With the upsurge of mobile searches being conducted over the past few years, a growing number of businesses have begun to alter their websites with the goal of improving their discoverability and accessibility to this ever-growing number of mobile-first users. There are two ways that this is predominantly being accomplished—the first is by converting a website into what is known as a progressive web app—or PWA. The second is through the use of AMPs—accelerated mobile pages. Today’s article is going to first take a look at the lesser-known AMPs before comparing them with PWAs in order to better inform your business of what exactly sets the two apart from one another.

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?

In the simplest possible terms, accelerated mobile pages are streamlined, simplified versions of your existing web pages that place great emphasis on ensuring that your content is delivered quickly and seamlessly to mobile users. By stripping down the elements of your website to its bare essentials such as its text and HTML code, users can have your pages loaded on their smart devices extremely rapidly—in most cases even less than one second. This process increases user satisfaction with the speed of your site, improves your search engine rankings, and dramatically minimises your bounce rates, ensuring consistent, steady streams of organic traffic.

The way that AMPs accomplish this difficult task is by targeting the leading cause of slow-loading web pages—scripts. The development of these web pages excludes Java and other popular third-party scripts, which ensures that smartphones don’t have to spend time and resources trying to load bloated pages and code. This keeps AMPs accessible even to users of weaker mobile hardware with less processing power, such as those frequently found here in the Caribbean.

AMPs vs PWAs

At their core, both accelerated mobile pages and progressive web apps strive to deliver streamlined browsing experiences to users of smart devices. However, the way in which they accomplish this task is quite different.

PWAs take your existing website and code, and alter it to appear more “app-like,” with many of the same features as native applications such as push notifications being supported. This is particularly useful for ecommerce companies, who may need to integrate a number of different plugins and apps to offer improved functionality to their users—the more feature-rich and user-friendly the progressive web app is, the more likely businesses are to drive successful conversions.

AMPs, in contrast, prioritise the delivery of text-based content as rapidly as possible with no additional features or superfluous design elements being supported. This means that businesses opting to develop accelerated mobile pages will be those that want to maximise the readership of their blog posts, news articles, and op-eds in order to more effectively promote their products and services. Moreover, search engines identify and display AMPs prominently on their SERPs, which reinforces your SEO efforts by enhancing the discoverability of your content.

Drawbacks And Considerations

Ultimately, choosing between the two is a matter of weighing the pros and cons of each platform for your respective use-cases and needs. While AMPs are niche, they do play a role in the modern landscape of website development and browsing, and should factor into your considerations when developing a new site from scratch. However, it’s important to keep two key considerations in mind before diving head-first into the development of a custom AMP.

First, you have to limit the number of images used on your core website. Since accelerated mobile pages only load and process what is immediately visible, weaker hardware can begin to struggle with processing high-resolution images as users scroll through the page, invalidating the benefits of AMPs entirely—for these case, scalable vector graphics are a more appropriate, versatile choice.

Second, it’s necessary to clean your code at every stage of the design and development process. Unneeded CSS and stylistic elements can interfere with the browsing experiences of your users, giving them an incentive to back away from your content. While this step may require the experience and capabilities of expert-level, third-party designers, it’s critical for ensuring that your website lives up to expectations.

With all of this information in mind, it’s time to take a long, hard look at the state of your existing website and the role that it plays in today’s mobile-first world. Do you need to deliver messages clearly and consistently to your users as quickly as possible? If so, then it might just be time to consider starting development on your very own accelerated mobile page.