Updated January 7, 2023
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In case you missed it, Google is pushing a Mobile First World… Part of this drive for fully functional mobile websites has been AMP. AMP is a way of getting your pages to load faster on mobile devices, especially useful for blog posts or news websites. However, changes are afoot as Google has just announced that they will start testing other types of content (non AMP pages) in their Top Stories section and other areas of the SERP. So does this mean you should stop using AMP?
What’s Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
The simplest way of explaining what AMP pages are and why you should use them is; AMP pages are essentially cached on Google’s own servers. So they load faster. This is why when you load an AMP page you will often see the Google URL in your search bar, indicating that you are viewing the page through a “window” from Google, rather than directly on the website.
Wasted Effort?
If you’re creating AMP pages you shouldn’t stop straight away. Whatever changes Google is making they will take time. We implemented AMP on a number of our pages last year and did see an improvement in our SEO ranking on those pages, which indicates that Google was giving some preferential treatment to these pages. It’s unlikely that this benefit is going to suddenly disappear.
A much more likely scenario will be that gradually the features offered by Accelerated Mobile Pages will become offered by using simple HTML. In short, HTML will load faster by allowing your pages to appear as “part of Google” making AMP redundant.
AMP Dead Already?
How long is a piece of string? Google have announced that they have begun testing integration. How long that will take nobody knows. If you’re creating AMP pages, for now at least we don’t see a reason why you should stop doing that. But if you were planning larger projects, like for example a full AMP website, you should probably put that on the backburner and see how this plays out.
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