Both Google and Facebook have recently announced that they are developing new projects: The Accelerated Mobile Page Project and Facebook Instant Articles respectively. What they aim to do is make news articles, like this one, look beautiful on mobile, and load in an instant.  

How Does It Work?

It all boils down tightly controlling how a web article is built. Cutting out the clutter to reveal a more minimal web page. Over the last 10 years, Web Design has changed a lot! From websites riddled with flash applets to unnecessarily large images and super HD videos. All of these elements contribute to the overall load time of a web page. Preventing such elements on an article reduce the load time and improve the user’s experience.

Speed Matters

The longer it takes to load your article, the less likely people will view it. People are very similar to goldfish when it comes to load times. Anything longer than 5 seconds and we become distracted and disinterested. Moving on to the next thing that catches our attention. That means that you, as a business owner misses out on potential clients. Both Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles use strict guidelines. For example, limiting some JavaScript to reduce load times upto a staggering 10 times! It also speeds up load times by serving pages from their own servers in some cases. It’s a lot quicker to get milk from your fridge than it is from the shop.

The main benefit for any one is clean, fast loading articles that are desirable to read directly from your mobile. The minimalistic approach may affect the ability to make money through ads (with some exceptions). However, if you gain more readers through a pleasant user experience, then your overall page visits will increase as well. It really seems like it will be the best for both worlds for the end user and the author.

This is Just the Beginning

Over time more publishers and developers will implement tools like this, which is a good thing. Just last week Twitter announced that it will start featuring Google’s AMP articles on its mobile app. For now, you must have the latest Facebook and Google apps on your phone before you will see any change. Over the next 12 months, expect to see this feature become more used throughout all of the social media platforms.