AMP, Accelerated Mobiles Pages, is a creation by Google to improve the load speed of web pages, by 
creating a simplified version of a website, that requires less load on servers.
As it stands, moving to AMP seems like an inevitable move for websites. However, there are some problems with AMP that makes it not entirely appealing to move to it…just yet. Here are some of the main points associated to using AMP on a website or not.
Google Created AMP
The fact Google created AMP to improve the web user’s experience when browsing online is a big deal. The type of things Google invest in, they tend to want the internet to take on board. One way Google could be doing this is through adding SEO weighting to websites that use AMP.
As soon as Google announce that AMP is having SEO weighting to websites, then it makes total sense to go with AMP. However, up until now, Google has only merely mentioned that it will have an impact in the future – when this is to be the case is still an unknown.
Monetization of AMP Pages
One of the issues associated with AMP is in the performance of them, in terms of monetization. Yes, they could be good for SEO and loading times, but how do they affect how much money a website can make from advertising?
When it comes to statistics, revenue generation can be considered more important than loading speed. For this reason, until A/B testing can prove that AMP pages can make as much money as standard mobile themes, then the incentive to go to AMP will continually be not that clear.
Lack of Theme Customization
AMP pages have simplified themes which enable them to request small amounts of data to load, helping to create near-on instantaneous loading times. This does come at the drawback of having simplified themes for AMP pages.
For this reason, it really depends on the type of website you have as to whether you will benefit from implementing AMP or not. For example:
- A news website will benefit from AMP, since the brunt of the website is simple article content
- The same is applicable for any content mill website
- For sophisticated themes, such as those with memberships, changing content (which shouldn’t be cached) and with functionality more complex than just content, it might not be beneficial to use AMP. The best way to determine this is by giving AMP a go and see how the functionality differs, it it does at all, for your website.
Ultimately, I think AMP is something we are all going to have to implement at some time. However, at what point you should use AMP is a completely different question.
