Yesterday Cloudflare announced that they are introducing Accelerated Mobile Links – their own version of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project. It was in the wake of Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince’s tweet a few hours back.
Cool @Cloudflare announcement coming in the morning! #staytuned #mobile #speed
— Matthew Prince đ„ (@eastdakota) January 12, 2017
He raised the expectations to a whole new level with this simple tweet. All we got to know was that it must be something related to site speed on mobile devices.
Well, now the official announcement is out as the company tweeted it from its official Twitter handle –
Introducing Accelerated Mobile Links: Making the Mobile Web App-Quick – https://t.co/95mQowBsvw pic.twitter.com/aT2eEHoOjC
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) January 12, 2017
This new feature which is still in its beta stage is available for free across all Cloudflare plans. Turning on this feature activates AMP enabled links across your entire domain.
I would say this feature is a boon to all website owners and their mobile visitors as it increases the page speed by at least three times than normal. According to a research by Google, fifty-three percent of visitors will abandon a site if it fails to load in three seconds or less!
Fun Fact : As of 2016, there are over 600 million pages running AMP on over 700,000 different domains.
Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile Links is actually powered by the official AMP project. What Cloudflare actually does, in this case, is – it loads AMP enabled external links inside of a viewing window, within the same tab. This in comparison is different from what Google does. Google displays the AMP version of a site only when the search query comes from a mobile device through Google search.
Cloudflare has promised that consuming AMP enabled content through Cloudflareâs Accelerated Mobile Links is at least 3 times faster than loading traditional mobile content. Moreover, visitors will not be having the need to leave your site to view AMP enabled external content by using its AMP viewer.
The best feature of this Cloudflare module is that AMP enabled pages which you have linked to from your website are cached across its 102 data centers in fifty different countries. Also, it is made sure that they meet the strict AMP HTML validation rules. Moreover, the generated AMP content is checked for potential security issues. This makes the AMP content fast and secure.
Cloudflare uses its own AMP Discovery technology to find AMP compatible links present on your website. Whenever a user taps on such links, the browser fetches the AMP’d article from Cloudflare’s AMP cache and opens it using the AMP viewer within the same tab thereby providing a mobile-app like an experience.
This AMP viewer uses the AMP HTML runtime to load the article, which is then delivered through Cloudflare’s secure AMP cache.
How to Enable Accelerated Mobile Links or AMP in Cloudflare?
Before you can enable this feature on your website, your website must be active on Cloudflare. If you aren’t using Cloudflare yet, follow this tutorial to set up Cloudflare for your website. Once you have enabled activated your site on Cloudflare, it can be enabled under the ‘Speed’ tab from within the Cloudflare Dashboard.
Pro Tip: Cloudflare also gives you an option to display AMP logo before links.
Thus I hope this post helped you in understanding what Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile Links are and how to enable them from your Cloudflare dashboard. If you are using WordPress, you might able be interested in reading my article on how to enable AMP in WordPress.
Should you use the WordPress AMP plugin, enable the option on Cloudflare, or both? What is the best way to set everything up?
Hey there, this article deals with only setting up Cloudflare’s accelerated mobile links on your site. By using it, your readers will be able to open external links (which support AMP) straight from your posts within the same tab without leaving your website. In this case, you haven’t enabled AMP on your site yet.
For Google to serve AMP content on search results page from your website, you should use the AMP plugin for WordPress. The best option would be to enable AMP on your site first (compulsory) and then add your site to Cloudflare & enable their accelerated mobile links feature (optional). Hope that clears your doubts.
Awesome. Thanks for the quick response!
You’re welcome.
I am unable to detect onclick event on Cloudflare ampâified external links. I need that for analytics purpose. Any work around is there?
Hey Adams, I’m sorry I couldn’t find if that’s possible with Cloudflare. I asked for help regarding this on Twitter but didn’t get any response from them. Maybe you can submit a support ticket to them from your dashboard if that’s possible. Thanks.
How to make this work on Blogspot? I set NS and everything else but it doesn’t work.
Hey there, your choice of blogging platform doesn’t matter. Just make sure that your site is active on Cloudflare. If you don’t know how to properly add your website to Cloudflare, have a look at this Cloudflare Setup Guide. Though I wrote this guide with WordPress users primarily in mind, the instructions are the same for any website. See under ‘How To Setup Cloudflare CDN Manually (Recommended)’ section. By the way, you had mentioned that you’re on Blogspot. You cannot add your free Blogspot subdomain to Cloudflare. I guess you should at least have a custom domain name. Hope that helps!
Can we use AMP with cloudflare.