Optimising Your Content For Mobile – AMP & Facebook Instant Articles

Google has now started to give ranking favour to websites on mobile search that provide Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Major online publishers are using AMP as well as Facebook Instant Articles to dramatically improve the service they offer to mobile users.

Mobile users now make up a huge percentage of visitors to any website. As well as making your site look good and be usable on a mobile device, we now need to look at optimising it for these two new technologies.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

This is a global, industry-wide initiative, with publishers large and small all focused on the same goal: a better, faster mobile web. The project launched in Autumn 2015.

Google in particular has been pushing AMP. The project aims to make pages load near-instantly on mobile devices. The web is slow for many mobile users who are often on a 2G or 3G connection. Web pages with big images and fancy plugins can take ages to load on a mobile device – this puts your customers off, as well as eating into their mobile data allowance.

AMP aims to present a mobile user with a stripped-down version of your website pages. Fancy design and resource-heavy plugins and scripts are ignored in favour of speed, but important content is retained. Your website will know if it being accessed by a mobile or desktop user and serve up the relevant resources automatically.

Facebook Instant Articles

This will be available to all publishers, large or small, from April 12th 2016. Leveraging the same technology used to display photos and videos quickly in the Facebook mobile app, articles now load instantly – in about half a second – and as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles. People will enjoy a more responsive reading experience with the fluidity and interactivity people expect from native apps.

So, what do you do?

The good news is that AMP and Facebook Instant Articles can be integrated into your existing website. CGain provides services for the most popular website development platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, Opencart and HTML. Contact us for details.