AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source HTML framework created by Google. It was an answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News. AMP optimizes the website for mobile web browsing and helps webpages load faster, at least that’s what Google said would happen in theory. Google has said multiple times that AMP is not a ranking factor. You do not need AMP links to be featured in Google’s Top Stories. What matters is the speed of your website.
The main aim of AMP was to Improve User Engagement and increase rankings because AMP had stripped down CSS and very less JS and Google served AMP from its own Cache. This meant that Webmasters had little control over their site design if they needed to follow proper AMP guidelines. All sorts of custom JavaScript or fancy slider functionality or that really cool-looking Share button that you might have included won’t load up on AMP. Let’s take a closer look at why so many people are now detesting AMP openly on the Internet!
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Why People Are Moving Away From AMP?
AMP simply does not work well for everyone. It varies per industry as AMP might work for big news publishers as they take advantage of the news feeds but for small niche bloggers, it may not work as they do not have a team of content writers.
As AMP pages load faster but they come with their limitations such as reduced ad revenue and design capabilities. There’s also the added headache of needing to fix your AMP pages whenever even a small validation error occurs.
Reasons to Turn off AMP:
- You cannot place more ads or display bigger ads. Your ads will be limited to AMP restrictions. Even if you have AdSense Auto Ads set up, you might not be able to leverage their full earning capabilities.
- AMP removes a big chunk of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and turns your website into a plain boring site. If the user experience is your priority then you should turn it off.
- It is difficult to implement AMP into non-WordPress sites.
- AMP is time-consuming and requires a coder who writes code in an AMP-specific format. This is because AMP has its own set of tags and even syntax varies from normal HTML to some extent. Hence the need for domain-specific knowledge to code everything or even maintain what’s already been made.
- One of the problems is that AMP is served on a cache on Google’s server rather than the original publisher’s website.
- You get lesser control over your content in AMP. The URLs are ugly long GoogleCache URLs and unless you are using Cloudflare or some other service which rewrites your URLs to fancy ones, the end-user experience suffers. You also cannot add videos or heavy media content on AMP pages.
- Turning off AMP ensures you are not at Google’s mercy!
How to Increase Ranking Without AMP?
Optimize your website according to Google’s CWV metrics. So, you can ensure the web page performs well and the user experience complies with Google’s standards. If your website performs well it will feature on Top Stories.
Use a lightweight and mobile-optimized site theme. If you opt for AMP alternative frameworks then the need to rely on AMP will also be reduced. You can also implement features that improve user engagement for the audience of your niche.
Conclusion:
What’s best for everyone might not be best for you. You should do A/B testing and check what is working for you. What will help me achieve and align with my goal? Are user engagement and visual content important for my audience and me? Does my primary target audience use mobile? Am I dependable on newsfeeds? Whatever are your answers, you know yourselves best.
We at Inspire2Rise will always be inspiring you to make an informed decision.
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