Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) For Landing Pages

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are designed to load extremely fast which is the goal of most landing page. These are the pages you see when clicking on a link from an email, for example. So landing pages would seem to be a great fit the AMP.

AMP places limits on how the page is created in order to render so quickly. These limits include no original JavaScript or third party JavaScript. It also limits the HTML code and the CSS. Landing pages are some of the most creative area of web design and limits on creativity sound bad. However, constraints often produce great results. So I think it is too early to assume that AMP is bad for landing page creativity.

The primary purpose of most landing pages is for the reader to take an action like provide an email address, donate money or click on a button. For AMP to work for landing page, they must be able to provide a Call to Action.

Web designers are going to be creative since AMP does not currently allow user input from a form or JavaScript. So Calls to Actions will primarily limited to buttons though we might see some creative use of links. The linked page will be non-AMPed for collection emails, donations and other information from the user. So a landing page is mostlikely going to be two pages or more. This will change the analysis of page views, the “funnel” for the business and A/B testing.

Bootstrap, Foundation or other CSS frameworks are also incompatible with AMP. These are common ways to get a landing page up quickly with minimum coding of CSS and JavaScript. So instead of these frameworks, AMP templates will probably spring up in the Grunt, Gulp, Browser and front end tool ecosystem. Also expect plugins for common editors like Sublime Text and Atom.

While it is fun to speculate about AMP for Landing Page, building one might provide more insights. To that end, I’ll be rebuilding the landing page for my Reading.email project. The first version will be very simple and more features will be added.