Accelerated Mobile Pages, AMP for short, is an open source project designed to make the web faster. For people accessing web content on mobile devices, speed is a challenge for many users and with over 50% of content accessed on the web via mobile devices, this is more important now than ever.
The concept of Accelerated Mobile Pages is all about stripping out irrelevant styling and fancy JavaScript technologies to make the page load much faster, with the most important aspect, the content, loading virtually instantly.
If you’re interested in the finer details behind the project, have a read all about it here, https://www.ampproject.org/. The technical aspects behind the project are quite significant as are the underlying details about how your web browser loads content as standard.
Accelerated Mobile Pages AMP Speed Test
So we thought we’d put AMP to the test to see just how much faster it really is for WordPress in comparison to a rather bloated website which requires a bit of TLC, like most WordPress websites on the whole. The results below we repeated on the same website multiple times and cannot believe the performance increases we saw. The Accelerated Mobile Pages plugin for WordPress is available for download from the WordPress repository. A note on the plugin at the time of writing, it only supports Posts in WordPress, i.e. your blog posts. Pages and Ecommerce Products aren’t supported currently.
Blog Post Loaded As Normal
Blog Post Loaded with Accelerated Mobile Pages APM Technology
Awesome! Try loading this page you are viewing now as an Accelerated Mobile Page here to see how this looks: https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/05/09/wordpress-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-speed-test/amp/
As a footnote. Yes, 30 seconds is darn slow for a website to fully load. Yes, tools like Pingdom are not perfect as many users are more interested in the time when the website appears to have completed to load opposed to when the last byte has arrived. And yes, this is only a single site as a comparison. Get involved and give this a go on your own website to see how this performs for you. Every website is significantly different and ever web server has been configured differently based on your individual needs.
Michael Cropper