Is AMP Finally Deprecated For Good?

With Google’s latest “Page Experience” update, a lot of websites that heavily invested in AMP are going to find the return on that investment severely diminished. This is for two reasons. First, the emergence of the various facets of page speed as ranking factors has propelled website owners to pay a lot of attention to how fast their site loads. As a result, the natural speed advantage that AMP pages possess diminishes due to competition. And second, Google itself has said that it will no longer reserve the “top stories” of the news section for AMP. This means that AMP will be gradually deprecated – to the benefit of all.

This cuts the feet right out from under AMP advocates. And for all the years that Google has been pushing for AMP, it might now just die a quiet death.

I’d Already Moved Away from AMP

Last year in 2020, I’d already started moving my site away from AMP. I found that the additional layer of complexity that AMP introduces wasn’t worth it. The WordPress plugin that converts ordinary pages and posts into AMP was reacting in unpredictable ways with my caching plugins and was slowing things down.

In addition, it was a nightmare to rewrite some of my Javascript functions so that they would run well on AMP pages. When I finally managed to debug why my site backend editing was so slow, I decided to disable AMP entirely.

There are a host of other reasons why AMP doesn’t work well despite its benefits.

AMP Loses its Prominence in Google Search

Before the page experience update, Google used to give special treatment to AMP pages by showing a lightning icon next to them like this:

(Sorry for the political results, it’s just the trending thing!)

These lightning indicators gave users confidence that the page they were about to visit would load fast. Surveys also demonstrated that users trusted AMP content more. All this was great for you if your site made use of a lot of AMP.

But now that Google has confirmed that the lightning icon is being deprecated, and that top stories will be drawn from non-AMP pages, their value has gone down dramatically – if not entirely washed away.

Not surprising then, that around 37% of users won’t be investing in AMP anymore as per this survey on Twitter:

For those who are using AMP on your sites: is the upcoming change in regards of the page experience update and AMP no longer being a requirement for top stories, no AMP badge to be shown, etc. will make you change your AMP usage? 👇

— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) May 22, 2021

Evidently, they think they don’t need AMP for fast pages.

As Usual, Google Can’t Be Relied Upon

Bitter experience has taught me never to go “all-in” on anything Google does if I can help it. I don’t use their password manager and browser, and I try and find alternatives whenever possible. The deprecation of visible AMP signs is just another confirmation of what I already knew – Google claims that a certain technology is the “hottest new thing”, and then one day they just drop it.

You Can Achieve Fast Pages without AMP

Ever since I removed AMP from my site, I’ve worked on deferring Javascript and improving my TTFB times. Since then, I’ve managed to achieve 100% Core Web Vitals success on both mobile and desktop sites for my site WP-Tweaks as shown here:

With the recent production launch of QUIC.cloud, making your websites fast with NameHero is even easier. You get a generous 10 GB cache transfer quota every month, thanks to the LiteSpeed webserver that will help you hit your Core Web Vitals goals. No need for AMP! Instead of using Google’s cache, you’ll be using QUIC.cloud’s cache instead from locations all over the world.

Thanks to the new page experience update, AMP is no longer necessary and I have a feeling it’ll be slowly phased out completely as support for it dies and publishers find they can easily hit their speed benchmarks without it.