4 ms·

Isn't that the point, though? I'm more than happy for Google to use loading speed as a signal in their search rankings. The issue was that sites were penalized

Isn't that the point, though? I'm more than happy for Google to use loading speed as a signal in their search rankings. The issue was that sites were penalized for not using AMP even if they had equivalent or better performance. If AMP becomes a lower bound for performance and non-AMP sites slim down their pages to compete, great. If sites that don't compete on performance die off as their search ranking decreases… also great!

jsnell 6y ago
Or if everyone continues to use AMP because they are not able to match the performance, that’s also great? :) The entire AMP design was driven by the need to make same origin serving of the content possible in a safe manner. That is where the performance gains come from, not from having lighter markup. And that is still just as true now as it was five years ago.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  AMP pages are bloated compared to browsing with NoScript and ads blocked. It isn't hard to deliberately beat AMP performance with enough motivation to make it happen. There needs to be an upheaval of ad vendors to make self hosted images without JS viable.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Same origin loading also allowed Google to take over the top of your page, hijack swipe actions (to send your visitor to a competitor), and so on. Some publishers may value moving away from AMP to prevent that sort of thing in the future, despite perhaps a small cost in performance.
- acdha 6y ago
  The entire AMP design was driven by a desire to put Google in charge of publishing, heading off Facebook. Putting 1MB of render-blocking JavaScript in the critical path was never good for users - just ask the Chrome developers! - but it was a strategic play which fortunately failed both because it wasn’t as fast as claimed and most publishers didn’t want to cede control of their UX.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Why does the same origin matter? There's no substantive difference between my page being served from Google's edge network vs. from Cloudflare's or Amazon's.
koheripbal 6y ago
At first I thought 5 seconds was a long amount of time, and then I loaded my company's website and noticed it really does take 5 seconds to load. It's a self-hosted Wordpress site on the GB business internet in our office. How can I possibly compete with AMP? I notice that even Reddit.com takes about 3 seconds to load. cnn.com, 2 seconds
- snazz 6y ago
  Making WordPress fast requires some pretty serious caching effort, in my experience. Your internet connection might not be quite up to snuff for server hosting either, although you can test that with ping and checking the time to first byte. Also, Reddit isn't exactly fast—it takes six seconds to load for me. Wikipedia and HN are better examples. If you want the very lowest bound possible on latency for your internet connection, try loading https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace. That should load in milliseconds. From there, you can do a little more profiling work on your site.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    There are plugins that help automate the easy stuff and provide lots of bang for the buck. I took a day a while back and got my local gaming league’s Wordpress site down from something like 6.5 seconds to 0.99 seconds by switching hosts, removing heavy plugins, compressing images, and lots of caching. Totally doable if you are mostly static content (which should be all news sites).
    - ramses0 6y ago
      Ahhh, ye olde yslow... http://yslow.org http://yslow.org
- criddell 6y ago
  Do you know why your site is so slow?
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  1. Static rendering 2. Use a CDN and size images appropriately 3. Avoid JS as much as possible, use it only for enhancements
lern_too_spel 6y ago
> even if they had equivalent or better performance. How are you going to achieve equivalent or better performance than instant? The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely prerendered.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Why can't non-AMP pages be safely prerendered?
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    Because doing so would communicate with the publisher's web server before the user has clicked on any results, deanonymizing the user to the publishers of all the results on the page. This is the entire point of AMP, yet 90% or more of the commenters on AMP articles don't understand it, which makes the comments completely useless.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Is there a source for this claim? I’ve never read anything about AMP that claims the intent is privacy. Furthermore, I don’t see why AMP specifically is needed for what you describe — it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages.
      - lern_too_spel 6y ago
        > I’ve never read anything about AMP that claims the intent is privacy. Why else do you think it loads from Google's cache? > it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages. Nope. The publisher needs to opt in to having their content served by Google; and the ad metrics, analytics, and login need to be delayed until the user clicks on the result. That can't happen without cooperation from the page. Hence AMP. I don't even do web development, and the design of AMP is mind-numbingly obvious even to me.

jsnell 6y ago

Or if everyone continues to use AMP because they are not able to match the performance, that’s also great? :) The entire AMP design was driven by the need to make same origin serving of the content possible in a safe manner. That is where the performance gains come from, not from having lighter markup. And that is still just as true now as it was five years ago.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
AMP pages are bloated compared to browsing with NoScript and ads blocked. It isn't hard to deliberately beat AMP performance with enough motivation to make it happen. There needs to be an upheaval of ad vendors to make self hosted images without JS viable.
tyingq 6y ago
Same origin loading also allowed Google to take over the top of your page, hijack swipe actions (to send your visitor to a competitor), and so on. Some publishers may value moving away from AMP to prevent that sort of thing in the future, despite perhaps a small cost in performance.
acdha 6y ago
The entire AMP design was driven by a desire to put Google in charge of publishing, heading off Facebook. Putting 1MB of render-blocking JavaScript in the critical path was never good for users - just ask the Chrome developers! - but it was a strategic play which fortunately failed both because it wasn’t as fast as claimed and most publishers didn’t want to cede control of their UX.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
Why does the same origin matter? There's no substantive difference between my page being served from Google's edge network vs. from Cloudflare's or Amazon's.

koheripbal 6y ago

At first I thought 5 seconds was a long amount of time, and then I loaded my company's website and noticed it really does take 5 seconds to load. It's a self-hosted Wordpress site on the GB business internet in our office. How can I possibly compete with AMP? I notice that even Reddit.com takes about 3 seconds to load. cnn.com, 2 seconds

snazz 6y ago
Making WordPress fast requires some pretty serious caching effort, in my experience. Your internet connection might not be quite up to snuff for server hosting either, although you can test that with ping and checking the time to first byte. Also, Reddit isn't exactly fast—it takes six seconds to load for me. Wikipedia and HN are better examples. If you want the very lowest bound possible on latency for your internet connection, try loading https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace. That should load in milliseconds. From there, you can do a little more profiling work on your site.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  There are plugins that help automate the easy stuff and provide lots of bang for the buck. I took a day a while back and got my local gaming league’s Wordpress site down from something like 6.5 seconds to 0.99 seconds by switching hosts, removing heavy plugins, compressing images, and lots of caching. Totally doable if you are mostly static content (which should be all news sites).
  - ramses0 6y ago
    Ahhh, ye olde yslow... http://yslow.org http://yslow.org
criddell 6y ago
Do you know why your site is so slow?
vorpalhex 6y ago
1. Static rendering 2. Use a CDN and size images appropriately 3. Avoid JS as much as possible, use it only for enhancements

lern_too_spel 6y ago

> even if they had equivalent or better performance. How are you going to achieve equivalent or better performance than instant? The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely prerendered.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
Why can't non-AMP pages be safely prerendered?
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Because doing so would communicate with the publisher's web server before the user has clicked on any results, deanonymizing the user to the publishers of all the results on the page. This is the entire point of AMP, yet 90% or more of the commenters on AMP articles don't understand it, which makes the comments completely useless.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Is there a source for this claim? I’ve never read anything about AMP that claims the intent is privacy. Furthermore, I don’t see why AMP specifically is needed for what you describe — it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      > I’ve never read anything about AMP that claims the intent is privacy. Why else do you think it loads from Google's cache? > it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages. Nope. The publisher needs to opt in to having their content served by Google; and the ad metrics, analytics, and login need to be delayed until the user clicks on the result. That can't happen without cooperation from the page. Hence AMP. I don't even do web development, and the design of AMP is mind-numbingly obvious even to me.