Along its mission of putting the power to code within the hands of more and more individuals, Google has launched a brand new certification program for mobile site developers. The certification program will focus on the essentials of mobile website and will cover everything from why mobile sites are important to how the speed of mobile sites can be increased.
As with other Google certifications, this particular program will also allow devlopers to test their skills and assuming that they succeed in passing, put themselves out as Google recognized coders.
As per the company, passing the exam will be an indication of:
a demonstrated ability to build and optimize high-quality sites, and allows you to promote yourself as a Google accredited mobile site developer.
Along with touching upon topics like mobile UX design and progressive web apps, the study guide lays quite a lot of focus upon speed. The search engine giant says that despite the fact that users are likely to leave a mobile website if it takes over 3 seconds to load, the average loading time for such websites is a massive 22 seconds. So yeah, a lot of users are probably skipping a lot of mobile websites due to this lag. Google wants the next generation of mobile site developers to be capable of dealing with this issue and towards the same, as stressed upon the importance of speed in its program.
Interestingly, the exam is more about mobile sites as compared to any particular ecosystem.After all, slow loading speeds aren’t limited to android. However, they do lay quite a lot of focus upon Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP), as they should considering that the AMP project has been successful enough to get other ecosystems interested as well. Meanwhile, this particular program joins Google’s Analytics and AdWords catalog — that also form part of the company’s partner programs.
