Analyzing Accelerated Mobile Pages Performance

If you are avid mobile user you would have noticed in Google search results pages a fine logo of lightning bolt with grey-ish text AMP. Have you ever thought what it is and why it is displaying in your search results. In this article, we are going to see about AMP from a performance perspective.

Now-a-days every web application is being built on complex architecture with micro services and there are lot of resources loaded on the client side. But for mobile users, it is unnecessary to load everything as-is like desktop. You get annoying pop-ups, huge images, automatic redirect to your app store or play or windows store. That is why Google designed a project called AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages.

It is an open source initiative by Google to deliver better performance for mobile web. Google collaborates with multiple publishers who creates mobile optimized content to deliver it quickly to the end users. The language to create AMP is called AMP HTML along with AMP JS library.

What Is the Need for AMP?

From my perspective, I feel it is necessary to streamline the mobile web content and to display relevant results quickly without loading all the resources. It saves the bandwidth, time, and many more. AMP project objective is to deliver content quickly for mobile web users.

How It Works?

Right now, there are lot of publishers who enabled their pages AMP-ish. E.g. Washington Post, if you search for any news, if Washington Post lists in the first page, Google collates it and display the content as AMP along with other publishers’ results as carousel. See below example.

Even our blog QAInsights.com is AMP enabled. WordPress has released AMP plugin recently where you need to just install that plugin and activate it. Google start indexing the pages as AMP and display it accordingly.

What AMP Supports?

AMP supports content, image, videos,  layouts, advertisements etc. Very soon, AMP extensions enables users to sign-up for newsletters, basic site searches etc. AMP supports e-commerce as well where users can shop in AMP.

As I mentioned above, AMP definitely enables faster web by loading only relevant resources.

• It will save the bandwidth usage
• less number of requests
• less number of DNS lookups
• Improved user experience.

Validate AMP

There are multiple ways to validate AMP. Easy way to validate the AMP content is : using this chrome app which validates the AMP compliance. You can use chrome dev tools to view the AMP errors.

Measuring AMP performance

Usual tools like HPE LoadRunner or Apache JMeter does not support AMP as of today. Only SOASTA’s mPulse tool has a privilege to capture real user monitoring for AMPs.

Your turn: Is there any other tool available to measure the AMP performance?

Have you enabled AMP for your blog?