AMP

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source web component framework, originally launched by Google, designed to make pages load almost instantly on mobile devices. Instead of trusting developers to optimize, AMP enforces performance by design: it strips HTML down to a validated subset, forbids author-written synchronous JavaScript, and requires every external resource to declare its size up front so the browser can lay out the page before anything downloads.

How AMP works

An AMP page is a parallel, simplified version of a regular URL, discoverable through a rel="amphtml" link tag. Three building blocks make it fast:

• AMP HTML — custom elements such as amp-img or amp-carousel replace their standard counterparts and guarantee stable layout, which directly helps metrics like CLS in Core Web Vitals;
• AMP JS — a runtime library that schedules all resource loading asynchronously and defers off-screen content with lazy loading;
• AMP Cache — Google fetches, validates and stores AMP documents on its own edge network, serving them like a CDN straight from the search results page, often before the user even finishes tapping.

Where AMP is used in practice

Publishers and news outlets adopted AMP en masse when it gated access to Google's Top Stories carousel. That requirement is gone: any sufficiently fast page now qualifies, so the trade-off has shifted. Maintaining AMP means running a second template with limited interactivity — restricted forms, constrained ad tech, no arbitrary scripts — in exchange for predictable speed.

Today AMP remains a reasonable choice for lightweight, article-style content aimed at mobile audiences on slow networks, and it lives on in AMP for Email, where interactive messages update their content at open time. For most projects, however, the same user-perceived speed can be reached on a single responsive codebase: server-side caching, HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, image compression and a sensible hosting setup close the gap without doubling maintenance effort. Before adopting AMP, measure your existing mobile performance first — if your pages already load in about a second, AMP will add complexity rather than value.