On Squarespace Blogs, Google AMP Means Faster Load Speeds

What is Google Amp on Squarespace Blog Pages?

Today, more business is being started and conducted on mobile technology like laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Squarespace templates are all pre-formatted for mobile technology, but you'll still need to optimize certain elements, like images, for maximum efficiency and fast load times. 

Integrating Google's open source Accelerated Mobile Pages technology with your Squarespace blog pages can help to accelerate load times of your blog content when opened and viewed on a mobile device.

On mobile, time means money. A site or blog that loads slowly can lose your visitors interest fast! Even a delay of just a few seconds can cost you page views, engagement, and conversions. With AMP your blog posts are automatically stripped of “heavier” desk-top only content allowing your blog posts to load instantly when viewed on any mobile device, so your readers will have an immediate experience, with no waiting.

Let's look at Amp technology, what it is, what it does, and how you can enable it in Squarespace.

What Is Google AMP?

Google AMP basically strips your web pages of all unnecessary coding elements in order to reduce load times when viewed on mobile devices. While with increased speed comes less design, mobile users want speed over bells and whistles.

Google's new technology gives users a faster web experience, and it can pay off in more engagement with your visitors. Studies have shown that most users will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. The average load time for mobile pages is eight seconds. By simply eliminating Javascript tags and creating a bare-bones version of mobile, with Google amp pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile pages. A faster mobile website is better for users, publishers, and platforms like Squarespace.

What AMP Does For Your Squarespace Website

Google views mobile content and accessibility as an important factor when ranking your site. When you create an excellent experience for your users, Google also views your content as high-quality and more relevant for users searching for that content.

That being said, you should be aware that when you enable AMP, your website will be changed when viewed on a mobile device. AMP strips away custom styling like fonts and colors as a way of condensing your code. If you like to keep your branding prominent, you should understand this before enabling AMP.

That being said, Squarespace still provides your blog with a streamlined and still aesthetically pleasing style. Of course, the styling doesn't disappear across your site, the stripped down formatting only appears on blog posts that are AMP enabled (more on this in a minute).

Squarespace uses the font Muli to display on all “Amped” blog posts. It's a clean and balance san-serif font that is aesthetically pleasing and super readable. Likewise, headings are now auto-sized and stripped of styling except for bold and italic.

Another change to be aware of is how Squarespace displays your blog content on mobile. Squarespace already auto-adjusts your content blocks into a single column, which is important! You should always check your content on mobile before publishing. This is true on Amped content as well.

No matter how you choose to display your Gallery pages, on amped they will appear as a slide show. This is yet another way AMP streamlines down the code that loads your content while keeping your gallery images on the page.

Enabling AMP on Your Squarespace Blog

By enabling Amp on your Squarespace website, helps visitors to quickly find your blog posts and optimizes their user experience. AMP formatting prioritizes readability and user experience with a simplified design.

Before Enabling AMP Remember:

• Only blog posts can display AMP formatting.

• AMP is only visible on the Google search engine. Any other engines will link to the “standard” version of your blog.

• Amped versions of blog posts can be viewed by clicking through Google search results or entering the AMP URL in a browser.

• Squarespace analytics doesn't record traffic on AMP enabled blog posts. You'll need to integrate Google Analytics to capture traffic metrics.

Enabling AMP on Squarespace is a very easy process. You can enable it in the Blog Panel in three simple steps.

1. In the Home Menu, click Settings, and then click Blogging

2. Scroll down to Accelerated Mobile Pages

3. Check Use AMP

Google can now index your AMP optimized blog posts.

Once you've enabled AMP a new URL will be created automatically. This will include “?format=amp” added at the end of your standard URL. You can share this URL with your visitors, but Squarespace templates already include responsive mobile styles.

Enabling AMP for your Squarespace blog can help you to give visitors an outstanding, and fast user experience. It can increase engagement with your content, while also providing an aesthetically pleasing, easy to read mobile experience.

About Michael Conway and Means-of-Production

Means-of-Production builds websites on Squarespace, writes blogs and creates email marketing campaigns. Our websites are better than typical Squarespace websites because we take the time to build them for search results. Want exceptional web design, search engine optimization, landing pages and drip marketing campaigns? Click here to view my calendar and schedule a call.