⚡ Google’s has been getting lots of attention lately since its major worldwide roll out in the main search engine listing… AMP You’ve been -ed AMP .. and with this article I want to chip with my point of view of the good and bad parts as a developer and site owner. But first… Why? The official . Do we need another HTML format to generate fast loading pages? Obviously the logical answer is no, because HTML is not the issue, HTML is actually pretty lean and mean. The biggest loading speed issue are iframes, ad networks, gifs and <script>-tags. Which AMP tried to kill in ! But then they ... answer one big swoop didn’t So why are we doing this? Read along. The good parts The web — specifically looking at you news sites — has been rendered to a thanks to advertising networks and share buttons. Its been well documented and experienced that blocking ad network calls will improve your web browsing experience significantly. AMP initially doesn’t allow any Third-Party Content. The spec demands external tools to hook into custom HTML components. Take a . That a big for users, but as a developer another weird custom spec to manage. I hope you’re using any of the approved ad networks, else you’re gonna be out of luck. Also is your CMS ready for < >? messy bloat peek Hooray! amp-youtube Part of the AMP spec is to mark up your content with . A quest Google’s been wanting publishers to implement so they get a better understanding of the attributes and context of a page’s content — for utopist — or as cynics may say to extract your content and inject in the SERP directly. The good is the new spec makes much more sense then its predecessor (unfortunately still alive) microdata, which involves: itemscope, itemprop, meta, RDFa or even vcard attributes on nested DOM elements. meta data json-ld . The AMP icon might attract more visits to your listing. It was also launched with a small ranking boost ( : officially not a ranking boost). My experience is that usually only says that to have developers adopt a new protocol. Personally I don’t see the uptick. And , all your competitors would swoop in and in 6 months there would be no competitive advantage.For Google News publishers, of which is also a proud club member, the news carousel actually does show up more often, and AMP articles get way more eyeballs then before. Thanks Google! More visibility in Google.com results Update Google even if it improved your rankings my site ! Yes it renders almost instant. And I know all non-4G/wifi people all over the globe will find this a killer feature to have. Including SSL by default. Even the good-ol’ <img> tag has been dropped in favor of < > for speed reasons. Speed amp-img The bad of a carbon copy of your site’s content. Yes, AMP lives on its own which you host yourselves. Only Google will crawl it, and it is not meant as a actual target to actually sent your visitors to (you could). Issues will appear, and you will find out late. Also Google will actually serve users their own local of your website. It closes the door to pages customized to logged in users. They do allow you to ping their CDN to . But yeah, more stuff to manage. Not cool. Although Webmaster Tools has some nice issue reporting. : and this new . Maintenance URLs copy update to a fresh copy Update debug tool Next to the point above. I thought we were all doing responsive design and wouldn’t be doing special mobile pages anymore? I was wrong. AMP is about mobile. So you’re building a . Until they also support desktop. For which I guess you would be doing @media queries to support those as well. custom mobile page The AMP-ed version is usually due to the tied down html spec. Comparing the page-per-visit of the same page AMP-ed vs non-AMP the users are quicker in, but also quicker out. It might be caused due to less clutter on the not-feature-par non-AMP page but its bad. And I’ve seen more reports. One might argue this is actually a thing. They do support stuff like image carrousels — can’t live without those — but only one Google provides for you. less user engaging good The spec started of mean and lean. But it’s already to support all more and more existing web features. Good example: Cookie consent notifications. Their is a custom for that. Which is tied to a user. And does a CORS request to your backend. Don’t forget about ! I don’t see an end in . growing out of control spec Glycat sight . The reason all those ad networks are loaded in a single page view is to make the most $ out of a single page view. My existing ad for example isn’t supported yet, which implies I’m back to 2004 with a single Adsense unit, slashing revenue in half. Harder to monetize network My advice If AMP is an success, Google would be a clear winner. They would have results that load instantly, greatly improving the Google Experience™ setting the user up to use more of Google. As a developer I don’t see how a mobile AMP copy of my site benefits me. It’s more backwards stuff. But Google, lets meet in the middle. Users on 2G or GPRS get AMP-ed, I will supply an AMP supported website but we keep serving non-AMP to all other web users (e.g. iPhone 7 4G)? Hell, I will even propose a spec for that: amp-audience-target-only. LGTM.
