Happy birthday to AMP! The open-source project officially turns four this month. It was announced in October 2015, but first began showing up in search in February 2016. AMP has rapidly evolved since its launch as Accelerated Mobile Pages with a focus on publishers and mobile users. The official name change to AMP reflects how the project has grown to encompass every business vertical and emerge as a development framework across screen sizes from mobile to desktop.
Here’s a few data points on AMP’s first four years:
- Over 6 billion AMP pages published
- More than 31 million domains created by AMP pages
- 2X time spent on AMP pages
- 5X faster than non-AMP pages
AMP achieved these milestones because the online world continues to migrate to mobile devices and speed is critical on mobile. At the same time, building for the mobile web is full of obstacles and challenges, such as intermittent networks, small batteries, small screens and less computing power. On top of these issues, websites contain more features and run more scripts than ever before. AMP entered the web development picture at the right time to address both challenges by guaranteeing speed and keeping functionality.
While AMP was originally targeted to publishers looking for a way to appeal to mobile readers, it has grown to become a framework that applies across the online experience, including e-commerce, digital ads, email and stories. And even though the open-source project was led by Google at launch, it is platform agnostic with Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Baidu, and more adopting AMP.
Moving beyond its Google-led beginnings, AMP now operates under an open governance model with an advisory committee and last October joined the OpenJS Foundation incubation program. The AMP community includes over 1,000 contributors from companies including Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, Bing, eBay and WompMobile.
AMP has grown to become the largest web component library. And these tools give developers the ability to build sites with rich functionality using components, such as:
- AMP-Experiments: A/B testing
- AMP-List: Fetches dynamic content
- AMP-Bind: Adds custom interactivity
- AMP-Script: Enables the use of JavaScript without impacting performance
At launch, AMP was purpose-made for static content that publishers distributed, but it quickly grew to become a development framework that allows for personalization, analytics and integration with most third-party software. Developers can reap the speed benefits inherent in AMP pages and keep feature parity with larger, back-end bloated websites.
AMP-as-a-Framework has evolved from an SEO tool to a robust platform for the entire web ecosystem. For developers, an AMP-first approach works as a framework just like Angular, React and Vue. And major brands have embraced AMP, including George.com, BMW, AARP, Samsung, NewEgg, Redfin, and more.
AMP benchmarks:
- October 2015, Google officially announced the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages project.
- February 2016, AMP launches.
- July 2016, eBay adopts AMP on 8 million of its mobile web pages bringing e-commerce to AMP and Google announced expanding AMP to include ads and landing pages.
- August 2016, Google announced making AMP part of organic mobile search results.
- September 2016, Microsoft announced AMP support in Bing iOS and Android apps.
- February 2017, Adobe reported AMP pages accounted for 7% of all web traffic for top U.S. publishers.
- May 2017, Google reported 900,000 web domains were publishing AMP pages representing more than 2 billion AMP pages published globally.
- June 2017, Twitter began linking to AMP pages from its iOS and Android apps.
- September 2018, Microsoft launched its Bing AMP viewer and AMP cache.
- April 2019, at AMP Conf 2019 project tech lead Malte Ubl, Google, announced the name change from “Accelerated Mobile Pages” to “AMP.”