Is AMP worth the effort?

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Is AMP worth the effort?

scottb

8:02 pm on May 4, 2021 (gmt 0)

I have been very happy with how Google has treated my site over the last year, except for AMP. I have put a lot of effort into making my pages AMP friendly, but I still have very few AMP page views.

I wonder if other posters here will comment about whether they are happy or unhappy with their AMP page views (and revenue) compared to the amount of work they have put into getting them.

Also, did you have to achieve perfection with all AMP pages to get the traffic? In other words, never have a single error?

lammert

8:20 pm on May 4, 2021 (gmt 0)

AMP is under severe pressure. See this thread [webmasterworld.com] about the legal issues, and Google's recent announcement that with the new page experience update [developers.google.com] the playing field between standard and AMP pages will basically be leveled.

So if your AMP pages perform worse than your standard pages, it might be the right time to switch back.

NickMNS

8:23 pm on May 4, 2021 (gmt 0)

I have been using AMP for several years, with no issues. I get a good amount of traffic going to AMP pages, but I couldn't say if it would be more or less without AMP.

As for revenue, you can't judge revenue by comparing AMP revenue to non-amp revenue as AMP pages will only ever be landing pages. But my revenue is currently as high as it has ever been.

Not sure what AMP perfection is, but if your pages have errors than they are not AMP and thus you should not expect to get traffic to them. That said, over the years Google has certainly sent a lot of warning in GSC, if there is an issue I resolve it quickly but typically these are false positives. Note my website has millions of pages each page has an AMP and non-amp version and all pages are based on templates. If a breaking error would exist it would effect all my pages not only a few.

As to whether or not it is worth the effort. If I had to start over today, given the current uncertainty regarding AMP, I certainly would not waste time and effort on making AMP pages. It is not easy to do it right, and there are far better functionalities and features that one could provide with a bigger bang for your buck. Given the advances in Googlebot's ability to render js, I would rely more heavily on client side rendering (anti-amp).

scottb

8:54 pm on May 4, 2021 (gmt 0)

That's an interesting and useful point about the page experience update. I have been trying to improve my core web vitals and seem to be getting a good response from Google search results.

AMP perfection means zero errors. Google finds a few occasional AMP errors on my site, which I fix. Site page views are up quite a bit over the last year, but I'm literally getting only 20-30 page views a month from AMP.

It has been a lot of work with no payback. And yet the site mobile traffic has jumped versus last year.