Nowadays, a lot of content consumption happens on mobile devices.
Think of a scenario, you have written a nice blog with good content, appropriate stock images, contextual infographics, etc., and everything seems fine till now.
But when you upload this blog to a website,
☹️The size of the web page increases
☹️Flashy content leads to the slow speed of the webpage, which increases page rendering time.
☹️Unable to cater to huge traffic (server problem)
This results in users dropping off, resulting in less traffic and output below expectations. A long delay in landing page loading can even hamper brand reputation.
What to do now?
Solution🚀: Accelerated Mobile Pages
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source standard that allows you to create web pages that load quickly on mobile browsers. To help provide a better mobile user experience, you can create AMP versions of your landing pages.
1. AMP allows asynchronous Java script with protection against the delay of page rendering.
2. It loads the layout of the page without waiting for any resources (image, infographic, embedded video, etc.). You will observe the gray boxes appear first, and then the content in those grey boxes. Visitors will churn if your webpage takes more than 3 seconds to load. This functionality helps in engaging the user and reducing churn.
3. AMPs don’t allow extension mechanisms to block rendering, which means any external extension requests from social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter are added before the script. Hence, AMPs don’t block or delay the rendering of the webpage due to those external extensions.
4. AMPs keep 3rd party JavaScript out of the path. As in, if your webpage has display ads, it will take time (latency) to load those ads. AMPs allow ads to load without hampering the main page's performance.
5. AMPs are templatized pages with structured CSS blocks and inline style sheets, which help in structured page building, follow hygiene, and enable faster loading.
6. Web font optimization: web fonts are larger. AMPs have dedicated style sheets and fonts. It doesn’t accept other HTTP requests until the font is loaded completely. This means faster loading of text, the first thing visible on the webpage will be the font. Interesting, isn’t it?
7. Minimize the time spent on style recalculations and AMPs work as per priorities.
8. All the animations on the page are accelerated using the hardware (GPU) of the device. Hence, you will observe that a better mobile device with a better processor and better GPU performs faster in dynamic page loading.
9. Prioritization: AMP controls all resource downloads: it prioritizes resource loading, loads only what’s needed, and prefetches lazy-loaded resources.
10. Instant Page Loading: AMP prerenders and downloads the resources ABF (Above the Fold). This means a page gets rendered before the decision of the user to visit that webpage. Isn’t it super cool? It consumes a lot of bandwidth on the CPU; hence, mobile devices with more RAM (8GB+) perform better in instant loading of the webpage.
Few other factors which impact the loading performance of landing pages on mobile devices:
1. RAM of the device
2. GPU of the device
3. Processor of the device
4. Refresh Rate frequency of the device screen
5. Speed of data (Mobile data or WIFI)
6. Performance of the dedicated server used to host the landing page
7. Geography of the device (IP address)
Other ways to develop mobile websites:
Separate Site: Build a separate website for mobile devices with the URL (m.sitename.com). In these types of websites, the browser recognizes the source (here mobile device) and automatically opens the mobile version of the website.
Adaptive Serving: The content of the page adapts to the device. It will capture the type of device, and internet speeds and automatically will get adapted to it and display the content accordingly.
Responsive mobile site: The layout of the website changes in order to be compliant/ adjusted with the mobile devices. In this, a developer needs to think about the aspect ratio of the device and adjust all the content elements accordingly. Various CMS platforms like WordPress and Wix provide it.
That's all folks.
Cheers!!
Insightful