2015 saw Google pushing mobile aggressively, and to a slightly lesser extent, HTTPS.  At State of Search in Dallas, Gary Illyes from Google revealed what the next big thing for 2016 would be, and it is AMP, also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages.  And he said they will be pushing it aggressively in 2016.

This is not really a surprise, as it does greatly improve the search experience for those who are surfing the web from slower connections, who might be too slow to download a usual webpage full of heavy graphics and other media, or for those who are bandwidth restricted.

For those not familiar with the program, this is from Google’s announcement last month:

A new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.

The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages.

And more specifically, how it works when a searcher is using it, but from a webmaster’s perspective.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are specially formatted web pages that enable Search to display this content extremely fast, while ensuring that publishers control the way their content looks and feels.

To see it in action, there is a demo here (view from a mobile device).

When it came to mobile, Google gave plenty of advanced warning, talking a lot about how important it was, but even as Illyes said today, some people didn’t listen.  So here is hoping that some webmasters pay more attention when it comes to AMP since we are also getting advanced notice of it.