Last week Google AMPs was finally released. No, not the kind of amp you used to connect your electric guitar to during band practice in your parents’ garage. We’re talking about the new Google “Accelerated Mobile Pages” project, an answer to the problem of our horrifically slow mobile web.
Yes, horrifically, monumentally slow — especially in the United States.
In a ranking of internet speeds around the world, the United States doesn’t even crack the top ten. We trail countries like Japan, Romania, Taiwan, Israel, Latvia, and Qatar:
This picture shows the global internet speeds and how they affect users’ browsing experience.
And when you rank our mobile connection speeds globally, it gets even more embarrassing. The UK’s mobile internet is exactly 5x faster than the US’s. Even the citizens of Venezuela enjoy a browsing experience that’s twice as fast.
Our tragically slow access to the World Wide Web has become the butt of jokes in recent years:
This gif shows how the “buffering” symbol can frustrate users and increase bounce rates.
Comedian Whitney Cummings has even suggested using it to narrow your potential suitors:
This picture shows a funny tweet about slow internet and marriage.
And, while at some point in our lives, we all probably could’ve saved some heartbreak by taking her advice; businesses stand to save something even more valuable to their survival by listening to gripes from their online customers:
Money.
Digital actions were responsible for $2.2 trillion retail sales last year, with the mobile internet contributing to one trillion of that.
Digital actions were responsible for $2.2 trillion retail sales last year, with the mobile internet contributing to one trillion of that.
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One trillion is a big number with a lot of zeros, but it should come as no surprise to those of us who have ever purchased something online. It’s convenient and easy to compare products, prices, and reviews, too.
What might be a little more shocking is how much less convenient online shopping becomes when a slow internet connection is introduced into the mix.
Studies have found that our impatience has the potential to cost businesses an absurd amount of money:
This graphic shows that the slower a web page loads, the more people will leave the page.
The average e-commerce site takes 7.12 seconds to load in Internet Explorer, 7.15 seconds to load in Firefox, and 7.5 seconds to load in Google Chrome – which ultimately translates to a loss of $500 billion annually for the e-commerce market. And slow-loading websites are to blame:
This graphic shows marketers that 50% of mobile users will leave a web page if it doesn’t load in 10 seconds.
In fact, 51% of U.S. online shoppers say slow site loading times is the number one reason they abandon a purchase.
Slow loading pages ultimately translates to a loss of $500 billion annually for the e-commerce market.
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This prompted many studies into how businesses could boost profit by speeding up site accessibility. Kissmetrics found that for every second delay in load time a page experiences, conversion rate can drop by 7%. The team at Conversion Conference discovered that by speeding up page load time by just two seconds, they were able to boost conversions for an e-commerce business by 66%:
This graphic shows how Amazon can lose $1.6 billion per year because of a 1-second web page delay.
Admittedly, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Accelerated mobile pages aren’t ready to be rolled out to e-commerce sites yet… but more on that in a minute.
What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
We have to give the team at Google credit. Time and again they’ve come up with new and creative ways to make things faster, easier, and better for their users. Their newest solution is something called “Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP),” which aims to make mobile web pages load at lightning speeds.
From the AMP site:
“For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience – but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.”
The project was unveiled about six months ago, and last week, Google AMPs began rolling out all over the world.
For internet users, the Accelerated Mobile Pages should help us skirt the frustration we experience when we see this on our mobile phones: