What is the status of Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages?

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, initially launched by Google, aimed to speed up webpage loading on mobile devices. Here’s the latest on its status as of 2023:

1. Relevance and Adoption: AMP remains relevant, with some sources emphasizing its continuous adoption. It’s suggested that AMP’s relevance persists due to its promise of faster mobile page loads, which could offer better user experiences and potentially higher search rankings​1​​2​​3​. However, the discussions around AMP have dwindled over the years, and removing the AMP symbol from Google’s search results in 2021 was seen as a noteworthy change​⁴​.
2. Functionality: AMP simplifies HTML code to accelerate page loading on mobile devices. This is achieved by stripping down pages to essential content, removing features like videos, ads, and animations, and caching a version on Google servers for quick delivery​⁴​​⁵​.
3. Benefits and Limitations: AMP has several benefits, including increased page speed, lower bounce rates, less mobile data usage, increased SERP visibility, and features like “Swipe to Visit” and inclusion in the “Top Stories” carousel. However, the latter is no longer exclusive to AMP pages as of May 2020. Conversely, AMP has been criticized for lowering ad revenue and making it harder to spot “fake news” articles due to its restrictions on page content​⁴​​⁵​.
4. Technical Aspects: Implementing AMP requires adhering to specific guidelines like using a streamlined version of CSS, utilizing AMP’s JavaScript library, and ensuring proper validation of AMP sites. AMP pages are hosted on Google’s servers, which pre-render and cache the content for faster delivery to users​⁴​​⁵​.
5. Competing Technologies: AMP was developed to respond to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News, aiming to provide a fast content delivery solution for mobile web users, not bound to any app, making mobile web content easily accessible and quickly consumable​⁵​.

In conclusion, while AMP continues to offer benefits, especially regarding page speed and mobile user experience, its enthusiasm seems to have decreased over the years, with some experts suggesting that it might not be as crucial for web developers and publishers as it once was. Nonetheless, AMP remains a topic of discussion and consideration within the web development community in 2023.