Welcome to the AMP community!

Why AMP?

In many ways, the Internet is the central hub for the world. Every day, more people from all over the world access information online. But many don’t use the Internet on lightning-fast connections or high-powered devices. When websites are developed only for the fastest connections and devices, the experience of many users suffers.

To give site visitors a better experience, the development community has found ways to improve website performance. Along the way, developers have improved accessibility for users of assistive technologies, reliability for fickle connections, and website design for a wide range of devices.

It can be overwhelming at times to keep track of all the new advancements in web technology. We believe that developers want to make fast sites, but it’s too easy to make mistakes along the way.

That’s where AMP comes in. AMP was created to make it easy for developers to focus on building better features without giving customers a poor user experience.

How AMP helps

AMP is a web components library that enforces best practices for the Web. AMP addresses common development obstacles to allow for the design of performant, accessible, and responsive websites.

In short, AMP tries to make it easy to do the right thing. This frees developers up to focus on features that bring value to their users.

AMP works to improve web performance by:

• Extending HTML by adding tags for common website features. HTML was developed to create basic content pages, but hasn’t evolved to keep up with modern websites. Some relevant modern website features include slide-out navigation menus, video players, and image carousels. The extra tags added for these features are also called “web components.”

• Reducing the amount of JavaScript. AMP requires JavaScript to run, but AMP places restrictions on where and how JavaScript can be used elsewhere on your pages. This restriction can dramatically improve performance on mobile devices. AMP components provide much of the functionality that developers used JavaScript for in the first place.

• Detecting problems early and often during the course of website development. As we’ve stated, there’s a lot to keep track of in modern web development. AMP helps manage this by providing a validator that looks for issues in your site that could affect performance or accessibility. It also helps you learn how to fix the issues it finds!

The benefits of AMP don’t end once your page is deployed. Companies like Google and Microsoft have created caches which store AMP pages that have no validation errors. These caches can apply powerful performance optimizations to your site’s content without affecting the way your users experience it. Cached AMP pages are also integrated with search engines so that your site can be reached from search results within seconds - or even less!

Learning AMP to learn web development

Learning AMP is a great way to learn web development because AMP sites are:

• built using standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• compatible with all modern browsers.

• not dependent on special tools or software to build or deploy online.

You’ll acquire skills while building AMP pages that can be transferred to building websites in other formats or frameworks. Like many popular frameworks, AMP is a component-based approach to designing and building websites. You will learn to build websites with recognized best practices, start thinking in components, and avoid bad habits that harm user experience. These universal skills can be applied across the web.

AMP addresses performance, accessibility, and responsive design so that you can focus on the features. However, if you want to hone your skills, learning AMP can also help you discover exactly how AMP addresses these concerns. You will continue to learn and mature as a developer, even while your users enjoy the experiences that AMP helped you to build.