AMP in the bin

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have had their day. Google developed this technology a few years ago to speed up the loading times of web pages on mobile devices. It worked really well, as new articles appeared in Google Stories in a flash, and social media platforms also favoured this format.

Support for AMP is waning

Now that speed is a ranking factor, more and more companies are taking this seriously. AMP had its limitations and was therefore not fully embraced. As websites become increasingly faster, the need for AMP has diminished. Google itself now even displays non-AMP pages in Google Stories. Twitter has also openly stated that it will no longer support AMP.

Struggles with AMP

AMP HTML differs from HTML5. The AMP framework supports a limited amount of scripting, no external files, different HTML tags, forms work differently, and the way statistics are tracked is also very different. These restrictions meant that AMP was – and remained – fast. Designers found AMP more difficult to work with, but for smartphone users it was brilliant. Loading times were very short.

Google Stories

Google was the mastermind behind AMP, but they themselves pushed the project to the brink of collapse when it emerged that non-AMP articles were also being displayed in Google Stories. Google Stories is a rich snippet that displays news article headlines directly in the search results based on a popular search query.

Twitter is also discontinuing AMP

Social media platforms also benefited from the loading times of AMP pages. Normally, Twitter would automatically redirect users to the AMP version, but that’s all in the past now. As many developers were using third-party plugins, users criticised the way AMP pages worked. They found it confusing, as the navigation often did not work properly. In our view, the poor implementation was down more to the developers than to the technology itself.

Will AMP still work?

The fact that Google has phased out AMP does not mean that existing AMP pages no longer work. The benefits that AMP used to offer are no longer available. 

SEO is a field in which techniques come and go. The first websites to implement AMP benefited greatly from this. So there are advantages to staying ahead of the curve and experimenting. SEO Ninja constantly keeps abreast of the latest developments and is always keen to capitalise on such advantages.