AMPle reasons you should make the move to AMP

 Accelerated Mobile Pages

OK, I agree that is a terrible pun I’ve used for a headline!

In my blog post last week I mentioned that the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project is now a year old and getting fast adoption. There are already 700,000 websites with AMP pages.

Google is actively encouraging website owners to adopt AMP and providing a lot of resources to facilitate this with things like AMP tutorials and validation tools.

However, given Google’s advice AMP pages won’t get any sort of ranking boost, a lot of website owners I’ve spoken to are questioning why they should take the time and trouble to create AMP versions of their websites. It’s not like most people don’t already have a longer to-do list than they have time…

The reality is that unless there are tangible benefits most people won’t bother.

Well, the good news is that it certainly does look like moving to AMP can pay off, even if Google won’t reward you with better rankings.

According to the AMP Project Lead at Google, David Besbris, there are some real benefits being experienced by news publishers that have already made the leap to AMP:

• Washington Post — 23% increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
• Slate — 44% increase in monthly unique visitors and a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique visitor
• Gizmodo — 80% of Gizmodo’s traffic from AMP pages is new traffic, 50% increase in impressions
• Wired — 25% increase in click through rates from search results, with CTR on ads in AMP stories up by 63%.
• Relay Media — in the last 30 days alone has converted over 2.5 million AMP pages for publishers like The Daily Dot, Hearst Television and The Miami Herald. This tells us says mobile users who start with an AMP article spend 10% more time than those who land on regular mobile pages.

Some benefits using AMP – source: Google

Why should you care?

As you can see from the above examples, AMP can result in both more visits and higher engagement. If those things are important to you (of course they are!), then implementing AMP is something you should be seriously considering sooner than later. If your website is built on WordPress (one in four are) then it’s easy to do using plugins. We’ve just done so ourselves using the WordPress AMP Plugin and the Yoast SEO: AMP Glue plugin.

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