Have you ever Google’d something on your phone, only to find the result you chose to click on took 15 seconds to load and turned your phone’s battery into a temporary heater?
It’s not fun. As a mobile user, you’re on the go and want results quick. You don’t want the speed of some website to stand between you and your goal.
It’s shown that mobile users have much different goals than desktop users. Desktop users are more happy to browse around, while mobile users are much more goal orientated – they’re there to do something, whether it’s looking for a phone number, reading a funny article, or finding the name they can’t remember of that actor who plays Sherlock. So mobile users are affected much more by slow websites, because they want results, and they want them now.
Some attentive engineers over at Google noticed this, and decided it was their responsibility to do something about it. They saw a user facing problem (slow websites) as a result of poor engineering and thought, “we can fix that”.
What a cool icon, I bet you're super jealous
If you listen to Google well enough, they’ll be happy to certify your web page as “AMP ready”, as signalled by a little lightning bolt in their search results. Now, Google likes fast sites, so they’ll also give you a little boost in ranking on mobiles as thanks1. Not only that, but they will also re-host the entire page on their own servers, because – let’s face it – they can serve your site quicker than you ever could. Not a bad deal.
All in all, for a desktop machine, the performance increase from AMP might be insignificant. However, on mobile devices where internet reception is often slow or spotty, and processing power is much less, AMP may have a very significant effect. AMP itself is not without controversy, but at the very least the message it sends is noble.
And at most you’ll have happier users and a better SEO ranking.
Notes:
- Technically Google doesn't boost pages because they're built with AMP, but rather that they're fast loading. You can achieve these better rankings yourself if you build your site to be fast with or without AMP. Using AMP has a better chance of results.
