Accelerated Mobile Pages
(also AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages definition
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a web component framework and a website publishing technology developed by Google that aims to provide a user-first format for web content. The core idea behind AMP is to create fast, smooth, and user-friendly web pages for mobile internet users. AMP ensures a seamless mobile browsing experience by restricting certain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements to optimize page speed and performance.
History of Accelerated Mobile Pages
Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project in October 2015 as an open-source initiative. The motive behind the project was to improve the performance of the web content and advertisements. It came as a response to similar fast-loading formats like Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News. The AMP project went live in Google Search in February 2016. Since then, it has been adopted by various publishers to create mobile-optimized content.
Accelerated Mobile Pages technology
AMP is built on three core components:
- AMP HTML. This is a variant of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) with custom AMP properties. Some HTML tags are replaced with AMP-specific tags (e.g., img becomes amp-img) to provide reliable performance.
- AMP JS. This JavaScript framework manages resource loading and provides the above-mentioned custom HTML tags. It’s responsible for the efficient and fast rendering of the AMP HTML pages.
- AMP Cache. It is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches and serves AMP content to improve page load times. When a user requests an AMP page, it’s served from the cache in the Google AMP Cache’s network instead of the publisher’s server, contributing to faster load times.
These components allow AMP pages to load much faster than standard HTML pages, leading to better experience for users.