The start of the year has seen a new open letter warning against AMP. As a reminder, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is the techno launched by Google in 2016 that lighten pages and thus, reduce the loading time of mobile pages.
Among the co-signatories of this letter are web influencers, and in particular webperf: Steve Souders, Zach Leatherman, and Mark Nottingham.
At Fasterize, we chose not to sign this letter for two reasons. But we wanted to share our vision. As webperf experts, isn’t it our duty?
We have not signed this open letter for two reasons.
The first is that we didn’t want to sign the letter on behalf of Fasterize. We would have involved all our employees, and that would have made no sense. Everyone is free to make up their own mind. In fact, we encourage everyone to make up their own minds.
But of course we discussed it a lot internally, which brings us to the second reason. In the course of our discussions, we realized that our opinions were more nuanced than those found in this open letter.
At Fasterize, we are in favor of solutions that make the web faster, especially when it comes to the mobile web, which already suffers greatly from connection contexts. For this, we thank Google for its evangelism on the subject.
The media domain, which has been invaded by the onsite advertising model and tracking, is probably the one that suffers most from the lack of speed.
Of course, we understand that AMP is a solution for improving the performance of these web pages. But there are many others! We could imagine :
- improving the quality of site code ;
- limiting and optimizing third parties;
- taking into account the specificities of mobile devices;
- …
In our opinion, AMP is not the best solution to adopt in its current state.
The technology has some major drawbacks:
- While AMP pages are not a ranking factor for Google, content in AMP format is nevertheless highlighted in the results pages.
Rather than giving AMP content a higher ranking, it would be preferable to integrate an objective, neutral performance criterion, such as the Speed Index. In this way, publishers retain the option of choosing the technical solution they prefer to adopt.
In this respect, Speed Update is a good thing. - AMP implies that the web page is delivered through Google’s cache (or only one other compatible cache at present) rather than from the original site, and by masking the URLs of the original site. In this way, when an Internet user clicks on Google-recommended content from within Google, they involuntarily remain in the Google ecosystem.
Although the project blog announces that URL management will change to better reflect the address of the original site, this only solves part of the problem. While users benefit from improved visibility, this is not the case for the owners of the sites in question. We think it’s important to be able to choose how your site is distributed.
Right now, we’re having a hard time seeing the governance of the project, and we really hope that future decisions will be made in favor of webperf. The web was born free, decentralized, and that’s what has made it so strong. We’d like to keep it that way.
