6 Reasons Why Google AMP is Not Good for Your Site

In past few years, Google was pushing webmasters and publishers to move towards the mobile world. Google introduced mobile first indexing as a default and push website owners to implement AMP pages on their site. In theory, AMP pages will load faster and improve the user experience on mobile devices. However, in practical you will face multiple problems to implement AMP on a running website. In this article we will explore why use of AMP on your site may impact your traffic and revenue adversely.

Related: Google AdSense and page speed – an irony.

1. AMP is Still Optional

Most of the popular news sites will offer different types of mobile access to their users.

• Mobile app
• Mobile website
• Responsive desktop site
• AMP site

It is impossible for normal users to implement such a complex mobile access system spending huge money on development. Other than apps, remaining three options are search engine relevant and Google will choose which one to show in the search results. This means even you invest lot of money to implement AMP, Google may still show the responsive or mobile site in search results. This does not make any sense for spending effort and investment for website owners who operate with minimum or low budget.

2. Advertisement Revenue will Plummet

The problem with Google is that they will never push their Google Ads advertisers; instead, they will push their AdSense publishers to move towards mobile. This is a similar problem with HTTPS protocols and page speed as many of the advertisers still serve ads through HTTP and un-optimized banner images. If you are an AdSense publisher, Google will push you to implement AMP as part of the revenue optimization. We strongly recommend ignoring that to avoid the impact on your revenue.

Mobile revenue of small-scale publishers depends upon the auto ads (anchor and vignette ads), matched content and display ads. When you implement AMP on your pages, all these will get a big hit due to the following reasons:

• Less display ad revenue as there will not be sufficient ad inventory from advertisers for AMP pages.
• No matched content ads.
• AMP auto ads does not show anchor or vignette ads.

3. Search Console Errors are Technical

After implementing AMP on your site, you will start noticing many errors on Google Search Console. Unfortunately, these errors are highly technical that you can’t resolve as a normal website owner. You need to hire a developer to resolve these issues in order to get rid of AMP errors. In fact, you need to use different Analytics code for your regular site and AMP pages.

4. Lower Leads and Conversion

Many of the sites depend on the sidebar for lead generation and bounce rate reduction. Here is a good example of one of the tutorial pages on Bootstrap in this site. When a user lands on any of the tutorial page, there is an option to explore more using the sidebar navigational links. We do use AdSense matched content ads for showing the related content. By default, AMP pages will not show sidebar and matched content ads from AdSense. Now that use landing on the page has no further navigational option even he is willing to read more.

In addition, many websites use newsletter and other affiliate banners on the sidebar running on scripts. None will work with AMP and you may end up in losing real visitor, customer and end up with lower conversion and higher bounce rate.

5. jQuery and JavaScript Themes

Google’s jQuery resources are more popular and widely used on content management systems like WordPress. Most of the eye-catching WordPress themes use jQuery to build features like tabs, accordion, pop-ups and sliders. When you switch to AMP pages, all these stuffs will stop working on mobile devices.

6. Custom Plugin Functionalities

Similar to WordPress themes, almost 50% of the custom plugins or add-ons use JavaScript. A good example is a data table. Many of the websites use data table with searching and sorting functions. Unfortunately, these beautiful features will not work with AMP unless you customize to handle the errors to ignore them. In our opinion, structured content in table is important even on mobile devices. It does not make sense to implement AMP and loose these features on the name of speed.

Final Words

AMP is a good option for big scale publishers, especially like news websites. Firstly, they have money invest and secondly there are many advertisers choose them. Unfortunately, this is not the case with small-scale publishers and normal website owners. As long as the return on investment is not clear, AMP will not become popular even if Google pushes for another decade.