Google AMP: Another Technology to Take Over the World?
In 2016, a client sent me a link to a business article about Google Amp. Here we go again, another technology that will cure cancer and guarantee world peace. The truth is, each of these latest, greatest technologies 1) serves a specific purpose, 2) is just a new twist on previous technology, 3) comes with a bucket load of marketing gobble-dee-gook. The article sent to me was mostly about how people are now using smart phones and if your site isn’t mobile friendly, you have a problem, which is all true. Many of these articles are just tagging onto a popular word or phrase to gain clicks to sell more advertising.
The problem with articles like this is that a business owner might take it as a mandate to use a technology, instead of an option to check out how it fits into their technology and what steps and changes would need to be made to use it. Often, there are underlying problems with a company’s site that would need to be fixed before adding another technology on top of it. And, if there has been a pattern of frequent changes and additions, the next addition just compounds the problem.
Where is Google AMP in 2008?
Move forward to 2018 and do a search for Google AMP and there is a down-to-earth article that puts the technology into perspective. Oh, jeez, it’s yet another JavaScript library. Wikipedia has a list of JavaScript libraries, and as of this writing, Google AMP isn’t even listed. Actually, Google AMP seems to be a combination of technologies that work together to improve the speed of loading a website on a mobile device. “The end product of AMP drastically improves the performance of mobile websites on the internet—so much so that the load time is often appearing to be instant.”