Make your website AMP-compatible
You may have heard about AMP before.
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and has been big news in the marketing world since its launch in 2015.
AMP is an open source development model designed to make web pages faster on mobile devices or smartphones.
Google has addressed AMP in an official blog post:
“When pages take too long to load, they lose visitors and potentially revenue through advertising or subscriptions… (AMP) aims to improve the performance of mobile versions of web pages so they can be delivered quickly. We want web pages that contain rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads and render faster.”
When AMP made its comeback in 2015, it seemed to be a bigger deal than we ever thought.
That’s because Google ‘s mobile-first initiative is a focus on Google. We know that
- More and more users are searching for information and websites via mobile devices.
- Users prefer websites that load quickly.
And because Google wants to provide a seamless browsing experience for users, AMP rewards websites that comply with its requirements. This means that pages that support AMP will rank higher in search results.
However, AMP also has some disadvantages.
The most obvious thing you might notice is a drop in conversions, as AMP strips out all the external code that takes time to load in order to make it faster. But if you want to get your conversions back, you might need to add some of that code back.
Despite its limitations, AMP itself is likely to become increasingly important to web performance over the long term. I recommend starting with your blog and then adding AMP to other pages on your site.
For full instructions on how to add AMP to your pages, click here.
Increase website loading speed
This technique is used with AMP.
Just think: Users spend an average of 69% of their time consuming media on their smartphones, yet when they visit websites, 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Page loading speed is certainly a big concern, and as I mentioned earlier, Google has been working on improving and developing the mobile experience for a long time.
Until recently, page load speed was just one ranking factor for desktop search, but Google recently announced that page load speed will become another ranking factor for mobile search starting in July 2018.
This means that companies have just a few months to make mobile page load times faster. There are a number of factors that can affect a website’s load time, but fortunately, these limitations are all workable.
- Fast server response time – This is easily fixed, I use com but of course there are many better servers out there.
- Have a large Content Delivery Network ( CDN ) – This will help deliver your content significantly faster (I’ve seen CDNs improve clients’ websites by 20%-30%).
- Limit your redirects – Too many redirects can impact your page speed. Make sure your site cleans up redirects periodically and only redirects that are absolutely necessary.
- Optimize your images – This is one of the most important factors. Slow images = slow page speed. Don’t try to cram a large image into a small space, it will have a significant impact on your speed, but make sure all your images are the right size and perform well.
- Avoid blocking Javascript and CSS – Google has made it clear that blocking Javascript and CSS can have a negative impact on your site’s ranking, so to improve speed, make sure these files are as small and optimized as possible.
- Enable file compression – When delivering files, documents, etc. through the browser, compressing them into a zip format will make your website render much faster.
- Enable Caching – When a website is “cached,” it means that the information that a user has visited the website before is stored in the browser’s memory. When the user returns to visit the page, the page can be retrieved from the cache without having to go to the server again, which can speed up the loading of the original page.
- Reduce the number of plugins on your site – As you might guess, the less the better. While some plugins are understandably necessary, try to limit the number of plugins you use to ensure that your site loads quickly.
