In its first year of existence it has racked up a host of big numbers – such as 600 million published AMP pages and a four times faster page load speed than traditional mobile pages.
AMP was launched 12 months ago by Google as an open source initiative amid part of its efforts to improve the mobile web experience for users. Over 700,000 websites have signed up to the initiative and are now publishing AMP pages to help their mobile visitors access content quicker and more conveniently.
The adoption rate of the AMP project so far highlights the importance of the mobile web and the desire of publishers and brands to tap into mobile connectedness to maintain closer relationships with their customers.
To mark its first birthday, David Besbris, VP Google Search and AMP Project Lead at Google shared a host of statistics surrounding the AMP project. In his official blog post, he noted that a core aim of AMP has been to speed up the mobile web, citing research that suggests that more than one in two people will leave a site if a page takes more than three seconds to load.
He describes AMP’s first 12 months as driven by momentum, highlighting how the open source code has developed and how quickly publishers have incorporated the functionality into their own page content. WordPress, Bing, eBay and of course Google itself all now use AMP to speed up their mobile content experience.
Google says that sites using AMP have reported higher open rates, an increase in click through rates, uplift in returning mobile search visitors, greater engagement and more impressions.
Despite the positives, there have also been a few roadblocks with AMP. Some early adopters complained that AMP wasn’t actually bringing that much traffic - which is scant payoff for the time taken to implement the code. Others have also questioned how heavily Google weights AMP in its algorithms. While it has said on a number of occasions page load speed is a mobile SEO ranking consideration, it hasn’t yet come out and said definitively that AMP is essential for improved search positions.
Besbris shared this infographic, which measures progress since launch in October 2015:
Don’t miss next week’s post which will explain how you can use AMP in your own content and take advantage of these benefits.
