LexBlog today is rolling out a major enhancement of its publishing platform that should mean its customers’ blogs will load significantly faster on mobile devices, rank higher in search results, and display better on certain social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
The enhancement makes LexBlog’s platform compatible with the AMP format (formerly Accelerated Mobile Pages), a framework developed by Google, Twitter and others to create a better experience for reading web pages on mobile devices.
“The difference in speed is definitely noticeable,” Joshua Lynch, LexBlog’s chief technology officer, told me last week. “The purpose is to make web pages load near instantly on mobile devices.”
[Full disclosure: I am employed part-time by LexBlog as publisher and editor-in-chief.]
In his testing, Lynch said, AMP pages load at least three times faster on mobile devices than full web pages. On top of that, Google caches AMP pages to deliver them more quickly, making the load time seem instantaneous.
The same page compared, with the responsive version on the left and the AMP version on the right.
Faster load times mean a better user experience, potentially resulting in visitors spending more time on a site and engaging with more of the site’s content.
Starting today, AMP is available on an opt-in basis at no extra cost to all LexBlog customers on either the boutique or full-service subscription plan, Lynch said. Going forward, the company will be reaching out to all its customers to introduce them to AMP and help them activate it if they wish.
LexBlog’s implementation of AMP is unique is that it is built directly into the core theme that underlies LexBlog’s customized WordPress publishing platform. That means that the AMP versions of blog pages will replicate the styles and typography of the blog’s full version.
