AMP

Why AddThis chose to integrate with AMP

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Posted by Mike Brooks, Product Lead, AddThis

Over the past year we’ve been extremely excited to share that AddThis released Share Buttons available as an AMP component. Our team has been tracking the AMP project since its announcement in 2016. As the web becomes increasingly mobile, it’s important for publishers to transform into this mobile era. At AddThis, we want to make sure that we’re part of this new community and bringing value to publishers.

AMP-lifying AddThis

With AMP’s ecosystem rapidly growing to tens of million domains, we knew this format was one we wanted to be part of. AddThis has been supporting publishers with our website tools for more than a decade, and as a result, our JavaScript client has become large and somewhat dated. In order to deliver a great user experience for AMP, we took the opportunity to start fresh, and therefore built a new client with the focus on being both compact and fast. AMP makes mobile web fast, and with AddThis, all the benefits of social sharing can ride the lightning bolt, too.

Our first task was figuring out what we should initially build. We love iteration here at AddThis, so we asked ourselves what our smallest usable feature set could be to ship, and then over time, we could expand our features and product offerings. AddThis offers many different tool types, but our sharing tools are by far our most used. We decided that our best bet was to get sharing supported in AMP first, and then eventually invest in adding more features and more website tools. With that in mind, we decided our Inline Share Buttons and Floating Sharing Sidebar were best suited for our first AMP release.

Building for AMP

The AddThis team is no stranger to building for and working with open-source projects. What struck us most was how supportive the AMP development community was as we went on our journey of building our extension for best-in-class sharing and social engagement tools. As soon as we declared our intent to build support, the AMP team worked with us at every stage of the process. As we hit roadblocks, we all worked together to come to solutions that made the most sense for AddThis and AMP. From submitting our first PR right up to the present day, it has been great watching such a helpful community thrive.

What’s the benefit of using AddThis Share Buttons?

Our Share Buttons come with more than 200+ global social networks and services, auto-personalized for your website visitors. Not to mention, you can customize the buttons to match your design needs.

We also provide an analytics dashboard with all our free tools to give you basic metrics such as site visits and referral data, as well as powerful statistics on sharing trends in real time and over the last 24 hours, including:

  • What content is being shared and driving traffic back to your site
  • How visitors are sharing, including address bar copy/pasting
  • Sharing breakdown by mobile and desktop
  • Email alerts when important spike changes occur

Additionally, our 24-hour support team is always on call, ready to answer any questions you may have.

We believe users should still have the same functionality on AMP that they have on other platforms, such as WordPress. With that in mind, we’ve recently released our Inline Share Buttons and we’re dedicated to making additional website tools available as an AMP component.

For information about the benefits of AddThis, visit our page at: https://www.addthis.com/share-buttons-for-amp/.

Want information about AddThis or suggestions for our next build? We’re ready to chat: help@addthis.com and @addthissupport. Happy sharing.