Google strives towards resolving our day-to-day issues with its regular updates and improved versions. This time the search engine giant has rolled out a new AMP Lite page format (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for faster and consistent delivery of webpages. The new page format will take up to 45 percent fewer bytes than the standard AMP pages.
To add to your knowledge, AMP is an open source platform for building web pages for static content consisting of three major parts — HTML, JS and AMP Google Cache. The new AMP Lite will not only enable tinier versions of websites but will also make browsing webpages on slow networks and low RAM devices, less of a chore. But, this new Lite technology has still not been included in the open-source project.
The optimizations made in AMP Lite include — removing invisible and unnecessary data which is difficult to view, reducing color and quality of images without affecting the visuals and converting images to WebP format which will lead to 25% reduction in bytes. The company explains the process in its developer’s blog as under:
we reduce JPEG image quality to 50 for Chrome users who have turned on Data Saver. This transformation leads to another 40%+ byte reduction to JPEG images.
The mentioned page format is only available for bandwidth-constrained users in few countries, starting with Vietnam and Malaysia. However, it is also enabled for holders of low RAM devices globally. For those worried about the effect s of optimization on the content, the blog post simply clarifies the doubt stating,
Note that these optimizations may modify the fine details of some images, but do not affect other parts of the page including ads.
AMP services offered by Google are quite similar to Facebook’s proprietary Instant Articles. The said service allows publishers of any type, anywhere in the world to deliver a fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook.
