AMP and Responsive Web: Why You Need To Think Mobile When Creating a Website

AMP technology has been improving the display of web pages in mobile environments for several years. Behind this acronym lie better user experiences and interfaces for the ubiquitous smartphones and tablets. Knowing this technology and those that came after it serves to understand the need for a responsive website that sustains the numerous mobile visits without making users flee.

What is AMP?

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source HTML project born in 2015 and promoted by Google and other companies such as WordPress, Twitter, and LinkedIn to improve the loading speed of websites on mobile devices. According to a Semrush study published in 2021, 66% of visits came from mobile devices on the 1000 most visited websites in the world.

The project arose at a time when many websites were not adapted to smartphones and tablets, which hindered the user experience on these devices. Thus, for mobile devices, websites can have an AMP version, which will be the same as the desktop version for search engines.

From AMP to Responsive Websites

But talking about responsive websites with mobile devices is not just about AMP (in fact, in recent years it is a less widespread term). To be a responsive website is to take into account phones and tablets to design a website as a whole. In other words, a responsive website is unique and adapts to any device, desktop or not.

Among the issues that must be taken into account to achieve a responsive website are:

• Always work thinking about the best user experience and “mobile first”.
• Prevent images and videos from exceeding certain limits, so that they look good in the mobile design.
• Automatically adjust width, height, and resolution for each screen.
• Do not use Flash, which is no longer supported by the main web browsers.
• Use standard fonts that are easy to read.

How To Implement a Responsive Website

In the case of an AMP page, many content management systems (CMS) already allow you to create an automatic version of the desktop version.

If you need to know if your website is responsive and what improvements should be implemented, you can use pages like Google’s ‘Mobile Optimization Test’. By entering a URL you can find out if the page has “mobile usability”, according to the company’s own words.

If you have already created your website, you can convert it to a responsive version with plugins, web builders or specific templates and themes. You can also count on the help of professionals to take care of this work.

Advantages of Having a Responsive Website

Among the advantages that AMP and the responsive web movement bring with it are:

• Improved loading speed. This is the main one. After all, it was the reason for creating the AMP Project. A website that loads slowly causes users to leave and not return.
• Higher chances of leads or conversions. Therefore, taking into account the previous point, with AMP and with a responsive design the loading speed is much lower, which means that they spend more time on the web and there are more opportunities to do business with them.
• Improving or maintaining our bounce rate. At the same time, if the website loads faster and users do not abandon it because it is slow, it does not worsen the bounce rate of our web analytics.
• Saving on maintenance and development costs. Designing a responsive website means not having to update different versions, which translates into less time and money spent on renewing, and extending it…

Why You Should Have a Responsive Website

Having a responsive website means giving each mobile device the attention it deserves and giving users the best browsing experience, according to the phone or tablet they have.

In addition, from the point of view of the company and as we saw above, betting from the beginning for a responsive website means having less development and maintenance costs, which translates into economic savings and fewer headaches in the long run since there is no need to update each version of the web separately.

If the website is already launched and is not responsive, you don’t have to worry: you can always change it. And at Plain Concepts, we have a UX/UI and web application design team specialized in it. We build your responsive website from scratch or renew it, and we make you part of all the changes from the beginning.

In addition, we have services that go beyond design, such as illustration, 3D modeling, or branding, which complement this responsive design. Just write us and let’s start working as a team. We’d love to hear from you.