Advantages and Disadvantages of AMP

AMP is undoubtedly changing the way we surf the internet and websites. It is faster, less messy, and easy to use a mobile-friendly version of a website. This open-source project was launched by google in 2015, and since then, many sites have converted their mobile versions to AMP. 

As we all know that AMP increases the speed of websites, and Google also asks websites to use AMP. But as a developer and website owner, we face some challenges in AMP that we will discuss in this blog post. So without any further due, let's get started.

What Is AMP?

AMP is an open-source HTML framework by Google. It was first launched in 2015 and first appeared in the search results in 2016. In the starting days, Google launched this for its new partner websites. But later in 2017, they made it public to be used by everyone. This framework minimizes additional functionalities into your website and helps reduce the loading time.

According to some reports in 2017, when AMP became available to everyone, nearly 900k domains converted to AMP. The latest stats show that there are approximately over 40M domains on AMP and continuously growing. But since its launch, AMP is also getting criticism, and many questions are raised against it. This criticism is because, in 2015, AMP had minimal options to customize the website. But now it has improved a lot, and they are continually adding new features to it.

How to make an AMP version of Website

If your website is on wordpress, then a plugin can do this work for you. Simply install the official AMP plugin for wordpress, activate it, and do some basic settings, and now your website is AMP. Yes, it is simple, but if you have developed your website manually, you can read this article.

Advantage of AMP

If you want to place yourself in the good books of Google, then you should surely go for AMP. Google describes AMP as the key ranking factor these days. AMP can increase the speed of your website and make it upto ten times faster. This will automatically improve your on-page SEO and will provide a higher search ranking. 

It is seen that the engagement rate of visitors on an AMP page is much higher than the traditional pages. Visitors are likely to visit multiple pages and watch embedded videos. AMP also makes it easier for your users to navigate through your website with minimized HTML and CSS. 

In AMP, ad placement is also very user friendly that also helps publishers to enhance the user experience.

Disadvantages of AMP

So now we have talked much about the advantages, and many people just after reading the advantages start working on it. But wait, there are lots of disadvantages as well if you implement AMP.

The first and the most apparent disadvantage of AMP is that it can cut your revenue. As we talked earlier that the AMP has minimal options to place ads so you can’t put the ads wherever you want. People use some tactics to place ads by directly editing the HTML and CSS. But if you do so, then you will get “custom javascript error.” Directly editing the HTML of AMP can also cause the crawling issue on your website.

You may have to compromise with various functionality on your website in order to make it mobile-friendly.

So, Who Should Use AMP?

So now you must be asking, should I use AMP or not? Well, if you are a website that publishes the latest updates (news), then you definitely need AMP. But if you do not update anything on your website frequently, then you still do not need to install it. Other than this, you can also analyze your industry and what kind of pages are ranking on Google. It will give you a better idea.