Alright, let’s start off by saying that I’m definitely a little biased – part of my job involves working with the AMP team at Google and the fine folks at XWP on the AMP for WordPress plugin. I wanted to highlight some things about this Bullshit Web piece that’s going around, though. In short: the bit about AMP is largely bullshit.
AMP pages aren’t inherently faster than non-AMP pages
Where’s the data to back that up? I’ve seen (big) data that shows the exact opposite.
high-performing non-AMP pages are not mixed with AMP versions
Wrong! AMP Native means that sites can be AMP-first, and the WP plugin makes that incredibly easy now.
Google has a conflict of interest in promoting the format.
Of course, because it’s focus with search is to give people the best result, and that includes performance, so faster pages will be given a rankings boost. That’s good for the user!
So: if you have a reasonably fast host and don’t litter your page with scripts, you, too, can have AMP-like results without creating a copy of your site dependent on Google and their slow crawl to gain control over the infrastructure of the web.
This is true (and of course, if you want a fast host, choose VIP), but as Nick already stated, publishers aren’t doing that on their own. I think it’s a damn shame that Google has had to use it’s power to force publishers to stop cluttering up their pages with all the bullshit Nick is complaining about, but that’s where we are.
AMP shouldn’t be necessary, but it’s helping force publishers to lighten their pages and solve the very problem Nick is ranting about. I agree with him that there is a lot of bullshit, and that it’s bad for users. Google is trying to do something about it. It might not be perfect, but it’s having an impact. Does he have a better idea?
their slow crawl
As a bit of an aside: Google’s crawl definitely isn’t slow. In working with some of the biggest publishers on the web I can tell you that Google is incredibly fast with indexing. Sometimes to a fault, as it can cause real issues for publishers when they need to delete content.
He also says,
…users are increasingly taking matters into their own hands — the use of ad blockers is rising across the board, many of which also block tracking scripts and other disrespectful behaviours. Users are making that choice… They shouldn’t have to.
Correct! Just like Google shouldn’t have to use it’s clout to force publishers to do what they should be doing already, users shouldn’t have to take steps to improve the browsing experience for themselves because publishers won’t.
But what does Nick expect to happen? Ranting about it won’t change anything. You might not like it but it’s not as if publishers are doing this to deliberately degrade the user experience. There are well-justified business reasons that have been given more prominence over the user experience. What AMP has done is to give performance a real business impact, and give publishers that incentive to improve the user experience.
For now, it’s helping.
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