What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in SEO?
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source web component framework to create fast and smooth-loading web pages. It was first introduced by Google in 2016.
AMP was trending a few years ago, on platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Bing, etc. but not anymore. Twitter has completely removed the AMP support since November 2021.
How AMP works
AMP is a stripped-down version of pages that limits the use of CSS to just 50 KB and JavaScript to around 150 KB. And since these pages are very lightweight, Google and other supported platforms have the AMP pages pre-rendered.
Here’s a diagram that shows how AMP works:
Advantages of using AMP on your website
There are numerous advantages of using AMP on your website, some of them are:
Blazing fast loading
AMP pages load almost instantly on mobile devices. All the heavy HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes are removed from the site to make the web pages smaller in size and load faster.
Implementing AMP on websites can speed up the loading of web pages by as much as 88%, as reported by The Washington Post.
Better user experience
No one wants to visit a website that takes ages to load. According to a report, if a webpage takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% of visitors hit the back button and go somewhere else.
AMP pages considerably improve the loading speed, and a fast-loading website provides an improved overall user experience.
Improves CTR
On the search result page, a lightning bolt icon is shown in front of AMP-supported pages. When users see the icon, they are more likely to click as it will open quickly. AMP also lowers bounce rates and increases the time on site.
According to a report, users are 11% more likely to click on the AMP pages than non-AMP pages in the search result.
Disadvantages of AMP
Most people do not like to use AMP on their websites at all. Here are some cons of using accelerated mobile pages on your website:
Reduced ad revenue and leads
If your website is monetized by ads, expect a considerable drop in the ad revenue. Because AMP is a very restrictive framework and the amount of JavaScript that you can load to show ads is just limited to 150kb.
Also, since you can’t show popups and other visually appealing lead capture forms, the number of leads captured will be reduced too.
Complicated implementation
If your site is built on WordPress then it’s easy to implement AMP, just install a couple of WordPress plugins and it’ll be good to go.
But if you have a custom-designed site, it requires a lot of effort to implement AMP. A common issue is the indexing of multiple URLs for the same webpage.
Also, you cannot use traditional analytics.js for adding Google Analytics to your website. For AMP pages, a different analytics tag is provided which further creates confusion.
Less control
You have less control over the design as well as less control over your content. It’s up to Google and other AMP-supported platforms how they will be showing your content.
AMP pages look decades old.
No extra benefits
No, AMP doesn’t provide any extra benefits in the Google rankings.
Initially, many people thought Google will prefer AMP websites and that might have been true in the past, but not anymore.
Final words
Accelerated mobile pages were a trendy topic and lots of people wanted to implement AMP on their sites back then, but now AMP is dying or rather already dead.
We do not recommend implementing AMP on your website.
