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It's a shame there's so much controversy around AMP. It's not a simple task to set up a performant website. Ignoring the search result preference and caching, b

It's a shame there's so much controversy around AMP. It's not a simple task to set up a performant website. Ignoring the search result preference and caching, but AMP is an interesting attempt to tame website development so your pages load quickly. People keep commenting you can make a website fast without AMP, but this is difficult when you're working in big teams and with management that don't put priority on performance.

jordanlev 9y ago
If Google just flat-out said they would penalize sites in rankings for poor performance, then management would very much prioritize it. Same thing happened with responsive design a year or two ago and now https this year -- my clients never cared about doing either of these when presented with the choice (since it would cost more money), but the second they received and email from Google about it affecting their search rankings (or showing the site as "insecure" in chrome, as per the recent push for https), they were asking us to do this for them.
- seanwilson 9y ago
  I'm curious about this as well. How easy would it be to game performance measurements? For example, when you can lazily load content it becomes much more difficult to measure. The advantage of the AMP restrictions for them is that they know for sure certain performance metrics will be met but this is much more difficult for arbitrary webpages.
  - jordanlev 9y ago
    That's a good point. I think google is able to measure this to some extent, but yeah I guess anything could be gamed.
  - vanadium 9y ago
    Run a WebPageTest on an AMP link and tell me it fits within the 1 second promise AMP keeps making. Without prefetch, on a lot of the pages I've cross-checked manually, it doesn't. So there's already gaming from the other side of the aisle in a sense.
sliverstorm 9y ago
People keep commenting you can make a website fast without AMP You can! But so few people actually do. Kind of like abstinence-only birth control.
lucb1e 9y ago
> It's not a simple task to set up a performant website. On the contrary, I feel like it takes more planning to build something that's slow than building something fast. Only once you've made elaborate designs and hired people who are used to including the six megabytes of javascript libraries they've accumulated over the years, it gets tricky. In the past I've been happily surprised when I wanted to look something up on my own blog over some slow, public WiFi, and it loads super fast compared to everything else. (I'm not the only one, of course, but most small websites don't have a huge team behind it and are not very popular.) It's just because it's a personal thing which I've kept simple and built from scratch.

jordanlev 9y ago

If Google just flat-out said they would penalize sites in rankings for poor performance, then management would very much prioritize it. Same thing happened with responsive design a year or two ago and now https this year -- my clients never cared about doing either of these when presented with the choice (since it would cost more money), but the second they received and email from Google about it affecting their search rankings (or showing the site as "insecure" in chrome, as per the recent push for https), they were asking us to do this for them.

seanwilson 9y ago
I'm curious about this as well. How easy would it be to game performance measurements? For example, when you can lazily load content it becomes much more difficult to measure. The advantage of the AMP restrictions for them is that they know for sure certain performance metrics will be met but this is much more difficult for arbitrary webpages.
- jordanlev 9y ago
  That's a good point. I think google is able to measure this to some extent, but yeah I guess anything could be gamed.
- vanadium 9y ago
  Run a WebPageTest on an AMP link and tell me it fits within the 1 second promise AMP keeps making. Without prefetch, on a lot of the pages I've cross-checked manually, it doesn't. So there's already gaming from the other side of the aisle in a sense.

sliverstorm 9y ago

People keep commenting you can make a website fast without AMP You can! But so few people actually do. Kind of like abstinence-only birth control.

lucb1e 9y ago

> It's not a simple task to set up a performant website. On the contrary, I feel like it takes more planning to build something that's slow than building something fast. Only once you've made elaborate designs and hired people who are used to including the six megabytes of javascript libraries they've accumulated over the years, it gets tricky. In the past I've been happily surprised when I wanted to look something up on my own blog over some slow, public WiFi, and it loads super fast compared to everything else. (I'm not the only one, of course, but most small websites don't have a huge team behind it and are not very popular.) It's just because it's a personal thing which I've kept simple and built from scratch.