An Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) is a simple and robust web page format that ensures your website is fast, beautiful, accessible and user-centric.

Do you want:

• Your web pages loading 3-4 times quicker
• 25% more mobile users visiting your website
• Visitors spending up to double the amount of time on your website
• 30% fewer visitors leaving without seeing your messages

If so, get familiar with AMP-based web design. It will improve your law firm website’s speed, rankings, and user engagement.

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What are AMPs?

Google’s AMP project started in 2015 as a response to the growing importance of content and as Facebook rolled out its Instant Articles project.

AMP web pages load quicker and more smoothly than standard web pages. They make content easier to consume.

Visitors to a law firm website see no difference in appearance between AMP pages and standard web pages.

Whichever browser or device they’re using, they still see your beautiful designs the way you intended them to be viewed – except they’re substantially snappier.

There’s not much to dislike here. Since 2016, billions of AMP pages have been published and 25 million domains now employ them.

AMP pages have been appearing in Google’s mobile search results for a few years now and the format is increasingly supported by ad companies and website platforms – including WordPress.

Here is a Googler, talking about how AMP pages make your website fast. Just be warned, you are entering developer territory.

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Why are they faster than typical web pages?

Google has a thing about speed. It’s seen as one of the most important factors in user experience.

Visitors to any website want relevant information delivered without pages buffering or images waiting to download.

Without getting technical, website speed comes from:

• Smart design; and
• Pages loading without the burden of too much heavy code

AMP pages are stripped down to the minimum of code and hosted in super-fast “libraries” that you link to. They generally use ten times less data than the equivalent non-AMP pages.

That gives them speed.

Depending on the speed of your existing website and what device you’re using:

• 3.6x faster load time
• 4x decrease in mobile page load times
• 2x increase in page speed

Google itself reports that AMP pages in Google search typically load in less than one second.

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Why are AMP pages important to your firm?

It’s not just about optimizing your website for mobile users.

Mobile responsive websites ensure that pages display correctly on smartphones, tablets, and other devices. But what if they still load slowly?

If you were able to increase the speed by 2-4 times, imagine what that could mean…

1. Higher rankings in the search engines

The correlation between search engine rankings and site speed is well-known. AMP pages rank highly in organic search listings.

This was an update from the Google webmaster’s blog in July 2018:

“People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”

2. Increased page views and engagement from visitors

According to KISSmetrics, page abandonment rates increase as page load increases.

In fact, the study found that “about 40% of people will abandon a web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.”

If you want your visitors to engage with you, make it easy for them to stay on your site with instantly loading pages.

That will further improve SEO as Google rewards low bounce rates with higher rankings.  So it’s a “virtuous circle” that keeps on giving.

If your visitors bounce away from slow-loading pages, your messages fall on deaf ears and frustration sends them to your competitors.

3. More leads

Conversion rates are just as important for lawyers as for e-commerce marketers. You still need your website to encourage a specific action – such as contacting you for an appointment.

A faster page load speed and better user experience will increase the number of leads you get – as you can see from the following:

Source

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Any downsides?

As mentioned, there’s not much to dislike about AMPs.

The only possible negatives are:

• The requirement for technical expertise in this area – but most law firms hire website designers rather than building their own site, anyway.
• Despite being open source, some perceive AMP pages as a ‘power play’ by Google over controlling the Web.
• AMP security vulnerabilities – but for most law firms, the risk is no greater than with standard webpages.

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How can you make AMP pages for your website?

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In short, get a website designer who is using up-to-date development techniques. You’ll need help but there’s already WordPress plugins that make life a lot easier.

At the end of last year, an official WordPress plugin was launched called AMP for WP. This allows your website to transition to AMP-ready pages.

Since then, the evolution has continued, with many other developers contributing to AMP-specific resources for WordPress.

A few of these include:

• AMP – official AMP plugin for WordPress
• AMP WP – Google AMP for WordPress
• Better AMP – WordPress Complete AMP

You can find reviews of these and other AMP-based WordPress plugins here.

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Let us get on the case for you…

Interested in making your website faster and more user-friendly with AMP-based design?

Contact us to learn more about getting AMP for your website.