Accelerated Mobile Pages - The Future of Mobile Development?

April 21 is a day that lived in infamy (or glory) for many websites, as Google started ranking sites with mobile responsive design higher in its algorithm. Some companies are already seeing boosts in traffic, but slowly.

Google has released their proof-of-concept for their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, which has already been implemented by over 30 different online publishers, such as the BBC, the Daily Mail and Mashable as well as several distribution platforms such as WordPress.com and Pinterest.

The basis of this technology is to take a news article, or any kind of webpage and strip it down to the basics, and make it load as fast as possible. This is achieved by stripping the pages bare of anything that will cause excessive load times on a mobile, limiting what the page is capable of displaying, as well as pre-loading elements before the page appears. This limit doesn’t effect the actual content being provided, just removes all the unnecessary items such as JavaScript calls or vast amounts of CSS. This doesn’t mean that you’re left with a blank page of just text though. One of Google’s major points in this is to allow the content that is displayed on your site to still display on the mobile, including videos direct from YouTube or advertising, which is often lost by the time a page fully loads.

What does this mean for us? Well, it means that we will be developing sites that are starting to use this. All of our WordPress sites will be fully supported, and our own CMS will also be following suit soon. This means that any new site we build will be keeping up with some of the biggest online publishers in the world.