Speed up your website with AMP and PWA

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP is an open source framework spearheaded by Google in its effort to push for a better mobile web experience. AMP consists of web pages that provide near instantaneous loading experience on mobile, with components that come already optimized for performance.

AMP is generally leaner because of the strict rules that it enforces.

For instance, it doesn’t allow the use of any JavaScript and select HTML elements. While this may seem limiting for some websites, these restrictions are what ultimately makes AMP faster than non-AMP pages.

On top of this, AMP also offers a CDN component. By default, it fetches and caches AMP content so that it can be served faster.

(To learn more about AMP, visit the official website.)

Despite the benefits that AMP offers, not many online businesses have implemented it for themselves.

Only 12% of marketers surveyed by Unbounce claim to have a strong understanding of AMP, with the rest having only limited understanding or no knowledge about AMP at all.

When asked why they’re not adapting AMP, the main reasons that surfaced are either the lack of understanding of the technology or the lack of developer capacity to implement it.

If this applies to your business, you can start adapting AMP by using tools like Unbounce, which lets you create AMP landing pages easily. This can ease you into the idea, and is a good way for you to see the benefits of AMP for yourself.

However, for a complete implementation of AMP on your entire site, you do need a dedicated development team to help you.

Our in-house development team have done many AMP projects—in fact, our own mobile site used to be built with AMP before we switched to a headless CMS setup (more on this in the next article).

Drop us a line to learn how we can help you with AMP implementation.

Progressive Web App (PWA)

PWA has been around since 2015, but recently it’s emerging as a new trend in mobile optimization because of the fast experience it delivers to users.

It’s basically a web app that’s accessible through a browser just like any other website, but acts as a native mobile app in terms of loading speed, navigation, and interactions.

PWA also gives you the option to make your site “installable” by offering an “Add to home screen” button to users when they visit your site, and even enable push notifications to re-engage with your users. These are optional features if you want your site to be more “app-like”.

But outside of these features, the key point of a PWA is to improve site performance and enable accessibility regardless of connectivity. A PWA that’s added to the home screen can be accessed on very low-quality networks or even offline.

You can check out PWA stats to learn more about real-world case studies on the benefits of PWA.

Next: Gatsby + headless CMS setup »