Twitter has recently announced in its developer portal that the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology is being gradually discontinued in the social network.
The AMP was created in 2016 by Google to make pages load faster on mobile devices, and it incentivized its adoption by rewarding pages that supported the technology with higher ranks in search results. Initially, its support was also mandatory if news portals wanted their pages in the Google News “Top Stories” section.
Since last year, many AMP big players have started to decrease their relevance and usage. Even the Washington Post, highlighted as one of the main AMP Success Stories, does not support the technology anymore. Another long-time partner, LinkedIn, also started to decrease AMP results relevance.
The reason is that Google also started retiring AMP, and in August this year, it started to roll out the Core Web Vitals (CWV) impacts to the search engine live for all users globally.
It means that, instead of ranking up websites that had the AMP version of its pages, the ones that had a great performance in CWV metrics would have their pages better-ranked instead.
Is AMP Fading Away?
The short answer is yes, it is.
Since last year, when Google started to consider non-AMP pages for their “Top Stories” news section, pages that supported the technology began to notice the decrease of referrals to their AMP pages.
Another situation that made users unable to identify and prioritize AMP results was the removal of the lightning bolt icon indicator.
Another point that AMP is mostly gone? With good results that the changes CWV metrics brought to websites’ performance in general, Google announced that it might bring the lightning bolt icon back to pages that had great results in their PageSpeed Insights tool, regardless of AMP support.
Why Does It Matter to Digital Marketers?
You don’t have to do anything regarding the AMP discontinuity. However, it does mean you can develop your website to perform better in terms of SEO and from experience and performance standpoints.
When Google started to rank websites that didn’t use AMP, the company sent a subliminal message to marketers and developers: Focus on user experience, have great design and content, and fast loading. That’s enough for you to rank. AMP is not necessary anymore!
This is great because it allows you to improve your SEO rank and enhance the user experience while maintaining your website’s features!
One of the main complaints about the AMP technology is that it showed an abbreviated version of the website, making it hard for owners to offer users the same experience on their original page and the AMP version of it.
Another important change is that you won’t have to maintain two versions of the same page. This is especially relevant for small businesses, which can have a hard time (timely and financially speaking) maintaining two different pages.
What Do You Have To Do Now?
You can start retiring your support for AMP pages gradually to test the effects this can cause on your SEO performance.
Here at Rock Content, we have done this since the beginning of this year. Of course, we continue to do optimizations. Our traffic continues to grow vastly, and we have today seven million monthly users in our global blogs. And we don’t use AMP anymore!
It’s also important to study and start implementing changes to enhance your score on CWV metrics. We have a complete guide to help you understand and implement it.
