The Washington Post

Summary #

AMP helps the Washington Post increase returning users from mobile search by 23%

Results #

• 23% increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
• 88% improvement in load time for AMP content versus traditional mobile web
• 1000+ articles The Washington Post publishes in AMP HTML daily

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Using AMP #

With nearly 55% of their traffic coming from mobile devices, The Washington Post knows that providing a great reading experience on mobile devices is critical to their long-term success.

In particular, The Post is focused on making their mobile content load as quickly as possible, because data shows that people abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn’t load quickly.

In June 2015, The Washington Post joined a group of publishers and technology companies to create the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, a new open standard for publishing content which loads instantly, anywhere across the mobile web.

We are committed to improving speed across the board,” said David Merrell, Senior Product Manager at The Washington Post. “If our site takes a long time to load, it doesn’t matter how great our journalism is, some people will leave the page before they see what’s there.”

The Post publishes over 1,000 articles in AMP every day, and they’re already seeing concrete benefits. “We have seen load times average 400 milliseconds, an 88% improvement over our traditional mobile website. This has made readers more likely to tap on Washington Post stories because they know our articles will load consistently fast.”

AMP has been great for retention as well. Traditionally 51% of mobile search users return to The Washington Post within 7 days. For users who read stories published in AMP, this number jumps to 63%.

Getting started with AMP was easy because it is built on existing web technologies. And since AMP is not a template based system, we were able to host our content, style it as we see fit, and easily integrate our existing advertising, analytics and other business tools,” Merrell said.