Google to up content loading speed on mobiles

But the enemy when it comes to mobile access is that sometimes, websites take too long to load (especially if you have a poor connection) and so publishers and advertisers lose eyeballs when impatient people abandon viewing the site.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project provides an open source approach, allowing publishers to focus on producing great content, while relying on the shared components for high performance and great user experience.

Google today announced an important initiative that might be the biggest attempt to create a better mobile web experience than we’ve ever seen.

Over time, Google plans to work with others to improve AMP HTML pages that continue to integrate animations, videos, and other rich content the way that the publishers intend.

Google’s service, called the “Accelerated Mobile Pages Project”, or AMP, is aimed at loading mobile Web pages nearly instantly instead of requiring consumers to wait several seconds to open an article. However, as Google’s ranking algorithms work on page-load times, surely AMP-optimised content will naturally rise to the top. Google also notes that with AMP, it wants to support a range of ad networks and formats, and so publishers can retain their ad networks.

Google claims its search results will not be skewered in favor of AMP articles, but speed will be a major factor in users decisions on where to read the news.

Publishers using AMP will keep control over their own revenues and there is no business partnership between them and Google. A few companies are already working on this process, such as The New York Times, Twitter, Guardian, BuzzFeed, Daily Mail and Vox media.

Google also launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to bring in a change in the display of mobile pages.

Indeed, “This is a deal-less environment”, says Richard Gingras, who is head of news at Google.

Google has already roped in a bunch of publishers to leverage AMP.

AWP’s initial technical spec is available on GitHub. Facebook offers an alternative, Instant Articles, which is now just on its own platform. You can take AMP for an early spin thanks to this demo Google has put together.