The AMP symbol tells users that the site loads quickly. Google doesn't indicate the same thing about non-AMP sites that still load quickly. Guess which site the user will tend to choose. I am not sure AMP will be optional for sites that want to get chosen.
What you're suggesting is not a matter of me making my website faster than AMP in isolation. You're talking about every non-AMP site in the world banding together and collectively bringing up the average speed of an internet webpage to be faster than an AMP page.
Without that, there's nothing to make my one faster-than-AMP site stand out from the rest of the slow non-AMP web in Google search results.
Totally disagree. I didn't know what AMP is and I keep seeing it. I avoided it thinking it was yet-another Google adware property like DoubleClick, another cleverly named way to trick users.
For the vast majority of users on 4G connections, AMP loads aren't that much faster (When you download 8MB/sec on 4G, a 2MB page is just not a deal breaker) and I doubt that very many users at all in America are noticing that dramatic of difference on their devices, enough to subconsciously learn to like it.
Take all those connections and introduce a 1-5% packet loss rate, and suddenly there's a very good chance that any given "page load" (really dozens of requests) takes perceptually "forever". That is what AMP helps with.
Google tests and re-tests the crap out of things like this.
But when you're rewarded by a quick page load for the first time, and the second time, you'll start clicking it more because you know what reward to expect.
This makes a significant difference in traffic.
Also, my websites are essentially all dynamic content. People come for the comments, like on HN. I gues I'll have to use some cache-busting javascript if Google caches my content?
"we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings"
Just like the promised benefits of HTTPS. I have yet to hear about a case where search traffic increased after switching to HTTPS.
The problem isn't that Google "steals" traffic in the sense it's going against the wishes of the site publisher, but that the author didn't know what he was buying in to and thus was surprised.
There is the other thing which is the AMP Cache is probably more local and faster than your site. Small sites usually dont use CDNs so there it is.
https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq
> Can I stop content from being cached?
> No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible.
I think it's easier to use a CDN like CDN77 than to convert the average site to AMP.
This is such a trivial optimisation it makes you wonder about the level of competency of the average web development company.
Our competency on projects where we are being paid a full domestic consulting rate is quite high, thank you.
Now, if you're asking us to compete with cut-rate bids from some online freelancer exchange, we will reduce the level of service and QA to match our competitors in that space....
Eg. you may have Nordstrom's service for a Nordstrom's price. Wal-mart service for a Wal-mart price. But don't expect Nordstrom's service for a Wal-mart price; that usually isn't going to fly....
You can insert ImageMagick somewhere into your production pipeline. It's excellent software.
[1] Like MVG (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/magick-vector-graphics.php) and MSL (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/conjure.php)
For JPEGs: use chroma downsampling, and don't go above 80% quality unless absolutely necessary. If your software has a preview function, use it. Encode with MozJPEG if you can.
For PNGs: compress the hell out of them. There's several tools that can compress them further.
You still need to resize your images appropriately but ImageOptim will do the rest. It passes images through a series of image optimization libs.
I have a few other minor problems about how Wikipedia's mobile page handles without Javascript enabled, but one big thing is that there's a minimum zoom level set. I can zoom in, but I can't zoom out, which means if I want more text per line, there's nothing to be done. This again feeds in to the lack of reflow in mobile browsers. I have no idea why this feature went away, but it completely ruined the mobile web for me.
How can I make this happen on mobile FireFox?
Yes and no. Google ranks AMP-ed pages differently, as well as showing that lightning bolt icon. It is definitely not a level playing field.
It's more like people don't feel like following a weight loss program until a trusted professional outlines an easy to follow and precise method.
Now Google comes along and says: You can't do it, let us do it. Which is perfectly reasonable from their point of view. And when I surf google news on my slow mobile connection I'm always happy when I see that a link is going to an amp target - because then I know it'll be loaded fast.
But you don't need Google to do that. If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing. Limit the amount of stuff you load into your page, reduce the third party content that you include to a sane number of hosts (something like 3 instead of 50), optimize your javascript, deploy HTTP/2. None of that is magic and you can have your fast webpage without any AMP.