Are AMPs worth considering for your charity website?

18 August 2020  |  Stuart Palmer

Next time you are carrying out a Google search on a mobile device, keep your eyes peeled for a small lightning bolt icon to the right of a listing’s web address. This means that the page listed is an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP).

This article looks at what AMPs are, how they are built and what benefits they can provide for charities.

What are AMPs?

Since the early days of the World Wide Web, most webpages have been structured using a special code (HTML). Over time, more lightweight, faster-loading frameworks have been created, mainly for social media sites and in mobile apps.

In 2016, Google launched a new, stripped down version of HTML. This was specifically designed for webpages served on mobile operating systems. At the time, these AMPs were designed to compete with Facebook Instant Articles and only appeared in the news carousel on mobile search results pages.

Four years on, AMPs are now part of Google’s mobile-first philosophy as their preferred format for all web pages. Yet they are still something of a rare sight when scrolling through Google Search Results Pages (SERPs).

Should your charity consider using them?

What benefits do AMPs provide?

The most commonly promoted benefit of AMPs is their loading speed. According Notify Visitors, AMPs load 85% faster than their HTML counterparts.

This is likely to reduce the proportion of visitors who leave your website before the content has loaded (bounce rate). It could also have a dramatic effect on your donations. General website stats from Kissmetrics reveal that a one second delay in loading speed can reduce conversions by 7% and there is no reason to think that charity websites would perform any differently.

Another reason to consider AMPs is that loading experience, including speed, will be part of the Core Web Vitals Google will be focusing on over the coming years. In short, AMPs could get you ranked higher on Google Search.

Google Web Stories (formerly AMP Stories) are another bonus which charities could benefit from. These enable visitors to enjoy a browser-based Instagram or Snapchat-type experience, tapping from page to page on their device to follow a story.

Browser-based Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can also be built on AMPs (these are called PWAMPs) for a true next-gen experience.

The case for embracing AMPs is clearly very strong so why isn’t every organisation rushing to get their websites rebuilt around them?

The answer could lie in the work required to develop a reliable AMP solution.

Setting up your AMP charity pages

AMPs require a lot of care and attention to set up which means you will almost certainly want to entrust them to a developer.

Although AMP ‘plug-ins’ have been available since 2018, they don’t offer the level of control and customisation that’s needed to deliver a truly optimised AMP experience.

For example, AMPs need to be combined with structured data to ensure mobile search listings highlight key information. They need to be carefully tested and monitored to make sure they are responding as expected and being indexed correctly.

The more complex your needs, the more development work needs to go in to your AMPs. More work means more cost which begs the question…

Is it worth it?

Given the SEO benefits and the ability to inject Instagram-like stories and store-free apps directly into your Google search listings, AMPs can certainly give charities a leg up in the search rankings.

The main barrier is, as always, budget. At the current stage of development, free plugins don’t really cut it and professional AMP development can get expensive.

If you want to take full advantage of everything AMPs have to offer, you need to have sufficient funds to set the technology up properly.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in AMP mainly to minimise page load time, we would recommend following best practise for speeding up a standard responsive website before worrying about AMPs.

This includes minimising the number of scripts running on your website, cleaning up bulky code and compressing images. These are all tasks that your existing web development partners should be able to help you with.

Whether you invest in AMPs or not, a fast, mobile-friendly website will put your charity in the best position as Google move towards embedding Core Web Vitals into its search engine.