Google’s AMP Lite and Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile Links broaden AMP’s footprint

Launched in the fall of 2015, Google’s AMP initiative has raised the performance standard for mobile content by accomplishing what the initials promise: accelerated mobile pages.

But publishers’ content in AMP format can mostly be called only from a few places, such as Google’s search engine, Twitter, Bing News and Pinterest. These sources summon the AMP content from Google’s cache, via a sufficiently speedy connection.

This week, Google and San Francisco-based performance and security firm Cloudflare made announcements to help broaden AMP’s availability.

Google unveiled AMP Lite for mobile devices with slow connections or not much memory. The Lite format is compressed so that it takes up 45 percent fewer bytes than standard AMP, in part by always employing lower quality for images and optimizing the use of external fonts.

At the moment, AMP Lite is only available in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, where slow wireless networks are common.

But AMP Lite is still served from Google’s cache. This week, performance and security firm Cloudflare announced Accelerated Mobile Links, developed with Google’s assistance, so that AMP content can be called from a cache in Cloudflare’s data centers from any source that can present a link and show HTML content.

The San Francisco-based company said this content, accessed as fast as AMP content via Google’s search engine, utilizes the first AMP cache built outside Google. The cache and the viewer were developed by Cloudflare, which utilizes the open-source runtime.

This means that links in a mobile website, email, app or other source whose performance is boosted through Cloudflare’s 102 data servers worldwide can call AMP content from Cloudflare’s cache, which quickly displays the content inside an AMP viewer on the site, email or app. Only Cloudflare customers can employ the new Accelerated Mobile Links for their properties.

From Cloudflare’s announcement post:

“By enabling Accelerated Mobile Links, Cloudflare delivers an experience analogous to viewing AMP-enabled pages from a top-level Google search. Accelerated Mobile Links looks for valid AMP URLs on your website, and shows the visitor which of them are AMP URLs. Once a visitor clicks on a valid AMP link, the page launches instantly in AMP Viewer, within the same tab.”

From Cloudflare