Google study highlights AMP performance

Last week, Google released a case study documenting Accelerated Mobile Page performance for the Washington Post.

In short, the study uncovered three key points:

• A 23% increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
• 88% improvement in load time for AMP content versus traditional mobile web
• 1000+ articles published using AMP HTML every day

With nearly 55% of their traffic coming from mobile devices, the Washington Post understands that a great reading experience on mobile is critical for long-term success.

In particular, The Post is focused on making their mobile content load as quickly as possible, because their data shows that people abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn’t load quickly.

In June 2015, the Washington Post joined a group of publishers and techn companies to create the Accelerated Mobile Pages project – an open standard for publishing content which loads almost instantaneously, anywhere across the mobile web.

David Merrell, Senior Product Manager at the Washington Post said:

“Getting started with AMP was so easy because it is built on existing technologies. Since AMP is not a template-based system, we were able to host our content, style it as we see fit, and easily integrate our existing advertising, analytics and other business tools.

“We are committed to improving speed across the board. If our site takes a long time to load, it doesn’t matter how great our content is, some users will leave the page before they see what’s there.

“We are seeing load times average 400 milliseconds – an 88% improvement over our traditional mobile website. This has made readers more likely to tap on our posts because they know they will load quicker than the competition.”

AMP has been great for retention as well. Traditionally 51% of mobile search users return to The Washington Post within 7 days. For users who read stories published in AMP, this number jumps to 63%.

Impressed? You should be. The Washington Post pulls in close to 80 million readers every month, so you know there’s significant data here.

Will AMP make your site faster? There’s no guarantee, but it’s absolutely worth a shot.

Need help getting AMP set up for your website? Connect with us.

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