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Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Is the lightning bolt really that worth it? I'm not convinced that (any more) Google prioritizes AMP pages beyond the coincidence that they prioritize faster ones and they are faster.
Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web tech boycotts.
AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages.
But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight.
It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.
There are other optimizations AMP implements that aren't currently possible with regular web pages, notably [their ability to be automatically preloaded by the browser without compromising the user's privacy][1].
Once [cross-origin server push][2] becomes standardized, regular webpages will be able to take advantage of similar functionality.
[1]: https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da245...
[2]: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...
No, it's not only about size and js restrictions. Here is a summary of the strategies employed (edited from [0]).
- Execute all AMP JavaScript asynchronously
- Size all resources statically
- AMP uncouples document layout from resource layout. Only one HTTP request is needed to layout the entire doc.
- All CSS must be inline and size-bound
- Minimize style recalculations
- Only run GPU-accelerated animations
- Prioritize resource loading
- The new preconnect API is used heavily
- When AMP documents get prerendered for instant loading, only resources above the fold are actually downloaded. Resources that might use a lot of CPU (like third-party iframes) do not get downloaded.
Google creates an environment where you "need to use AMP" because they prioritize search results for properties that have AMP varietals - placing them in the "carousel" on top of search results. You can build a very performant static site, with terrific SEO and social share meta tags, etc. - but without AMP - and still be positioned below another property who's "regular" site is slow and full of cruft but has an AMP varietal.
Right. Absolutely. People should just follow some of these restrictions to get speed without AMP. I went down this AMP path though because of yes the Icon. Google was testing the Icon in Paid Ads I had read, and wanted to see if that could also improve our Click Through Rates. I also wanted to see if officially being AMP could improve things like our Quality Score in our ads, which would reduce our click cost, etc.
So yeah, just me trying to get blessed by G so everything else improves from G for us :)
I had a thought the other day:
Is there a mobile browser that tracks bandwidth used, and can tell me how much money I'm spending on bandwidth per domain?
I'd like to know which sites are parsimonious about page size. Then I'll limit my mobile browsing to those and ditch the ones that don't care.
> If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways?
Maciej Cegłowski (aka idlewords) recommends exactly this is in his (2015!) talk "The Website Obesity Crisis": http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
His specific comments about AMP: "AMP is a special subset of HTML designed to be fast on mobile devices. Why not just serve regular HTML without stuffing it full of useless crap? The question is left unanswered."
AMP is just a fork of HTML, creating more pressure and work for publishers to implement.
The reason why they do it is because of better search page placement in Google. It's unfair and wasteful, since site speed can easily be measured by the most advanced search engine that already has tools and reports doing exactly that.
> Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways?
I think aside from the icon and the special treatment mentioned above, don't AMP pages get served directly from google and get preloaded on the search results page? So that's the other benefit, I guess. Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.
I'm a contributor to AMP and also work on Google Search. We're currently investigating the issue of the blank page that's mentioned in the article. So far we've been able to reproduce the issue using the Chrome emulator; however, we haven't been able to repro on an actual device, either Android or iOS. So we'll keep digging into this.
The article also mentions the impact on conversion rate. We're interested to learn more details surrounding this. Blank pages loading for many users would explain a lower conversion rate but we'd like to figure out if there's any other possible cause since it doesn't currently seem like most users hit a blank page in actual usage. I'll get in touch with the article author to see if there's openness to digging in further.
AMP is a terrible product and an abuse of market position, but the ego behind it means nobody cares what users think, and it will be touted as a success on someone's performance review no matter what.
AMP has a pretty bad user experience that is unrelated to performance: It's super confusing for me when I am on a news site and the url bar shows a long unfamiliar string. It actually makes me feel like I need to check if I'm on a fishing site or I was misdirected or I misclicked.
> Sometimes I get blank pages.
I got them very frequently (as a user). This coupled with the inability to turn off AMP finally pushed me to use DDG as the default search engine.
Google restricts access to the search results carousel to AMP. If they did it in a neutral manner by measuring performance almost all of the criticism would evaporate.
