Important Notice: MIP is an outdated and
discontinued concept from Baidu
What is MIP?
MIP, an acronym for Mobile Instant Pages, is an open protocol that Baidu recommends webmasters use to improve their mobile websites by increasing website loading speed.
To simplify the concept, MIP can be called the Chinese counterpart of Google’s AMP.
Like websites using AMP, which uses Google’s cache to speed up page loading, Baidu’s MIP also increases page loading speed by importing web pages into its MIP server as cache.
The MIP is built on three basic components, including MIP-specific HTML markups, MIP-specific JS libraries to manage the resource loading, and MIP cache, a proxy-based CDN that provides valid MIP pages. The MIP initiative was primarily prompted by China’s censorship of Google’s hosted resources. While the MIP is a good option for Chinese websites, it’s not a good solution for websites outside China.
What are the benefits of having MIP?
Baidu has emphasized that usability is a very important factor in the ranking algorithm. Websites optimized with MIP helps improve loading speed, which definitely carries its weight on mobile search results.
The screenshot on the right shows a mobile search results page where the page with the MIP icon (the lightning bolt icon in light blue) ranks second, right after Baidu’s own page.
How to use MIP?
MIP consists of three main components: MIP HTML, MIP JS, and MIP Cache. If you want to implement MIP in your mobile websites, you need to optimize CSS, HTML code, and image tag according to the MIP standard, use MIP JS instead of calling other JS libraries, and connect to the Baidu MIP cache server.
Practical advice on how to build MIP pages
MIP HTML is not much different from regular HTML. It is just important that you may not use any HTML, XML, JS or CSS that is not defined as MIP standard. You may only use defined MIP HTML.
Start the source code with
Followed by the HTML head and the information, that the document will be UTF8 encoded:
Help the user agent understand how to scale the page when rendering it with this line:
The standard CSS shall be loaded from the official MIP CDN servers:
The layout shall be optimized for mobile view, as page speed is essential for mobile pages (and MIP also got the “mobile” already in its name).
The MIP pages shall be either stored in a separate folder or subdomain like:
- https://www.yourdomain.com.cn/mip/
- https://mip.yourdomain.com.cn/
That is not a must but a recommendation, so the search engine can easily recognize, that everything in this folder or subdomain are MIP pages.
Further more – just like with other separate mobile URLs, you must place a real canonical from the MIP pages pointing to the desktop / regular responsive pages. So you may not have an MIP page without a regular page (in best case):
From the regular pages on the other hand, there shall be link rel=miphtml pointing to the MIP version:
If you plan to add custom CSS (which you should) do not load it as a resource but place it directly into the HTML head like this:
Of course the page will need JavaScript as well. You need to load it from the official MIP CDN servers – directly in the end before you close the body tag:
How to validate MIP HTML code?
Baidu’s MIP team also provides a validation tool that you can access at the following link.
Who will benefit from MIP?
Usually, large websites have their own CDN (Content Delivery Network) solution, and due to the complexity of the website and the dynamics of content creation, MIP might not be a good solution for them, considering that a large number of HTML tags and JS need to be changed on the pages. Therefore, MIP could be a very cost-effective mobile SEO solution for the websites of SME companies to reach the users of Baidu mobile search.
End of MIP
Baidu suspended support of MIP in 2020, which means it is not a viable technique for speeding up your websites, any longer.
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