Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in October 2015. Google AMP is an accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile pages. Google AMP is an open-source initiative that is designed to enable publishers to easily improve the speed and the user experience for their mobile users without sacrificing any ad revenue that they may rely upon.

Experienced publishers can often achieve similar results through intensive performance optimizations. However, they often neglect doing this due to resource or time constraints. Google AMP validation allows these optimizations to be easily achieved without altering the primary mobile web experience. There’s also the added benefit to using AMP because of its usage by Google and other prominent web technology companies who are encouraging its use by integrating it heavily into their respective platforms.

google amp validation

How does Google AMP validation work?

Google AMP validation is essentially a framework for creating mobile web pages. It consists of three parts.

  • AMP HTML – This stripped-down subset of HTML has some custom tags and properties. There are also many restrictions. It’s kind of like HTML on a diet. If you are familiar with HTML in general, you should have no problem implementing AMP HTML into your mobile pages.
  • AMP Javascript – AMP has a JavaScript framework for mobile pages. It manages resource handling and asynchronous loading. Please note that 3rd party Javascript is not allowed within the AMP framework.
  • AMP CDN – This is an optional content delivery network that will take your AMP pages, cache them automatically and make some performance optimizations.

How will you use Google AMP validation on your website?

Let’s be honest, with Google AMP validation, you will have to maintain at least two versions of any article page. These will be the original version of the article page and the AMP version of the same page. Since AMP doesn’t permit things such as form elements and third-party JavaScript, you will not be able to have lead forms, on-page comments and other elements that you may have used in your standard page implementation. It is also important to remember that you may have to rewrite your site template to accommodate the restrictions. For example, all CSS in AMP must be in-line and be less than 50KB. Due to loading-intensiveness of custom fonts, they may be loaded using special amp-font extensions in order to better control the loading. As a result, you may want to stick to easier loading fonts as a rule.

Multimedia must be handled in a special way.  For example, images need to utilize the custom amp-img element and have an explicit height and width. When converting a legacy website to a Google AMP validated website, this can be a major problem if width and height attributes aren’t already being used. Additionally, if you use animated GIFs on your site, you need to use the separate amp-anim extended component.

Like images, there is a custom tag that you must use to embed locally hosted videos via HTML5. It’s called amp-video. For embedding YouTube videos, you will use a separate extended component called amp-youtube.

We’re not saying that these tag and extended components are difficult to use. They are not. They just require some planning in your site design. In order for Google (and other technologies supporting the AMP Project) to detect the AMP version of your article, you will need to modify the original version of the article page. The original article page must include the following tag, essentially a canonical tag for AMP pages:

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”http://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/”>

The AMP discovery page also mentions that some platforms that support AMP will require Schema.org meta data to specify the content type of the page. (Currently, “article,” “recipe,” “review” and “video” are listed as page type examples on GitHub.)

Moreover, it also indicates that Schema.org meta data is a requirement to make your content eligible to appear in the demo of the Google Search news carousel. So if you’re trying to get a future benefit from Google by implementing AMP, make sure you get your schema right!

 So, to get your pages Google AMP ready, you will need to undertake some work. It’s vitally important to make your mobile pages load quickly. Google AMP validation will only become more important as time goes on so if you can do things to get your site ready now it is well worth the effort.