AMP is appearing in nearly every web newsletter and SEO blog this month. Accelerated Mobile Pages were announced by Google with a group of news publishers in October, and in December Google stated that it would begin directing mobile search users to AMP pages in late February. The question is now coming from businesses that are not news publishers: do they need AMP as well?
The question is directly relevant to us. Ceningan Divers, the dive centre we co-founded on Nusa Ceningan, is about six months old. Most visitors to its website use a phone, on hotel Wi-Fi in Lembongan or on whatever signal is available on the boat from Bali. Speed is a practical concern in this context.
Our answer for most small businesses: probably not, at least not yet. What most small businesses need is a lighter website.
What is Google's AMP project?
A stripped-down copy of each page, built in a restricted HTML format, that Google can cache and serve almost instantly. The format allows almost no custom JavaScript and uses special tags for images and video. Google stores the copy and serves it from its own servers, so the page opens almost immediately from a search result. The demonstrations are impressive.
The project targets publishers first. The first place it will appear is the news carousel at the top of mobile results. Many readers interpret "Google wants AMP" as a ranking bonus, but Google has not stated this. What Google has stated for years is that speed matters, and last April's mobile-friendly update made it clear that phones now come first. AMP is one way to achieve speed. It is not the only one, and for a small site it is not where we recommend starting.
The project's documentation is available at amp.dev. It is worth reviewing even without building a single AMP page, because it amounts to a list of everything that makes web pages slow, and of the features Google considers worth giving up.
Is a fast theme more effective than AMP for a small business website?
Yes, in most cases. AMP makes sense for a newsroom publishing dozens of articles a day, each loaded with advertising and tracking scripts. Such organizations face a real speed problem, have significant revenue at stake and employ developers to address it.
A dive centre's website is very different: twenty or thirty pages covering courses, prices, a few dive sites, a contact form and a booking request. When a small business site is slow, the causes are nearly always the same:
- a heavy theme purchased on a marketplace, with a slider, three font families and every option enabled
- photos uploaded directly from the camera, five or six megabytes each
- a large number of plugins, each loading its own scripts on every page
- low-cost shared hosting on the wrong continent
AMP does not resolve any of these issues on the main site. It creates a second, parallel version of certain pages, which must be kept synchronized with the first. For an owner who updates a WordPress site on a Sunday evening, this adds another component that can fail.
AMP pages are also deliberately minimal. Booking forms, galleries and chat widgets, the features that turn a visitor into a guest, either do not work or require special AMP components, many of which are still under development. A WordPress plugin that enables AMP for blog posts is likely to appear soon. The result would be fast posts with a very plain appearance, and a longer path from the post to the booking form.
Where should a small business start to improve speed?
With the images, followed by measurement. The effective measures are simple. Every image should be resized and compressed before it is uploaded. For underwater photography, this is by far the largest gain. A page reduced from ten megabytes to two feels like a different website on a phone in Indonesia, and on a phone anywhere else.
The next step is to lighten the theme. Remove the homepage slider, since few visitors wait for the third slide. Remove any plugin whose purpose nobody can explain. Move the hosting closer to the customers who book, rather than to where the owner lives.
Every change should be measured. Before making any modification, run the page through PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest, record the figures, make a single change and test again. One change at a time. Without a baseline, results cannot be assessed, and "speed plugins" make sites slower more often than one might expect.
Which steps do we recommend for a small site this year?
- Images first. Resize them to the dimensions at which they are actually displayed, then compress them. The choice of tool matters much less than applying it every time.
- A light theme, or a simple custom theme built for what the business actually needs. Every unused feature is still loaded.
- Only the plugins whose purpose can be named and explained.
- Hosting close to customers, with a CDN in front if they are widely dispersed, as they are for a dive centre.
- A periodic review of the mobile usability report in Search Console, and Google's Mobile-Friendly Test after any major change.
Where is AMP heading?
The likely trend is that Google will extend AMP beyond news. If it succeeds with publishers, Google will probably promote it in regular results, and SEO blogs will then tell small businesses that they are falling behind. That outcome is possible, but it does not justify immediate action.
The arrangement itself raises concerns. Content is served from Google's cache, under a Google address, and built with Google's components. Many developers have already expressed reservations, and those reservations are well founded. A preferable approach would be for Google to measure how quickly real pages load for real visitors and reward that, regardless of the technology used. That would be fairer to small businesses with well-built WordPress sites, and Google may eventually move in that direction.
AMP does have one clear benefit: it is prompting business owners to pay attention to speed. Owners who disregarded every warning about image sizes now want to discuss load times, because Google has attached its lightning-bolt symbol to the issue. That attention is useful in itself.
Why does mobile speed matter for customers on poor connections?
Because a slow site loses the customer who was about to book. In this region, many people browse on an unreliable signal, as do people in rural areas everywhere. A slow site costs more than a few seconds: the visitor returns to the search results and selects the next listing.
A site that feels slow on the owner's own phone can usually be improved without starting over. A website redesign does not necessarily mean a new look; often it mainly involves reducing page weight. A thorough technical SEO review identifies the heaviest elements more quickly than trial and error.
Speed is not a matter of satisfying Google's latest project. It is the first impression a customer forms of a business, before reading a single word.