Do Hotel Websites Need to Use AMP?
What’s AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is an an open source initiative that aims to provide mobile-optimized content that can load almost instantly on all devices.
The goal is to allow publishers to use AMP to improve mobile access to news stories, videos, blogs, photos, and GIFs.
Basically, it creates stripped down versions of your web pages that will load really, really quickly.
AMP is a Google-backed project designed for any publisher to have pages load much faster. Early last year, Google officially integrated AMP listings into its mobile search results, which have been weighted more heavily in overall search engine results.
A lot of news sites use it. Search something news related on your phone and you’ll see the AMP searches at the top
Currently AMP is used by leading publishers around the world, including BBC, Guardian News & Media, The Financial Times, CBS News, CNN, Forbes, NFL, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many others.
AMP achieves its lightning-fast speeds in a couple of ways. First, it requires web developers to use a simple set of web technologies to create pages. Most JavaScript is not allowed, which is a really good way to make web pages load faster. Second, it sends pages from its own Google-run servers, at least when you visit an AMP page from a Google search results page.
As we all know, slow loading websites frustrate visitors. They tend to bounce and for you that’s a potential lost booking. In a recent Google study on mobile site speed, they found that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than just three (!) seconds to load.
Does Your Hotel Website Need AMP?
Well, it depends.
At this point, odds are AMP is probably not applicable to your website. But, that doesn’t mean we don’t recommend it.
When might we suggest you use AMP on your hotel’s website?
If your site is truly content-driven, you may want to implement it. This means that if you are constantly publishing new webpages (think articles, video blog posts, special landing pages, area guides, etc.), AMP might help you gain traction on the increasingly mobile web. At least you may want to experiment with it on your blog if yours is active and actively driving web traffic and bookings.
As content becomes more and more important to the overall guest experience, you may want to keep AMP in your back pocket, even if you don’t implement yet. (You also may want to start thinking about how you can improve your overall content marketing game—but we can discuss that later.)
WordPress, which we use to develop all of our websites, offers an AMP plugin that when activated it transforms all posts on your site so that they will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions, accessible by appending /amp/ to the end your post URLs.
Even without the speedy benefits of AMP, you’ll want to make sure your mobile pages fly. Some of the best ways to ensure a faster mobile website include keeping the file size of your images low, not overusing plugins, limiting (or eliminating altogether) your use of JavaScript, and not relying on too many 301 page redirects.
While AMP is still new and being tried and tested by various web developers, it has proven itself a force to be reckoned with, at least as far as major news sites and their readers are concerned.
Definitely keep AMP on your radar and we’ll continue to post about it. We suspect the volume on it will continue to increase.