Google AMP Lite Brings More Optimisations for Low-RAM Devices on Slow Internet Connections

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technique has been beneficial to mobile users since its introduction as it helps devices with weak Internet connection to access webpages using minimum amount of data. Now, the search giant has tried to further improve upon its existing technology as it has announced AMP Lite, a stripped down version of its earlier technique.

AMP Lite, which Google claims causes a combined 45 percent reduction in data across all optimisations, essentially allows the pages to load faster even on devices with low-RAM or that have weak Internet connections, as pointed out in a report by 9to5Google. In order to achieve these results, the search giant has made several optimisations to AMP, Google said in its blog post.

Google points out that on an average, images form around 64 percent of the data of a webpage. This is why the company decided to remove that part of the image data which is not visible to the users, including thumbnail and geolocation data. The search giant has further reduced the size of JPEG images as well as quality to a point where the difference does not become noticeable.

The image data is then compressed "exhaustively" and as per the company, these optimisations reduce data by around 40 percent while the differences are not noticeable. The company says that it further converts JPEG images to WebP format for supported browsers, which leads to further 25 percent data reduction to JPEG images.

With AMP Lite technique, Google uses the "amp-font" tag which enables fonts to be displayed instantaneously even if the search giant did not cache them earlier.

Google says that AMP Lite is rolling out for bandwidth-constrained users in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia as well as for users with low-RAM devices around the world.