Expersight Intelligence
The field of UX has developed so much over the years that has now set high expectations among the customers. It also made customers grow impatient as access to information has to be expedited, error-free and engaging. Spearheading the bandwagon, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have met with immense success wherein they are addressing issues that uninspire user response because of slow loading sites. As a matter of fact, 150 million pages enabled by AMP are indexed on the search engine.
These open-source protocols that speed up pages on mobile browsers have proven to have loaded pages faster than non-AMP pages by 85%. While millions of websites including e-commerce portals have their content strategy in place, it is the ease in accessing the pages that differentiates a ‘fine’ browsing experience from excellent.
As per SmartInsights, 44% of mobile users expect a website to load faster and deliver a desktop-like browsing experience while the performance drops leading to abbreviated ROI is a proven metric. As the number of smartphone owners continues to increase explosively from 4.9 billion, e-commerce platforms must adhere to the transpiring trends and reach out to 66% of the world’s population that is active on-mobile, more efficiently.
Google’s experiment to display 30 search results (and not 10) on a page led to a massive drop in usage by 20% because an additional 500 milliseconds were needed to stream.
Better UX designs for faster loading and reduced bounce rates
More than half of the visitors might have abandoned a page if it took more than 3 seconds to load? These findings by Kissmetrics further detailed a use case wherein a site that generates USD 10,000 per day loses USD 2.5 million of revenue every year due to a loading delay by 1 second. Such delays while browsing mobiles lower conversion by 3.5% while the bounce rate crosses 8.5%.
Sluggish page loading could drastically affect the overall CX (Customer Experience), and that is why Google has been asking you to improve loading times. With AMP, everything boils down to speeding loading times and ultimately overhauled customer experience to help control the bounce rates of the websites. Such an uplifting user experience contributes to better organic rankings.
Washington Post’s new website enabled with AMP benefited with 23% more returning users on mobile, and that happened with load times overhauled by 88%!
While users have agreed to have spent more time on websites that load faster on mobile devices, these metrics are of utmost significance in the e-commerce ecosystem wherein product pages that load faster could help convert more sales. Nothing less than incentivizing your visitors for repeated purchases, AMP directly enhances your potential revenue.
Moreover, e-commerce sites that implemented AMP in their email campaigns benefitted from a 200% rise in CTRs and up to 18% increase in Ad performance. Such enhanced effectiveness of online campaigns is of utmost significance to businesses selling online.
Page loading speed and SEO rankings
Site speed is an essential ranking factor for search engines, and unchecked bounce rates will eventually affect your organic visibility. Google’s algorithm favors faster sites and shows them up in the search results. Making it a point to reward mobile-optimized sites, the search engine’s mobile-friendly algorithm pushed websites to fit appropriately on mobile screens and render a better user experience.
The lightning bolt label adjacent to AMP-enabled pages allows a user to connect faster, and that’s just one of the many ways Google is rewarding such websites.
As perfectly put by Google, “AMP is a natural fit for e-commerce because AMP makes web pages fast, and helps pages with purchase conversions.”
Fastcommerce drove conversions to a 15% hike following the AMP-first approach wherein over 2 million pages were published. Having AMP will put your e-commerce store ahead of the league and, in turn, convert more sales. As online shops make it a point to steer their traffic to handheld devices, AMP becomes even more imperative wherein they outperform by keeping the user arrested until he makes a purchase.
AMP upgrades and analytics
Since multiple analytics tools could potentially slow down the site, Google’s ‘measure once report to many’ enables to utilize the AMP-analytics variable for e-commerce websites. Amidst certain speculations about the scope of AMP, key updates have been introduced to align with the e-commerce ecosystem.
Both the product and listing pages are now enabled by AMP followed by a smart cache model to refer traffic to the AMP pages. Also, the in-built validation system scans the page’s markup and validates its AMP HTML specifications. Currently, less than 0.1% of pages indexed by Google are enabled by AMP. However, the upcoming years will witness an explosive rise in more AMP-enabled e-commerce pages being indexed by the search engine.
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