AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

AMP pages are special pages that are designed to load in under a second. While there are some drawbacks associated with measurement within AMP pages, the speed often helps drive conversion and the process is often easier than making fast pages natively. The limited code of an AMP page helps the pages load more quickly, but it also helps that all of a page’s external assets are hosted in Google’s Cloud CDN. Additionally, there is a file called the AMP JavaScript runtime that helps a lot. According to AMP Project documentation, “The AMP runtime is a piece of JavaScript that runs inside every AMP document. It provides implementations for AMP custom elements, manages resource loading and prioritization and optionally includes a runtime validator for AMP HTML for use during development.” Source: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec.html. Part of the requirements for creating and validating AMP pages is that there is a rel=alternate tag on the original version of the page that points to the AMP version of the page. If a site is using JavaScript to populate this link in the Tag, then the pages may not validate in normal testing. To ensure that AMP pages always validate, and are tracked properly, it is important to populate the AMP links in the tag static HTML, rather than relying on JavaScript to do it.