How Google, eBay, Reddit Gain Speedier Mobile Page Load Times From AMP

by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 22, 2016

Google began including general Web search results in its Accelerated Mobile Pages project to improve the mobile experience for Shopify merchants with plans in the next few weeks to roll it out to select merchants participating in the test pilot.

The project required Google to create a mobile app that merchants can install to provide AMP to all of their products. 

But Google wasn’t the only company touting AMP achievements. Those participating in the Google-led initiative AMP project also made announcements this week, including one from eBay. Several months ago, eBay said it would implement the open source initiative to speed mobile Web pages on users’ mobile devices.

Senthil Padmanabhan, principal engineer at eBay, now estimates close to 15 million AMP-based product browse pages, up from eight million pages in July 2016.

Now users worldwide on the ecommerce platform will begin seeing eBay AMP links in Google search results and experience instant load times.

Padmanabhan admits the company had to make quite a few changes to better understand how users interact with eBay’s pages, which he calls “critical” to provide the most optimized experience.

“The back-end system that powers the new product browse experience is designed in such a way that it constantly collects users’ screen activity, learns from it, and optimizes the experience for subsequent visits,” he said, providing more details. ‘If users interact more often with a module that appears below the fold in the screen, then in future visits to the same browse page, that module will start appearing above the fold. Our non-AMP page has a custom analytics library that does the reporting to the back end.”

Still, ebay isn’t the only site making its pages load faster on mobile through the AMP project. Jeremy Karmel, product manager, channels at Reddit, announced in a post the launch of “tens of millions of AMP pages” that load between seven and 30 times faster than the site’s previous mobile pages.

In an interesting move, Karmel pointed to a post by Vox Media, a technology that declared “performance bankruptcy” in 2015, citing pages that took on average 23 seconds to load.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(19)