It has been quite a long since AMP was launched, but there are many doubts and controversies about it that, until today. For those who don’t know, Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP are lightweight pages that have been designed to ensure a superfast experience to make it easy to read most engagingly. It is a Google-backed HTML project programmed to provide a faster-loading experience in lightweight mobile pages. It enables mobile users to get through the web content quickly and easily from their phones.
If you are developing a new website, you would want to make sure your website is easily accessible from every device. You’d also want your web pages to load faster so that you can have better engagement in your website. For this, AMP was made to enhance user experience and better website visibility. But after years of its release, we’re looking to see whether it is still relevant or not.
How Google AMP changed the SEO? #blogging #wordpress #seo #startup #blogger #blog #business https://t.co/jv4q8GixQy
— CatchUpdates.com (@catchupdates) May 4, 2022
How it works
For those who don’t know, AMP is an open-source web framework developed to deliver a user-first format for web content. It was supposed to provide faster pages and better ranking with a radical mobile optimization facility. Though there were many early adopters, the majority of developers are still skeptical about it.
The working process of AMP had design restrictions enabling inline styles, limiting CSS and JS to 50KB and 150KB, leaving the fluff out of the critical rendering path that helps create faster pages and make them visible instantly. Pre-rendering is also an advantage with this. Despite all those promises, it tells a different story today.
Not that surprising: "Media executives have said dropping AMP would give them more control over their page designs and ad formats, and make it easier for them to sell ad space in auctions that include a greater number of ad marketplaces …" https://t.co/14KwmZzUvA
— Christine Spies (@Rischdl_Spies) April 28, 2022
Is it still a good idea?
AMP got a huge response while launched, and gathered momentum by making partnerships with many substantial publishers. It claimed to deliver 4x speed along with a significant update in mobile traffic and enhanced conversion rate. But in the past few years, its popularity went down because a lot of improved features have been added for mobile optimization.
There are many reasons behind this, such as it doesn’t enable third-party JS, dodgy analytics connection, limitations in style, no place for comments, can’t share on social media, navigation is off, and so on. Even AMP pages are not visible in the Google domain anymore as Google has more effective hosting.
https://twitter.com/PlausibleHQ/status/1394559884285382656
Things have been upgraded and most website builders are creating mobile-optimized websites. From this perspective, it seems like AMP has gone far away from being a prominent solution but they are working on it such as putting on some new features as well as adding extra benefits and concepts to survive. But honestly, implementing AMP in 2022 may not give you the result that you are expecting to have on your website.
One of its key benefits was its speed, but it is no longer convincing enough to convert in AMP as you can achieve the same speed criteria from regular mobile optimization. Soon, Google cache will be extended to non-AMP pages so there is no point in converting.
Photo credit: The feature image has been taken by Tran Mau Tri Tam.
