Google Gives Adrenaline Shot To Web With Accelerated Mobile Pages Project

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Google loves speed. This is a reality website owners know all too well. Sometimes it can feel like a constant battle making sure the big G is happy, both with regards to how fast pages load, and how it wants you to check all of the right Web design boxes. It's for these reasons that it's no surprise that the company has just rolled out a new project that aims to make the Web even faster. At least on mobile.

The AMP Project, or Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, comes to fruition a mere week after Google officially became a subsidiary, and it could prove to be a boon for those who browse while mobile often (which is pretty much all of us). As its name no doubt gives away, the goal here is to make sure that webpages load fast. In fact, Google's not going to be happy unless "fast" becomes "instant".

To make this work, a brand-new framework is being introduced, called AMP HTML, which can take advantage of Google's cloud serving capabilities. A unique framework like this means that Web developers who want to take advantage of this feature need to integrate AMP into their website, because, in effect, it will override standard protocols. For example, a link clicked could be an AMP link, not a simple URL (though it'd be backwards compatible.)

An example of what Google hopes to see from this can be seen at the URL below; when on mobile, swiping from article to article will have no delay whatsoever, in effect providing the best experience possible.

For website owners, there's a bit of good news: taking advantage of AMP is not required, and Google isn't going to begin weighing sites that use it over those that don't. However, Google does favor sites with super-fast response times, so it stands to reason that using it will help to some extent. So far, a number of major publishers have signed up, so now we'll start the waiting game to see if this will become a de facto standard.