Hallo uit Amsterdam! We’re kicking off the second AMP Conf today in Europe, celebrating the global reach of the AMP community. This year we have over 400 developers joining the AMP team in Amsterdam for two days and thousands more watching the livestream, marking our biggest event yet. Since last year’s AMP Conf, we’ve seen AMP continue to grow globally as more websites adopt and experiment with the format, with strong results. Europe is home to many AMP websites like Spiegel Daily, which was built with AMP, that demonstrate the strength of the format across devices. And Russian web design studio Eski.Mobi are using AMP for their ecommerce clients, seeing double digit conversion rate increases across many sites.
As a result, there are now over 31 million domains that have created more than 5 billion AMP pages across publishing, ecommerce and travel. We’re excited and encouraged by the progress, but there is much left to do to continue improving the web user experience. The AMP team is focused on expanding AMP’s horizons, taking its benefits to more websites and platforms across the web.
Telling visual stories
Content consumption on the web continues to evolve, especially on mobile. And while some stories are told best through text, the AMP Project wanted to ensure publishers can invest in new ways of storytelling and engaging readers on the open web. That’s why we’ve been working on the AMP story format.
AMP stories use the technical infrastructure of AMP to provide a reliably fast, beautiful experience on the web. And AMP stories live on the web, being hosted on a publisher’s site and can be easily shared or linked. Check out some of the latest examples of AMP stories on ampproject.org/stories. Today AMP stories are available for everyone to try on their websites. As part of the AMP Project, the AMP story format is free and open for anyone to use.
Empowering commerce
Ecommerce websites have also seen progress with AMP as the format matures to support greater interactivity. Like US Xpress which is projecting to save over $1M a year using AMP pages to recruit truck drivers, or Event Tickets Center which has seen a 20% lift in conversion rates compared to their responsive site. The AMP team is committed to providing e-commerce websites with new functionalities like the datepicker and payment methods to make AMP sites even more useful. And we’re excited to highlight AliExpress in particular, which just launched their new AMP mobile site, decreasing load time by >40% and increasing conversion rates for new users by >4.3%.
The AMP ecosystem
The growth of AMP is also a result of strong support across the web ecosystem. Platforms and services across the globe such as Baidu, Sogou, VK (Russia), 360 Search and Twitter link out to AMP pages. Twitter in particular has seen positive results with their AMP support, seeing a 10% reduction in page load abandonment on AMP pages compared to non-AMP. Many publishers and businesses have websites that rely on a CMS platform. Sites on platforms such as Drupal, BigCommerce and Squarespace are able to publish AMP pages. And today, Google, together with XWP and Automattic, released the 0.7 version of the WordPress AMP plugin to better support an all-AMP experience in WordPress. We’re committed to ensuring the web ecosystem allows for the creation of AMP pages.
New surfaces for AMP
Last year, we looked at everything AMP was capable of and saw a huge opportunity for AMP to modernize one of the most popular and widely used communication channels: email. Today we announced AMP for Email — a new way to include AMP components in email messages across all platforms. Many people rely on email for information about flights, events, news, purchases and more— over 270 billion emails are sent each day! With AMP for Email, information in email messages can be dynamic, kept up-to-date and made actionable. We’re really excited about the possibilities — developers and businesses will be able to send more expressive and interactive email messages than ever before.
Companies like Pinterest, Booking.com and Doodle have already built new experiences using AMP for Email, and we’re excited to see what others will do soon. The AMP for Email spec is available today and Gmail is planning to support it later this year. In the meantime, developers can access a developer preview for Gmail, here.
Community
Ultimately the success of an open source project like AMP is dependent on the contributions and support across the web. I speak for the entire AMP team when I say that we are extremely grateful for all the input, contributions, and support we’ve seen over the past several years. We have over 560 contributors on Github, with the majority (88%!) outside the core AMP team at Google. And as always, we sincerely would love for more of you to get involved and build the project with us. Our weekly design reviews, now at global-friendly times, are a great way to get started.
While there is still more to be done, we’re excited by the enthusiasm for making the web a place where users and websites can thrive, and I hope I’ve conveyed the energy in the room here in Amsterdam. Be sure to watch all of the talks from this year’s AMP Conf on AMPproject.org/amp-conf and follow us on Twitter using the #ampconf hashtag. Proost!
Posted by Malte Ubl, Engineering Lead, AMP Project, Google