Ye Old Internet

Getting web pages to the consumer fast is not only important to big companies but also for self-employed people if they want to catch a new customer. According to some statistics, for every second that it takes to open a page, 11% of the people of the users are likely to go somewhere else, or have 16% lower satisfaction, and that after 3 sec, 53% of the people have already gone.

Since a couple of years Google has been trying to get people to use a tool to package web pages in a “container” format that makes the loading of pages really fast. This is called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and is an open-source initiative.

It still has teething problems but more and more “publishers” such as the big newspapers are already using it. The search machine companies pulls the web pages and their parts from the publishers server and saves them in their content delivery network, so that when the consumer clicks on a link on a search page, the page can be delivered within one second instead of several seconds. It doesn’t sound much, but you really notice the difference.

With the “time to load” factor getting to be more important than having lots of content on a site, Google is rating sites which have been AMP’lified higher up the search lists.

The downside is that a lot of javascript stuff which makes pages “sexy” cannot be used and web pages need to be redesigned. The upside is that you don’t really need a fast server any more - the pages are stored in the internet.

It also has major implications about who owns the internet - but that is another story.

I presume that the standard will slowly catch on resulting in two worlds - the world of fast loading pages and the other the “Ye Old Internet” consisting of old websites.

With more people moving to use their mobile as their communications instrument (95% use of the internet in India is via mobile), old websites, which take long to load, are difficult to read on the mobile, etc., will be a no go for many.