What Are AMP Blog Posts & Why I Disabled Mine
When I first launched my website, I went through all of the settings in the backend of the site to hopefully optimise my content in the best way possible. one setting I came across was “Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)” - my first question was, what are AMP blog posts and do I need them?
What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
As you can probably tell by the name, AMP is a way of minimising your blog post so that your website can load faster on a mobile device. It also allows your posts to appear on Google as “Top Stories”, featuring your thumbnail image and headline - perfect. This sounded great to me and I instantly enabled this setting, didn’t think much about it after that.
AMP Blog Post Pros
Before I discuss why I disabled AMP, I wanted to cover the pros, because there are a good few!
Sitespeed
Obviously we all know that site speed is super important. Enabling AMP on your site allows you to accelerate the speed at which you pages load on mobile, and since many of us use mobiles, this is a huge factor.
Visibility
We all google on our phone, and enabling AMP content on your website means you may show up higher in mobile based searches. Google prioritises AMP posts, often featuring them in Top Stories with a thumbnail and heading - making it easier for the browser to find what they need.
User Experience
Nobody likes a slow loading site, especially on mobile. The benefit of a faster loading site is not only functionally great, but it’s great in terms of how your visitors are interacting with your content.
Why I Disabled AMP Blog Posts
Now, here’s the catch. These aren’t biggies to everyone, but for me, they are really important factors. Here are some of the reasons I disabled AMP blog posts.
No Branding
Enabling AMP blog posts will clear your site of any branding, fonts, colours, backgrounds, headings and more. This means, you will see a minimal version of your blog post in a standardised format - oh, and did I mention the whole post is written in Muli? This is huge for me, as a branding and website designer,
Thumbnail Placement
Normally, your post thumbnails aren’t displayed in a post. They are used when sharing on social media or maybe they pull through on your blog landing page. With AMP enabled, your thumbnails will be displayed at the top of the post.
No Menu
I love that blog posts can be helpful to readers but also great as a means of increasing traffic to your site. AMP doesn’t show your menu, meaning readers can read the post and leave your site without exploring your services, contact page and so on. This was a big con for me as I want my visitors to be able to explore my site, read other posts, reach out to work with me.
Disabled Blocks
I use code blocks, button blocks and more throughout my posts to add various features such as sign up forms, CTA’s, no follow links and more. AMP doesn’t show all of the Squarespace blocks which makes it harder for my audience to convert.
Conclusion
All in all, whether you enable AMP or not will depend on your marketing approach and what’s important to your business. Yes, there are pros but for me, they don’t outweigh the cons - branding, menus and more are key to my marketing efforts and so I am not willing to loose them for site speed and higher google search ranking (most of my traffic comes from Pinterest so this isn’t a biggie for me anyway).
I manually optimise my posts for SEO and so I don’t feel too bad about this decision, I just can’t sacrifice the aspects of my site that ultimately send business my way!
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