Every website owner should care about reducing the loading time of their website. This way, they would get a higher ranking in search engines which results in more visitors. Using Google’s AMP technology a page’s speed becomes extremely fast.

Website speed as a ranking factor

It is known that a website’s speed is a ranking factor. This means that increased load times may result in lower search rankings. That is the reason why every website owner should be concerned about their website’s speed. Poor webpage speed can be a result of a few reasons:

• The page contains some scripts that are loaded before the content of the page can be displayed to the visitor.
• The page contains many images which increase the number of requests made to the server.
• The images that are displayed on the page are not optimized for web use. As a result their big size has a big impact on the speed of the page.
• Sometimes the hosting is not as good. In that case long server response times can be noticed.

Google’s AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages) framework for extremely fast pages

As more and more people browse the web using smartphones, google now rewards more the websites that are mobile friendly. For this reason some years ago google introduced the AMP framework. What AMP really does is that it strips the page from any third party javascript, cookies and ad networks. It uses custom html and css. As for the content it remains identical to the original page’s content. The result is a dramatic change in matters of speed as the page loads almost instantly. After implementing AMP pages it is common to see a boost in a page’s search engine ranking.

AMP – Pros and Cons

Of course, nothing can be perfect. Now let’s see the pros and cons of using AMP.

Pros

• AMP page are really fast. This means that the website will attract more visitors that will be happy when they read content without any delays.
• Any content that is displayed in a search engine will always be on top with an indicator that this page is using AMP.
• As I said above, more speed equals in a higher page ranking in search engines.

Cons

• The AMP version of a page does not accept any external css or javascript scripts. This means that the style of the page is really limited and might not always be attractive.
• AMP might reduce the performance of a domain name. This can happen because an AMP page is actually cached in a CDN(Content Delivery Network). So, when visitors see an AMP page, they are not on the page’s domain but on google.

Use Case: AMP in action

It is time to see what AMP is all about. We will be using an article which is published on a website that uses wordpress. Using a CMS(content management system) like wordpress is always a nice solution if someone doesn’t want to go into much trouble. However it might not be the best solution in matters of speed. Let’s take a look at the article’s loading speed using google’s page speed insights.

Here we can see the big difference in terms of speed. The page that does not use AMP has got a score of 21 while the AMP page got a stunning score of 98. First contentful paint is at 2 seconds instead of 5.1 seconds and the time at which the page is interactive is also 2 seconds instead of a long 10.8 second delay.

Conclusion

To sum things up, as we are venturing further into the digital era, it is a must for every website to comply with the standards set by the search engines in order to attract more visitors and be more competitive. In this case, AMP does a great job in keeping the load times short but at the cost of the page’s visual appearance. So it is up to the owners to decide if they want a faster website to keep their readers coming back or if they want their website to be pretty to the eye.