Yeah, the display of AMP pages, even on Android devices, is absurdly user-hostile. The textless "link" icon to get to the actual content, the loss of the critical "find in page" command, the loss of screen real-estate when the browser already has a bar.
It's an odd worst-of-both-worlds implementation where it has made the compromises needed to display it in a vanilla Chrome browser window, but doesn't actually appear to be a vanilla Chrome browser window with normal Chrome features.
And that's not getting into the terrifying power-position it gives google as the host of your content.
Personally, I dislike AMP with a vengeance - I refuse to click any AMP search result or link - so I'm glad to see people quantitatively assessing the benefits for their site (or lack thereof) and moving away from it. Now if only we could encourage web developers to still adhere to the better parts of the protocol, the mobile web might become a better place.
I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I don’t have a good internet connection and it’s painful to wait for a page to load. If I see the AMP icon I will visit that site than the non AMP site. Oh and I’m in US. If I travel abroad, it’s much worse. As a consumer, AMP has been phenomenal.
AMP + Safari reader mode = Best browsing experience.
Is there a coordinated campaign going on against AMP? My experience as a user has been nothing but positive, with pages loading in a small fraction of the time of normal pages, while I read nothing but negativity about AMP in developer communities like this one. Am I missing something fundamentally evil about AMP that's not apparent from the user standpoint? From my limited perspective, it seems to be the only force trying to counteract an increasingly bloated and slow web.
I've tried AMP a couple times only to get rid of it.
It's a nice bar to set for websites to compete against. I think Google rightfully so should penalize bloated & slow sites.
It's easy to create something better than AMP's experience. It takes a little time optimizing your site to create a pleasant interface & experience.
The majority of sites I see that are below the AMP bar, are sites that choose to be that way with lots of ads & pop ups. They do it because these things help them make money. So for them they have little incentive to use AMP. A lot of them make some of that money with Google Ads though.
So at the end of the day, I really don't see who AMP is for.
I like the idea of AMP but its implementation by Google is so poor. It's just way too buggy for me. Websites will load only as much as my phone's screen allows - when I try to scroll down nothing happens. Other times it's just a blank page.
AMP convinced me to stop using Google's mobile website and switch to DuckDuckGo, and as an added bonus I can View Image from image search results.
EDIT: Forgot about how Google refuses to serve their modern version of Google.com on Firefox Android. That was the final nail in the coffin for me.
AMP simply goes too far for me. Google Search already decides which sites we see. Now they want to control what we see on those sites too? Nu-uh.
I found the article an interesting read, however I couldn't help but think we are talking about AMP and small sites on Medium. When I download that article from Medium with wget I receive a 142K html file that is surprisingly small in this day and age, but still bloated more than is needs to be.
Using this script[0], I was able to get it down to 14K. Then further cleaning it up in emacs and adding <img> tags, I got the html down to 10k. That means it should take probably less than 5 seconds to load the html (not including the massive images) on a 5KB/s connection in Australia (more common thank you might think in the country areas, although getting much better with the NBN roll out) or any other 3rd world internet countries.
You can test the resulting html in this gist[1]. Please note I did that in about 20mins, and did not test on mobile, so it is not perfect. I expect the images need to be scaled to fit on mobile. Also I only used the <style> tag to keep it as one file, I don't recommend doing that on real websites.
I really hope more people start caring about saving bandwidth and client side resources (CPU, RAM, etc.)
[0]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855...
[1]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1...
Does anyone think google is engaging in anti-trust/monopoly-building actions by prioritizing AMP pages
> Sometimes the cover-up is more damaging than the crime.
I hate walled gardens. What troubles me more is that something that came from addressing a competitor's product (Fb's Instant Articles in this case) has grown to do more damage than what Instant Articles could have in the first place.
As for the Google Amp URL, they are working on fixing it. https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536
My personal experience has been that a large number of AMP pages never load. If I search the article title on Google and click the non AMP page, it loads fine. Even after doing that and going back to the AMP link, still won't load.
