You may already have a website or you may be planning to have one designed and developed. You would want to add many of the latest features to ensure that you have an advanced website that delivers efficiently in terms of user experience and SEO. While there are many such features to consider, there are 2 upgrades that should be at the top of your mind.
1. No More Sidebars
Sidebars were a common feature in the past, but they don't go well with modern mobile-friendly websites. With over 50% of search traffic coming from smaller screens, the use of sidebars has fallen. Smaller screens mean limited real estate and adding sidebars means squeezing more features on the small screen. With improvement in web browser support for HTML features, more web development agencies consider hiding sidebars behind collapsible menus and sticky navigation bars.
· Modern websites have minimal features
· All unnecessary distractions are avoided
· Focus is more on user experience (UX) and SEO
Web development professionals understand that millennial attention spans continue to become shorter.
2. AMP Pages
AMP pages are for real and you should also embrace this technology to give your website the edge. So what is AMP? It is an open-source initiative from Google that allows web pages to load at extremely fast rate.
It focuses on removing all unwanted features from web pages and brings them down to
the basics. This includes removing scripts that can slow down pages from loading. The result is improved UX, which further translates into improved SEO results because UX and page load speeds are important ranking factors.
The following points related to AMP should be of interest to you:
· There are over 2 billion AMP web pages
· Almost 60 AMP pages get created every second
· Implementing AMP helps increasing page load times, conversion rates, and orders
There are 3 key elements that make up AMP:
· AMP HTML – HTML with AMP-based extensions
· AMP CND – Optimized network for caching web pages to adapt them to the code
· AMP JS – Quick-loading JavaScript
The growing popularity of the initiative can be associated with how much importance Google gives to it in their mobile-first index.
There are many benefits of implementing AMP to your existing website or creating a new website that follows its principles. This includes the following benefits:
i. Quick-Loading Pages
3 seconds is the average time taken by web pages to load. If you implement AMP on your website, your pages can take less not more than half a second to load. Faster page loads transform into many benefits:
· Improved UX
· Reduced bounce rates
· Improved conversion rates
Major ecommerce platforms have experienced dramatic improvements after implementing AMP on their websites. For example, AliExpress’ pages started loading faster by 36%. Wal-Mart reported is mobile load times being reduced by 1 second. While AliExpress experienced a 10.5% increase in traffic, Yahoo noticed 9% increase in traffic.
ii. Improved Search Rankings
Faster page load speeds and better user experience are major Google search ranking factors. So AMP support can translate into better SEO rankings.
iii. Improved Server Performance
Web pages with all the minimal bare features are going to significantly improve server performance too. When you upgrade your website to AMP or create a new AMP-based website, it helps in reducing the load on your website’s server, leading to improved performance.
Thus, AMP helps your website in so many ways. It helps boost your website’s rankings in your SERPs. It improves paged load speeds. It increases conversion rates. Some of the largest websites from major brands have also switched to it and have benefited significantly in terms of all these aspects.
So if you are serious about improving your website’s performance, you should address these 2 key areas.