Why I Disabled AMP On My Website

Just because we have a new technology, doesn’t mean we all need to scramble on to it. Or more precisely, we should try out everything, and choose to keep what works. Discard the rest. For years now, Google has been pushing AMP for websites to display on mobile phones. And for years, I signed up for it. But a few days back, I decided to disable AMP for good. Now I can’t promise that you would share all of my reasons for doing so. I can only explain what led me to abandon it.

Slow Gutenberg Editing and Preview – Thanks Quarantine!

For a while now, I knew that something was wrong on my site. It loaded fine but editing posts in the WordPress Gutenberg editor was painfully slow. It would often take a full 30 seconds for even a slight update to any post or page. And the preview functionality was so broken as to be completely unusable. It would often take up to a minute for the preview to show!

For some reason, I’d sort of gotten used to it – worried that if I poke around, I might break things further. But here I am holed up for 14-days in mandatory quarantine, and I decided to bite the bullet and debug my site. And the culprit was the official AMP for WordPress plugin.

After failing to find the cause using any “debug queries” plugin, I decided to go the old-fashioned way. I created a staging environment for my site WP-Tweaks and started with the most obvious culprit – Jetpack. To my surprise, Jetpack wasn’t it! Neither was it iThemes – my security plugin. So I started moving more and more systematically until I isolated the flaw – AMP for WordPress.

Now I realize this isn’t a knock on AMP itself. It could just be a flaw with the particular plugin. Or perhaps it was some deeper issue on my site that was causing some weird interaction. Either way, it made me re-evaluate the benefits of AMP to see if I really wanted to keep it by using some other plugin instead.

My Javascript Breaks on AMP Pages

I rely on a few JavaScript snippets to enhance my CTA. Like automatically copying some text. With AMP, all of this is stripped, and my CTAs lose that extra “oomph”. Yes, I’m aware that there are ways to restructure the JavaScript so that it can be included in AMP pages, but honestly, it’s not worth the hassle.

Another area where this is a problem is on my Table of Contents sections. I have a plugin that uses JavaScript to scan the headlines of my post and create a TOC. On AMP pages, this plugin fails, and I’m left with a blank content section in place of the TOC itself. Small annoyances like this work against AMP, even though I understand the reasons behind the restrictions.

As far as JavaScript goes, you’ll be surprised at how much JavaScript even ordinary pages use. You don’t need a complex, flashy website with sophisticated functionality. Even relatively static and banal pages can use JavaScript that performs essential functions.

My Most Valuable Traffic is Desktop Based

Based on my niche, most of my conversions happen on a desktop. Because of this, AMP is less valuable to me. Now I realize this isn’t the case for everyone, but it should be something you consider when making a decision.

My Page Load Speed is Pretty Decent Already

For the most part, I’ve done everything I can to ensure a fast page loading experience. I feel I’ve made the best compromise between speed and utility, and I’m happy with it as it stands. As a result, I feel I can forego the benefits of AMP without impacting my site too much!

After all, that’s the true purpose of AMP isn’t it? If you’re confident that your page loads reasonably fast, what else do you need?