What is AMP?

Published: 07.01.2019.

Find out what AMP is and why it matters in the modern world.

What is AMP

AMP is a project by Google (abbreviation for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”) that was created to speed up the loading of web pages on mobile devices.

Before AMP, web pages were loaded on mobile devices of the same weight, which is sometimes a problem due to the speed of the mobile Internet, which in many cases is not comparable to the speed of the wired Internet.

The reason why AMP is so much faster lies in the fact that it uses a very “simple” structure and initially loads only the text, and eventually the rest of the content that is needed.

AMP advantages

Some of the advantages of AMP are the high loading speed of pages written in it, which makes it great as an SEO plugin for a site. Among other factors for displaying search results, Google looks at the user experience on the page, and if you have a website written in AMP, the user experience will be greatly improved due to the speed of content loading.

Google isn’t the only one who doesn’t like slow websites. In most cases, when users come to a website that loads slowly, they will simply change their mind and go back to the search engine. They will look for another website to provide them with information, product or service just because the first page was not written in AMP.

AMP is not the only way to create a website, but those who want a high loading speed will choose AMP because AMP is far ahead of other technologies. Following some research, it can be concluded that almost half of potential clients leave the webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load.

How to recognize AMP

When you use an AMP mobile device, you can tell by the fact that pages written in AMP in Google search results have a small white lightning drawn on a gray background, and when you open them by the loading speed, which easily surpasses all other technologies.

Is AMP still worth using in 2024?

Honestly, a lot less than it used to be. When this article was written AMP was a real speed advantage and Google gave AMP pages prominent placement in mobile results. Since then Google dropped that special treatment, so AMP no longer gets you a ranking boost on its own. Modern sites built well with lazy loading, optimized images and good caching can hit the same speeds without AMP’s restrictions. We rarely recommend starting a new project with AMP today, but if you already run AMP pages that perform well, there’s no urgent reason to rip them out.

What's the catch with AMP if it loads so fast?

Speed comes from heavy restrictions. AMP limits the HTML, CSS and JavaScript you can use, which means custom interactive features, certain third-party scripts and some analytics or ad setups either won’t work or need an AMP-specific workaround. You also serve a stripped-down version of your page, so the AMP copy can look and behave differently from your main site. For a simple article or product page that tradeoff can be fine. For anything with complex functionality it often gets frustrating fast.

Will AMP help my online store sell more?

It can help with the part where slow loading scares people off, since shoppers do abandon pages that take more than a few seconds. But AMP’s limits on scripts and custom features make full e-commerce flows like cart, checkout and payment harder to build inside AMP itself. For a shop we’d usually focus on making your regular product and category pages genuinely fast rather than forcing the whole store into AMP. If you want, we can audit your current load times and tell you where the real bottlenecks are.

Do I need AMP to rank well on Google now?

No. What matters for mobile ranking today is Core Web Vitals, which measure real loading speed, visual stability and how quickly the page responds to taps. You can pass those metrics with a normal, well-built site. AMP is one way to get there, not a requirement. If your goal is better mobile SEO, we’d rather optimize your existing pages so they score well on those metrics directly.

Can you build my site with AMP if I specifically want it?

Yes, we can. If you have a clear reason, like a content-heavy news or blog site where AMP fits well, we’ll set it up properly and make sure the AMP versions validate and track correctly. Before we do, we’ll walk you through the limitations honestly so you know what you’re giving up. In a lot of cases people come asking for AMP when what they actually want is a fast site, and there’s usually a simpler path to that.

What is AMP

AMP advantages

How to recognize AMP

Frequently asked questions