Back in October, Google announced that it would be adopting the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project to make content on the web load faster. At the time, AMP was only available in a sort of preview, but now it’s fully rolling out.
Google said today that it’s rolling out AMP pages in mobile search results, meaning that you should start seeing news articles that utilize AMP and load super quickly. When you search for something on Google, you’ll see pages that use AMP highlighted in a card and using an AMP lightning bolt. Tapping a webpage will load it, and then you can scroll left-to-right to view the other AMP pages.
Google says that pages built with AMP load an average of four times faster than non-AMP pages and that they use 10 times less data than their non-AMP equivalents. So not only does AMP offer speedier loading, but it can also help you to save some data, which is important when many folks are on limited data plans. While not all webpages that you search for are going to support AMP, the fact that AMP pages load faster and use less data makes AMP-supported pages more attractive than non-AMP pages, and they’ll also be easier to access since they appear up at the top of the search results.
AMP pages are currently only appearing on the mobile web, but Google says that they’ll be added to the Google apps for Android and iOS “soon.”