How AMP Support in Sitefinity Benefits Marketers

As you may have seen, support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) came with Sitefinity 10.1. This feature is in beta as we continue to evolve this offering.

My colleague, Peter Filipov, detailed how to create these pages in a previous blog post. But I want to take another view of AMP from a marketer’s perspective.

What is AMP?

There are many great summaries on the web about the AMP but for ease of use, I’m going to do a quick summary here. If you are looking for more information, feel free to read these two great posts. 

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a Google backed open-source initiative focused on providing a lightning-fast method for enabling content loading. This initiative prioritizes the user experience on a mobile device in styling and functionality over anything else . Some call it a framework while others call it an initiative, but the main takeaway is that many organizations are adopting this with the goal of improving the mobile experience for users.

What benefits can a marketer gain?

Many discussions on the web are about what the real benefit is for marketers. I see many questions on whether there is a benefit for anyone other than publishers or the media. At Sitefinity, we see 5 benefits for marketers:

Speed – Let’s be honest, we all expect things instantaneously. Our attention spans are shrinking, and if a page doesn’t load right away, we immediately begin to search for a new resource. Most likely a competitor.

User Experience – In this new world of user driven experiences, providing the content a user wants, when they want it and how they want it, is the minimum that all businesses must adopt. Providing a better mobile web experience ensures that great user experience.

Content Visibility - Another way to say this is SEO, but I believe this is more than just SEO. Every content owner and promoter is always searching for ways to get their content in front of more people. AMP provides another method for amplifying great content.

Site Traffic - Avoid losing audience to AMP-enabled competitors or similar categories because you aren’t there.

Competitive Advantage – I’m waiting for the comment that AMP doesn’t align to “fill-in the blank” business. The reality is all businesses are creating content for different audiences. If your competitors aren’t doing this, then you have an opportunity to beat them and start winning awareness.

The AMP-curious include smaller e-commerce sites, professional sites, blogs, academic publishers, niche content sites and even news publishers in small markets. In general, they like what they hear about AMP’s benefits and are eager to improve search performance — but are also juggling a long list of competing priorities and must be careful about allocation of resources and brain space. Their question usually isn’t whether to implement AMP, but whether it’s important enough to prioritize now.

How does Sitefinity help?

Many articles on the web talk about technical details of implementing AMP pages. Most of the articles I look at include statements about the development time or cost of managing two versions of your pages. Examples include:

1. Developers must integrate any and all CSS documents into a singular, inline CSS markup that does not exceed 50 kilobytes. This will force developers to write minified code in order to meet the specified requirements.
2. All images/media must have their dimensions defined clearly within the HTML markup tags. This includes width and height definitions so that the webpage can allocate a proper layout prior to media loading.
3. Developers must add in AMP-markup into existing HTML in order to provide the AMP technology with a clear map of HTML tags to load. (<img> changes to <amp-img>)

Referencing Peter’s post again, once the templates have been setup, marketers and content owners can easily create AMP pages with a click of a button to extend their content to the ever growing mobile audience. Sitefinity takes away the pain and reduces the time to create these pages, allowing Sitefinity users to gain all the benefits without adding a significant workload