What do you expect from the pages you visit while surfing the web on your phone? Fluid graphics, smooth scrolling, and instant load times when you click a link.
This is the dream, but most often not the case. Reality looks more like frantically refreshing the page and being overwhelmed by nervous twitches when the web doesn’t work at its optimal efficiency.
So other than being rather irritating, are slow page load times affecting your business? Nearly half of web users tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded in 3 seconds or less. If your company makes $100,000 per day, 1 extra second of page load time could cost you $2.5 million annually in lost sales.
With 50% of search queries globally coming from mobile devices, quick access and fast browsing should be a priority for any ecommerce store. So how does one overcome the epidemic of slow load times? Well Google AMP had risen to the challenge.
In the past web efficiency has been based around the desktop browsing experience, but Google is plunging us into a mobile-first world with the cutting edge AMP software.
What is Google AMP?
Google Amp stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is an open source software designed for optimized web browsing and near instantaneous load times. It’s a software open to all publishers and allows the creation of websites that are accessible, fast, and promote enjoyable user experience.
Google’s AMP product manager stated that the average AMP page load time is 0.7 seconds, compare to regular non-AMP webpages averaging with a load time of 22 seconds. So is Google employing some sort of black magic? Turns out their developer team has taken a more simplistic and elegant approach. AMP is a regular HTML site stripped down to essentials and optimized for lightning speed.
When designing your new site using the Cornerstone Template, an alternate version of your site is created and shaped to meet the minimalistic specifications required by AMP. By sticking to the Google provided guidelines the software knows what the layout of your page will be, before the content even begins to load.
Most JavaScript isn’t used and AMP pages are loaded and stored on Google servers, both of which allow for much faster load times. AMP prioritizes the entire load chain and certain elements are loaded before others. Most secondary content and elements outside the page are loaded once the main content is completely displayed, so users can start reading as soon as possible.
So how can you enter the world of Google AMP and begin making fast and furiously compelling websites? BigCommerce has just recently released the new AMP-enabled Cornerstone template. The AMP feature is available for both product and category pages and allows you to operate your online storefront without the fear of losing customers to tedious page load times.
The integration of AMP with BigCommerce allows your ecommerce content to be loaded across multiple platforms and devices in an instant. Decreasing load time will increase conversions and Google AMP will help your site achieve incredible speeds and profit.
For more information on how to setup a BigCommerce Store or how to incorporate Google AMP onto your BigCommerce site, contact us below for more information.
