Some time ago, a client asked us about Google Accelerated Mobile Pages support. At the time, it was new and we didn’t know much about AMP besides the fact it made pages load faster on mobile devices. It sounded neat.
A couple weeks ago, we decided to dive in and integrate AMP with our website. But the deeper we got, the more we realised exactly how it works and why it’s terrible for the web.
We think it will be better to highlight why it’s such a bad idea and why we ultimately chose not to add AMP to our website. I’m sure we’ll be linking AMP enquiries to this post in the future.
TL;DR – AMP is parading around as an open-source initiative that makes the web faster for mobile users, but it’s really just Google‘s way of locking users into their own ecosystem.
AMP Specifications
First off, the AMP spec is way too strict:
- You must include this exact style block on every page
- The first child element in your
tag must be a meta tag specifying UTF-8 encoding - The second child element must be the AMP script
- You must include a viewport tag with a specific value
- You must put all your custom styles on the page using a