amp vs mobile friendly

Google has really transformed its way of functionality when compared to its earlier days. It keeps launching different algorithms and bots to evaluate and rank websites.

Do you remember those early mobile-phone-days when we searched something on the Google, and the destination URL opens with a truncated page? Half of the page captured the mobile screen, and for the remaining page, you had to scroll sidewise.

If we are talking about the display of website pages back in early mobile days, then let us also mention how much time a website used to take to load completely even if the internet connection is strong.

These 2 issues have irritated all of us, isn’t it?

That’s why Google first launched ‘mobile-friendly’ label to be displayed for the mobile search results which load with full page displayed on the screen irrespective of the device used and screen size of the device.

  • What is a Mobile-Friendly Page?

A Mobile-Friendly Page is a web designing approach to display the same page of the website across a wide range of devices without changing page layout aspects. The user experience and response of the website remain the same regardless of the device used for opening a mobile-friendly page. It is a part of Responsive Web Design (RWD) which aims at providing optimised display experience of a website for a user.

As per Google’s latest update, mobile-friendly is an out-dated label for any search engine, and it has been recently updated not to display against any web-page. However, it still remains one of the page-ranking factors. The reason Google has removed the label is the fact that today nearly 85% web-pages are designed on a mobile-friendly website.

How to test the mobile-friendliness of a website?

There are many free tools available on the net to test if a website is mobile-friendly or not. You can use Think with Google or Google Search Console to perform a test. You only need to mention the website URL and enter.

  • What is an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)?

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Page can be defined as an open-source web component framework developed by Google to publish fast-loading websites. AMPs are the lightweight mobile web pages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. Similar to a mobile-friendly page, an AMP uses the same building blocks – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

AMP is not yet classified as one of the page ranking factors; however, in the future, it is expected to be included in the list.

When compared to a mobile-friendly page that displays the same URL regardless of the device used to access, an AMP uses different URL on mobile phones.

How to validate an AMP-Complaint Page?

Similar to testing a mobile-friendly page, you can validate an AMP page through AMP Project Validator. There are other free tools available as well to validate AMP codes.

What is the ‘Mobile-First’ Index?

Mobile-First Index is a baseline for indexing and ranking websites from the mobile version of the site first. With mobile-first index coming in the game, Google will decide the rank of a website based on how a site will appear and respond to a mobile user. Hence, a website has to be mobile-friendly and AMP-compliant at the same time.

Difference between AMP and Mobile-Friendly Page:

  1. While mobile-friendly pages are designed with an objective to provide optimal user experience; accelerated mobile pages are designed for fast-loading pages without losing page layout.
  2. Almost every website is currently having mobile-friendly pages, whereas AMP is still evolving and has started getting implemented. As of now, Google has recorded nearly 4 million AMP docs getting added on its index every week.
  3. Google has stopped labelling mobile-friendly pages, whereas it labels those pages which are AMP optimised.
  4. The number of requests sent to retrieve an accelerated mobile page, whereas requests are relatively higher for mobile-friendly pages when compared to AMPs.

In short, if you are planning to launch a website, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, and at the same time, it should be AMP optimised, unless you want your page to drop to the bottom of the SEO ranking list.