I am fairly sure the product is not working as expected... My experience is on an Android Pixel 2 - so it's not like I am not a target market.
From an end-user perspective, my solution to the degradation of Google was to switch to DuckDuckGo.com.
About one year ago when I switched there were a few things that annoyed me, but it’s become a great experience since then... and they’re not tracking me.
Do it, and you won’t regret it.
AMP pages rarely work for me when opening from Feedly and sometimes Twitter.
I'm not sure, but it seems like the site/service this article is referencing is for either coders, or people who need coders, but either way is targeting a more-technical / business-oriented audience.
What is the overlap on the Venn diagram between "people who like to use AMP" and "people who are technical enough to need this service"? My first instinct would be that it's low.
Its by far the quality of the content that matters the most for ranking on Google search engine, much more than the speed of the page.
If the page speed is acceptable, its going to be ranked over an AMP page if the content is better.
Content is the key, build better content, that solves better a concrete problem that visitors have: that is how you win visitors trust and get higher rankings at the same time.
> There’s little reason that a small company website that could load in 100ms as a static site of all HTML and no Javascript is actually a 100MB React app
AMP is the developer equivalent of getting a gastric bypass surgery because you refuse to control yourself and live a healthy lifestyle.
There's a very obvious solution here to the AMP issues that people keep writing about: stop building massively bloated sites, where the bloat inevitably acts to abuse users rather than provide a better experience. AMP isn't necessary at all. It is that simple. No, you don't need 600kb of CSS. No you don't need 8mb of JavaScript. Just stop building like that, there's a better way. Put your obese, lazy sites on a healthy diet and exercise regimen.
100% on Google Lighthouse
The author seem to be implying conversion loss from pre/post which may be affected from many factors including seasonality - I’m wondering why didn’t he do an A/B for a radical design like that?
Google you are supposed to help me search digital documents to find ones relevant to me. I dont even care if they're slow, you are a search engine not tye internet police.
Unrelated to this topic, but still speaking about AMP: has anyone done integration tests with AMP pages? It seems that it's impossible to achieve that, and since AMP has its own async module with amp-forms and amp-mustache, I'm a little nervous about replacing a normal landing page with an AMP page that has errors on its scripting.
I've looked everywhere, but to no avail. Can anyone shed some light on this?
AMP is not about fast websites, better user experience for either users or publishers, nor a trusted platform.
It's about google hosting your site and capturing data from it. It's a shitty idea and i can't understand why people use it.
Yes, make your website fast, please. There're plenty of guidelines and tests for that, but you don't need amp for that.
AMP is the worst. I used to get rid of it by going through encrypted.google.com, but unfortunately that's been shut down and I haven't figured out how to use google and not use AMP. But I still want to.
I do find myself using Chrome on android less and less primarily because of AMP
You can remove Google AMP without hurting organic traffic and web performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
Google's goal is to not increase your conversion rate; it's for users to go back to the search results and click on an ad.
I work extensively in SEO and have never recommended AMP for this reason.
Matrix Dodging Bullets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os
GETF (Google Engineering Task Force) says AMP is mandatory. Fix your browsers and move content to Google official servers before January 2020.
Another thing to consider: Google is blocked in China, so AMP doesn't matter if you are looking for a truly global presence.
The argument against amp is based on moats and monopoly but millions of people who make money from Google are unlikely to care about these things. They will do anything to get better revenue or rankings.
This is where consumer choice and free markets break down, and regulations become important. That's why dumping is a illegal, because consumers are not going to turn away from cheap products because of bad actors.
In the real world you need regulations.
The same happened with a site I manage after I enabled AMP.
We've been doing the Google dance to their tune for too long.
AMP is just another reason to block third party scripts. If your page is blank, I'm going elsewhere.
The speed of computers has scaled / is scaling so quickly. IMO avoiding JS completely is ridiculous.
Monopolies don't care about you
Why does Google tell me I'm logged into Google on amp pages? It makes no sense.