Editor’s note: The following was originally posted on Reddit’s Blog by u/illymc, Product Manager, Channels. Read below to learn how Reddit is using AMP.
Reddit is creating web pages that load almost instantly by leveraging Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short). Slow to load pages are the primary reason that 39% of mobile users are unhappywith their web browsing experience. Creating fast mobile web experiences turns out to be very challenging; Vox Media, a tech company whose sites get over 150 million unique visitors a month, declared “performance bankruptcy” in 2015 citing pages that took 23 seconds to finish loading on average. AMP is a game changer for the mobile web because it makes it easy to create pages that load in a tenth of a second. Google’s performance experts have helped create the AMP standard so you know it’s reliable.
Today, we are announcing the launch of tens of millions of AMP pages on Reddit. These pages load between 7 and 30 times faster than our previous mobile pages. Every self-post created on Reddit now has a corresponding AMP version. Google will be showing these pages in it’s search results more and more over time. These pages focus on the most important part of the Reddit experience — the great content our users create.
Here’s an example:
We were pleased to discover that creating AMP pages was a snap for our engineering team. AMP is a set of components verified by performance experts at Google to load incredibly quickly. As a result, building web pages becomes more like putting together LEGO blocks instead of having to carefully craft every aspect of your page. Some product developers might worry that having a constrained set of choices would lead to a compromised user experience. However, we found that being limited to AMP’s components made it easy to focus our design efforts on the content that users come to Reddit for.
Today, most companies are creating separate AMP versions of pages they already have. Here at Reddit, we are so excited about AMP that we’re experimenting with developing new pages in AMP. AMP pages look great and load fast on desktop just like they do on mobile. Maintaining good performance to pages as they change often amounts to a time consuming game of Whack-A-Mole but we can be confident our AMP pages will always be fast. So, for many kinds of pages, we think the AMP version is the only version we’ll ever need.
Posted by u/illymc