Cloudflare Makes the Mobile Web Up to Five Times Faster with Accelerated Mobile Links

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 12, 2017) - Cloudflare, the leading Internet performance and security company, today announced Accelerated Mobile Links, a solution to make the experience of browsing the mobile web as fast as using a native application. Accelerated Mobile Links automatically identifies links to content supporting the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format and renders it within milliseconds of the link being clicked.

"The mobile web has traditionally been at a performance disadvantage to native mobile applications," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "Accelerated Mobile Links closes this gap by ensuring AMP content is served almost instantly on any Cloudflare customer's site."

AMP is a way to build static mobile web pages that render fast. The AMP Project, founded by Google, is an open-source initiative aimed at optimizing mobile content and making it available anywhere, instantly. When customers turn on Accelerated Mobile Links for their web properties, Cloudflare identifies all links that have AMP content and makes them available, natively, via a viewer inside the original page. This gives content aggregators and news publishers a way for their users to consume third party AMP content on their web properties just like they can on Google.com, without losing visitor traffic. Cloudflare worked in conjunction with the Google team to build the first non-Google AMP cache, which will deliver AMP links instantly for a better user experience.

"Working with Cloudflare on its AMP caching solution was as seamless as open-source development can be," said Malte Ubl, the technical lead for the AMP Project at Google. "Cloudflare has become a regular contributor on the project and made the code base better for all users of AMP. It is always a big step for a software project to go from supporting specific caches to many, and it is awesome to see Cloudflare's elegant solution for this."

The benefits of Accelerated Mobile Links include:

• App-Quick Browsing Experience: Accessing mobile content through Accelerated Mobile Links is at least three times faster than on traditional mobile web properties, offering publishers an ideal platform to deliver mobile content.
  
  
• Increased User Engagement: Users can quickly view AMP-enabled external mobile content without ever having to leave the web page. This provides a more native app feel for mobile web properties and keeps traffic on publishers' pages.
  
  
• Secure Global Caching: AMP-enabled pages linked to web properties are cached across 102 data centers, in 50 different countries. They meet strict AMP HTML validation rules, and are checked for potential security issues like XSS attacks.
  
  

Over the past year, more than 600 million pages of new media content have been optimized for mobile using the AMP HTML format, giving publishers highly performant code and the ability to deliver pages fast. "The traditional mobile web experience can be slow and frustrating for users and publishers, and with the influx of AMP content in the past year, we knew there needed to be a solution," said Dane Knecht, head of product strategy at Cloudflare. "We worked closely with Google to develop Accelerated Mobile Links as part of an open initiative to strengthen the AMP specification beyond what is currently available."

Starting today, Accelerated Mobile Links will be available to all Cloudflare customers for their mobile properties for free by simply turning it on in the Cloudflare Dashboard.

To learn more about Accelerated Mobile Links, please check out the additional resources below:

• Cloudflare Accelerated Mobile Links blog
• Cloudflare Accelerated Mobile Links product page