Leah BecerraGoogle is giving news sites a good reason to speed up their mobile page load times. That's potentially good news for anyone with a smartphone or tablet.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short) is an open source initiative Google created to make sites you visit on a smartphone or tablet load faster — because it turns out that people will give up on a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Because it's not 1995 anymore.
In 2016, three seconds really is a longer time to wait than is probably necessary — at least that's what Google thinks. So it appears to be giving news sites an incentive to get up to speed.
As of Wednesday, pages made with AMP will start to appear in Google search results for stories or topics in a "Top Stories" section. Since the tool is still new, you might not see the section every time you search.
Considering the "top" placement, though, it's possible that sites using the tool could see more clicks. And these sites rely pretty heavily on Google to get views, so this gives them a reason to get on board.
It's not clear if other types of sites will get the same incentive for using AMP. Regardless, it seems like we're well on our way to never having to wait three seconds for a page to load.
This video includes clips from Google.
