Google Announces Accelerated Mobile Pages

Google began rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, in early 2016 as an attempt to make news and publishing pages load much faster on phones. AMP restricted what page authors could do and encouraged content to be served from caches close to users.

AMP HTML limited arbitrary JavaScript and required predictable sizing for resources such as images and advertisements. These rules reduced layout shifts and blocked many patterns that delayed rendering. Google’s AMP Cache could prefetch and serve validated pages, further reducing latency when users opened results from search.

The project improved performance for many sites but became controversial because Google controlled important parts of the distribution path and sometimes displayed cached Google URLs. AMP later became less central as browsers, Core Web Vitals, and ordinary web-performance practices improved.