DR’s Country Life Blog is now making full use of AMP! Why, you ask, should you care? What is AMP?

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new format for online content which loads up to 7 times faster than mobile friendly pages.

There’s a pretty good chance you own some kind of mobile device. There’s a decent chance that you’ve clicked on a link while using that device—from a social media site, your email, a search engine. You’re ready to read, watch, learn, shop, or be entertained. Maybe you want to do so in this very blog.  And then you see the dreaded circle, and that word, Loading…

You wait, annoyed, as the information slowly comes to life in a patchwork, jerky way. You start reading, and the page suddenly shifts down as something loads above it: an ad, some graphic that is irrelevant, a pop-up. You try to click on something, but everything has moved and now you’re chasing some rabbit down a hole. The information you want will load…eventually.

Let’s be honest, in this fast paced, instant gratification world we live in, we don’t wait. We don’t chase. We move onto something else, frustrated. What’s the point of having access to all that information in the palm of your hand if it WON’T LOAD!?

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is the solution we’ve all been sometimes not-so patiently waiting for.

AMP allows that page you’re trying to view on your mobile device to load fast, without all the fuss! It cleans up the background noise that we, as readers, don’t even know is there. All those elements that contribute to the slow loading times are removed, allowing the page to load up to 85% faster than a non-AMP page. What used to take 5 seconds (forever) can now be loaded in less than a second. AMP knows the amount of space that your page needs, eliminating the obnoxious shifting. Streamlining the page to fit into the viewer window immediately.

You can identify an AMP page in Google’s Mobile Search by the lightening bolt icon like the one in the picture above. You will see this icon next to the AMP enabled link in the search results.

The simple answer to “Why do I care?”…AMP creates an enjoyable interaction out of what used to be an annoyance. Sit back, relax. Scroll through that fully loaded content and enjoy our blog! Check out the AMP version of this article!