BigCommerce Brings Google AMP to Ecommerce Sites Worldwide

First native ecommerce integration for accelerated mobile pages simplifies category and product detail pages, improving mobile site speed and click-through

AUSTIN, Texas – April 3, 2018 – BigCommerce, the leading ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established brands, today announced it has added native support for accelerated mobile pages (AMP), making it possible for more than 55,000 BigCommerce merchants to deliver near-instant page load times for mobile shoppers. With AMP, an open-source framework launched by Google, BigCommerce merchants have the ability to easily generate a streamlined version of their website’s category and product detail pages on mobile devices, resulting in significantly faster page load times, and up to 20 percent higher click-through rates.

“Mobile has become the primary shopping method for many online consumers, and ecommerce brands are increasingly realizing that their mobile sites need greater prioritization,” said Brian Dhatt, chief technology officer for BigCommerce. “AMP effectively removes extraneous details that distract from the shopping experience, allowing shoppers to quickly access catalog and product pages, find the information that is most relevant to their purchase decision and proceed to checkout without the typical friction often associated with mobile shopping.”

In a closed beta conducted in mid-2017, BigCommerce merchants that utilized AMP on category pages saw, on average, a 20 percent improvement in click-through rate. Additional benefits include:

• Increase page load speed. AMP alleviates heavy design elements that slow down page load speed. On average, a 100-millisecond delay in site load time drops conversion by seven percent1, and by simplifying a site’s content on mobile devices, AMP helps to decrease the time to first byte.

• Optimize search engine visibility. BigCommerce’s native support designates your site as AMP-enabled in Google search results. According to a 2017 survey, the majority of consumers are more inclined to click on an AMP-enabled link than one that is not2.

• Stay on cutting edge. By enabling AMP support in the control panel, BigCommerce is the first ecommerce platform to natively offer all customers AMP-enabled product and category pages out of the box — without the need for custom coding or costly third-party apps — providing merchants a competitive advantage.

“Until now, many ecommerce brands have been unable to adopt AMP into their stores due to excessive coding requirements and lack of costly development resources,” said Ben Moore, CEO at Pixel Union, a leading ecommerce design agency and BigCommerce partner since 2015. “Today, we are thrilled to be partnering with BigCommerce to offer AMP-enabled ecommerce themes across our entire Pixel Union catalog, giving online merchants a game-changing solution for harnessing the growth of mobile commerce and the power of world-class mobile design.”

The added support for AMP follows the release of Akamai Image Manager in January 2018, which gave BigCommerce merchants the ability to automatically optimize website imagery across all device types, resulting in faster page load times and higher conversion rates. BigCommerce merchants using supported themes can enable AMP beginning today in their control panel.

For more information, visit: https://www.bigcommerce.com/sell-on-mobile/

1 Akamai, “Online Retail Performance Report.” April, 2017.

2 Moz, “AMP-lify Your Digital Marketing in 2018.” November, 2017.

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