it is really not necessary for you.
But here’s why I say it is necessary.
It can give you a slight advantage over your competition. The reason that has become so important is that mobile search is now overtaking desktop search as the main way that people search for content. And so Google will give preference to any website that is optimized for mobile devices.
Unless your website is coded in static HTML, which I am actually doing on some projects for competitive reasons, then the AMP versions of your page will definitely contain less code and load quicker for mobile devices. So use it. It is worth whatever trouble and expense it costs you to gain the advantage for your website.
This is a fairly advanced subject, so I’m not going to go into the details of AMP implementation here. To learn more about AMP, visit https://www.ampproject.org. However, unless you are a real code nerd, you are probably not going to want to build out AMP pages yourself. Either hire a developer or use a plugin for your content management system to generate the pages automatically.