In fact, data shows that people abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn't load quickly—which is bad not just for people trying to get what they want online, but for the publishers who want those readers to enjoy the content they've created for them.
That's why, last October, we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP for short), an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.
AMP enables a fast reading experience on Google search and Google Play as well as thousands of other sites from social and travel to food, and from retail to sport, making it easy for people to get to the latest news quickly and to read more in the limited time they have.
In less than six months Google has enabled AMP across a number of products from top stories in search to Google News and NewsStand. The data we are seeing is encouraging with pages on average loading 4 x faster and using 10x less data than non AMP pages.
Now we are bringing that same fast reading experience to users here in Australia on our top stories section in search with some of the country's biggest publishers leveraging the power of AMP, including News Corporation, Fairfax Media, Nine Digital and Fox Sports. Readers looking for updates on Aussie athletes at the Rio Olympics or the latest on the US election will get their stories blazingly fast on mobile devices.
For publishers already using AMP, the experience is encouraging. The Washington Post is seeing very promising numbers when it comes to engagement and retention:
- An 88% decrease in article loading time
- A 23% increase in returning users from mobile search
The objectives of the AMP Project team aren’t just about improving a user’s engagement with content. We know the experience people have with ads is equally important to help publishers fund the great content we all love to read. That's why we are introducing AMP for Ads to bring together everything that is good and fast about AMP to advertising. You can read more about that effort on the AMP Project blog.
Follow progress on the AMP Project site and see what is coming next on the roadmap here. There’s still a lot of work ahead and it’s been thrilling to see how the industry has come together to work on this common goal of making the mobile web great for everyone. And given the potential AMP holds for other types of content, we’re excited about what the future holds and look forward to hearing your feedback - get involved here. ______________________________________________________________________________________