Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open source framework that works to create a faster loading internet. Made by Google, AMP uses lightweight themes and simplified HTML, with Google 
providing cached versions of the website for improved load time, to effectively make the load speed of a web page as fast as possible, whilst using their search engine.
Now why would you want to move to AMP, considering many websites have most likely put a lot of effort to designing their own already-optimized mobile theme?
- Improved load time – it is proven that load time affects many elements to a website, including:
- Bounce rate
- Exit rate
- Time on website
- Pages/visit
- SEO, considering web users are less likely to exit back to search results if your pages load super fast. This, as well as the fact Google made clear they use website load time as a ranking factor the SERP.
- Cleaner theme – AMP themes are usually very basic and help to remove some unwanted clutter (to the web user)
- Decrease your host server load – since Google caches AMP pages, your own server will have less load to it for mobile traffic.
This does all sound very promising. After all, Google are the giants when it comes to SEO and gaining traffic, so we should listen to them? Well, not always the case. There is actually an argument to not implementing AMP to your mobile website – here are some of the main reasons why.
Revenue Drop
Considering the fact the AMP theme can be considered very simple and not HTML heavy, getting adverts to appear in a certain way that generates revenue is sometimes a little difficult to achieve. On top of this, many website mobile themes are already optimized for advertising. AMP, on the other hand, is primarily optimized for the web user and load time: revenue comes second. Therefore, it is not out of the question (and from searching on the internet, I am not the only one that found this) that you will actually make less money using AMP for mobile than a standard mobile theme.
No SEO Penalty
Google stated that there is good reason to reduce your website’s load time, considering the fact that they use it as a factor when determining the SEO of a web page. What Google does not strictly state is how you achieve the low loading time. Yes, you can achieve it quite easily through AMP. However, you can also achieve it organically without AMP. If you want to look at reducing your website load time, think about the factors that firstly affect a website’s loading time.
AMP is Simple
At its core, AMP is simple. The theme is simple. The functionality that you can implement for an AMP theme is very simple. For this reason, if you have a website that has lots of different features, you might struggle to replicate these effectively in AMP.
