Accelerated Mobile Pages load faster. Brilliant, right? Erm. Sort of.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, introduced in 2015, are designed to make it easier to create mobile-friendly content and pages, using a reinvented version of the HTML the web is designed with. They are stripped of ‘useless’ content which is less relevant for mobile pages in order to encourage load speeds, and are duly denoted with the ‘Fast’ ticket on SERPs. AMP content supposedly loads anywhere between 15-85{3eb5e81dc2dbd5243766a445dfd7203b99614852f30724c0fcd7c1e47478fab9} faster than non AMP pages. Readers get quick and easy access to all of your content. Or almost all of your content.
Ask a web developer their opinion of AMP and you may feel the air turning a few degrees chillier. AMP enforces a stripped down CSS and does not allow Javascript to run. You must also conform to the bare-bones offerings of the AMP format. Images are forced into ‘lazy loading’. What AMP deem as ‘irrelevant’ content will often be seen as very relevant to anyone who sees UX as not just the immediate access and readability of their content, but the journey their consumers are taken on. For marketers, it falls more under the ‘nightmare’ category, particularly for anyone looking to enhance UX with some clever Javascript magic or beautiful page design.
So; The Good.
Your pages will load faster, readers may be more likely to pay attention to your content because they know it will load faster, and Google may feature your content.
The Bad.
AMP is restrictive. Although ‘universal’ it is designed for Google page ranking, with the idea that Google is the preferential search engine of everyone. It’s also primarily content-focused, for sites that are driven by information distribution, similar to the way some Facebook-optimised articles appear. Thus the actual words on your page will be what are prioritised, meaning any site that is NOT solely language driven will find much of its value lost. You may also find your access to analytics severely restricted, with tracking and attribution not possible.
The Ugly.
Your pages will be stripped of personality. Native maps, coding and some other brand imagery will be removed to fit the format of the AMP. Many of the brand elements you so painstakingly curated to enhance your identity will not appear. However, if you don’t conform to the AMP requirements you may find that, thanks to Google’s algorithm updates favouring mobile friendly pages, you will slip down the ranks of the SERPs.
Confused? Understandable. Consider your site to be that lovely lady who calms down King Kong as he’s trying to drag her up the Empire State Building. AMP=King Kong, in case you didn’t get that… You don’t necessarily want to go up there, but you may not have much choice! Ready to get started? Let’s have a chat and see what we can do.
