Google's AMP Moves Beyond News, Optimizes Any Mobile Page

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which were launched to make news sites load faster on mobile devices (largely because they were weighted down with excessive and slow-loading ads), is moving beyond news sites to the wider vistas of the Internet.

 Google launched a demo page today allowing users to take a look and see what sites will look like with AMP applied. Releasing it as a demo will allow Google to adjust the process as needed, based on consumer and developer feedback before it does a full run. It will also allow developers time to learn how to implement AMP.

The full rollout will happen sometime within the next few months, but Google hasn’t made it clear exactly when that will be.

There are reportedly over 150 million AMP documents from over 650,000 domains in Google’s index, with an additional 4 million being loaded in each week.

The expanded AMP program doesn’t affect site ranking at all, but it will allow people to access sites and stories beyond the “top stories” section of Google at a faster rate. Slow loading times are the bane of many Internet properties’ existence.

The program is still working to find ways to better support ecommerce and forms to help those processes go faster.

AMP still supports ads, but those ads have to be in a format that will load fast enough to meet Google’s requirements. Many users are becoming used to the lightning bolt that signifies a fast-loading, stripped down mobile page.

The demo is available at g.co/ampdemo.

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