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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's a nice bar to set for websites to compete against. I think Google rightfully so should penalize bloated & slow sites.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I really hope more people start caring about saving bandwidth and client side resources (CPU, RAM, etc.)<p>[0]: <a href="https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855bb4c6e" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1a7890e" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1...</a>
> Sometimes the cover-up is more damaging than the crime.<p>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.<p>As for the Google Amp URL, they are working on fixing it.
<a href="https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Do it, and you won’t regret it.
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.<p>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.<p>If the page speed is acceptable, its going to be ranked over an AMP page if the content is better.<p>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<p>AMP is the developer equivalent of getting a gastric bypass surgery because you refuse to control yourself and live a healthy lifestyle.<p>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.
<p><pre><code> 100% on Google Lighthouse
</code></pre>
Something is awry here. Putting AMP on a page immediately gets you points removed for "Uses inefficient cache policy on static assets" for the inclusion of v0.js.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <a href="https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance" rel="nofollow">https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance</a>
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.<p>I work extensively in SEO and have never recommended AMP for this reason.
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.<p>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.<p>In the real world you need regulations.
Um, google is taking people's pages and hosting them themselves? That seems like a copyright violation to me. If my website was being mirrored by google and they diverted traffic to the mirror instead of my own website, I'd be filing a DMCA pretty quick.<p>Or is AMP opt-in?
A consultant I worked with would charge lots of $$$ for basically doing to his large enterprise clients. For example we would go into a meeting with 4 random employees and then charge $250 per hour per person.<p>He joked to me and said that this money is essentially "stupidity tax" on these large enterprises because they can't navigate their way through even some trivial tech problems.<p>AMP is one such stupidity tax in my personal opinion. I have worked for many years in web performance optimisation and I realise that every internet business must pay a good close attention to it but most of them are incompetent to do that. Their webpages are bloated. Just check how heavy is the page for forbes.com and you will realise the problem.<p>AMP sets a standard where even with low quality developers you can have nice fast loading pages. It is very similar to those Javascript wrappers that force typed variables and semicolons.<p>IF you are already having a good web team don't waste time on AMP unless there is some real demonstrable benefit.
Q: Did Google create - and promote from their dominant position - AMP for anyone but their own interests?<p>A: No. Why would you be so naive to think otherwise?
There's really not enough information in the article to judge its validity...<p>Some comparisons between devices, as but one example, could support the idea that AMP affects conversion rate (AMP is only shown on mobile).<p>As it is, I have my doubts that the mechanisms he speculates could have such an impact. URLs, for example, are really de-emphasised on mobile.
From the OP:<p>"There’s nothing that magical about it. A big part of its performance boost is simply its standards: no javascript, all inline CSS, and CSS can only measure 50KB or less. You’re going to make any page load faster with those requirements."<p>Gee, for my startup, that's the way I wrote my Web pages from the beginning! Microsoft's ASP.NET wrote a little, simple JavaScript for me, but for using my Web pages that JavaScript is optional.
Or... maybe it's not AMPs fault (not that I'm a fan of AMP). Maybe it's just that Ruby is quickly going out of vogue and you're just seeing the signs.