Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP for short, is getting new upgrades by Google. AMP pages are designed to be lightweight and thus load up faster than conventional web pages.
At the Google I/O conference yesterday, the company announced that currently there are more thanĀ 2 billion AMP pages covering aroundĀ 900,000 domains. Google claims that AMP optimized pages are loading up twice as fast via Google Search and will now cover more e-commerce websites.
Google and Facebook have faced controversy through these initiatives (Facebook’s Instant Articles vs. Google AMP). They are blamed for pointing people towards their own domains and taking the traffic away from the websites themselves.
Improvements to AMP
In a blog post announcing the news, Google shared these achievements. It also announced new improvements that its bringing to AMP in order to serve web pages faster.
The shorter page load time was a result of improvements at the backend of the service, reducing the bandwidth for images by 50%. A new compression algorithm was also implemented called Brotli which shrinks document sizes by 10%.
The number of sites which support AMP have also increased with the newer sitesĀ focusing on social networking.
AMP Usage Statistics
Tumblr now has 340,000 plus blogs and 500,000 domains rendered through AMP on mobile. Twitter now links to AMP in mobile web (clicking on links in tweets) and is going to expand AMP to its mobile app soon.
More product pages on eBay will now show up as AMP with a strong focus on name-brands and “Interest” pages. They’ve added 15 million pages last year and plan to add millions more soon.
AliExpress, Zalando and Myntra are also adding AMP.
New Ad Formats
Additionally three new ad formats will be added in order to optimizeĀ mobile advertising user experience.
By introducing these ad formats Google is conveniently placing itself as the middleman for implementing ads.
