Introduction
Google has been working hard on how they can make a difference in terms of providing content to the readers globally. With the introduction of mobile, things have changed drastically as more and more readers now use mobile to access information and knowledge. In 2016, Google decided to introduce and integrate AMP in its mobile search index and there were plenty of websites that started writing and guessing about what is AMP and how it will affect the search rankings in the future. Many website owners, digital marketers, and webmasters decided to jump the bandwagon and integrated AMP on their website to gain the advantage of AMP. Now, with the Google’s announcement of the Mobile-First index it has been confirmed that Google is shifting gradually towards mobile, but the question remains: Is AMP important for my site?
Understanding AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is a free, open-source framework that allows you to create mobile pages that consist of stripped down HTML and cache libraries for instant mobile content viewing experience. In simple words, it is a minimalistic version of your site’s mobile page that can display content at lightning fast speed for quick data access.
Should You Implement AMP for Your Site?
The answer to this question is subjective because it depends from site to site. Google claims that implementing AMP can allow you to increase your SERPs, but there’s a twist to it.
AMP has got nothing to do with the quality of your content it only makes your site load faster. This means that even if your site loads faster you need relevant and appealing content to boost your website performance. If your content is not appealing or relevant your site will eventually have high bounce rate and that will affect the SERPs. On the other hand, if your site has relevant and appealing content and loads quickly then your site will still have increasing SERPs without AMP. This indicates that installing AMP doesn’t magically increase your site SERPs. The focus still remains to improve the reader experience, bring in more traffic and please Google.
AMP Benefits vs. Drawbacks
The stripped down HTML allows AMP to work fast and therefore it speeds up the website load time. Your users will not have to wait for the pages to load and that improves user engagement. While AMP is not a ranking factor, but the faster website load time will improve your site SERPs. Implementing AMP also reduces the load on your servers and improve their performance and help you generate a lot of traffic.
However, there are certain drawbacks that you need to keep in mind. Most important of all is that implementing ads on AMP-pages is a bit tough and therefore your site revenue might be compromised. AMP does support Google Analytics, but you need to use a different tag on AMP-pages. This means it will take time for you to analyze the data and see how your site pages have performed. Google makes use of the cached version of your AMP-pages when the visitors access it and that means your users might not see the newly updated page.
Conclusion
As a website owner, it is up to you to decide whether you want to implement AMP on your site or not. It has certain benefits and drawbacks and you need to be the judge of that. If you are willing to ignore the drawbacks you can go ahead with implementing AMP, or just wait for some more time and let AMP stand the test of time and let Google make some changes to it before you make your first move. If you are having trouble implementing AMP on your site we can help you with it.
