You’re about to spend a lot less time waiting for mobile search results to load. Google has announced a pretty drastic expansion of the Accelerated Mobile Pages program, which will now include websites that aren’t publishing partners with Google.
Basically, any website that has the AMP code in it will be able to surface as fast-loading pages in Google Search, helping users get to those web pages much faster than they otherwise would be able to.
There are a few reasons Google is making the move — one of which is that AMP has been quite a big success with publishers. The likes of Disney, Food Network, and eBay have all built websites that load with AMP, and according to Google a massive 150 million web URLs load through the project.
Of course, Google isn’t the only company trying to speed up the web for mobile. Facebook is also trying to speed up content natively through its Instant Articles initiative. Instant Articles is largely limited to publishers, while Google’s product is less about publishers and more about trying to speed up the mobile web.
It’s important to note that while AMP pages will load much faster than non AMP pages, they won’t show any higher in search results — AMP doesn’t affect Google’s search algorithm. Google is rolling out a developer preview of the new AMP feature today, and will roll out the full feature in the near future.
While many of us may already have excellent internet connections that are able to deliver content to us extremely quickly, those that do not may notice much more of a change. It will certainly be interesting to see the effect that AMP has on the mobile web and whether or not it web owners adopt it on a mass scale.
