Why Did I Decide to Drop AMP from my Blog?

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was a sensation when it was launched. Everybody was trying to update to AMP for Google organic ranking. AMP had become a major weapon in the hands of SEO Experts. I am not much of a programmer but I was also equally interested in the AMP.

AMP Google trends five years

AMP Google trends five years in Canada

AMP was unorganized

For me, first of all, AMP was hard to grasp. I did a lot of online researches and I could not get the entire concept of AMP. There were a lot of study materials and even from Github side but it was really hard to organize your thoughts. During it’s peak time, AMP saw a lot of WordPress plugins being launched.

I searched for AMP plugins and I found a lot of plugins claiming that they supported AMP. Well, there were a lot of options but it was hard to differentiate between the plugins because as a normal user, I could not differentiate much between two good AMP plugins.

AMP had a lot of Afterworks

I did the online research and finally decided to go ahead with a plugin and installed AMP for my website. But that was just the beginning. After installing the AMP, there were a lot of settings to be done. For example, Google Analytics Installation, canonical tags verifications etc. Moreover, most of the implementation work was at the code level so it further became problematic for me.

AMP was restrictive

Well, everyone knows that AMP is much faster to load but it was so restrictive too. For the first one year, I was unable to put an ad in my AMP blogs because I was either too lazy or I took a lot of time to figure out how to put an ad in an AMP article.

Apart from that, I also wanted to put some extra links for engagement purpose such as inline related posts, a WordPress plugin. In that case, too, AMP was restrictive. So, though my page was loading faster, I was compromising a lot on the engagement front. On top of that, custom features such as comment, ratings etc became very hard to implement or show on an AMP article itself.

AMP Vs Regular Website Data

Though I have a lot of Data for AMP, I want to share with you the latest ones. For gaining the Google favor, I was compromising a lot on the other fronts. Here is a data comparison of AMP vs regular visitors data from my AMP and regular website visitors. I am posting both of the screenshot below:

AMP GA Data

AMP Google Analytics Data

And, here is the Non-AMP data:

Regular website GA data

Regular website Google Analytics data

There were two things which became the highest concern for me:

AMP had a very high bounce rate and as high as 90% :

This is true as evident from the picture itself. As I mentioned before that AMP was too restrictive in installing any user engagement plugins on WordPress so that bounce rate was so high, as high as around 18 times the Non-AMP page.

Pages per Session in AMP was also low:

My second concern was pages per session on the AMP website was very low. It was just as good as people read and leave my blog. There was almost no engagement. So, I decided to drop AMP from my website. Now, you must be thinking that how dropping AMP from my website affected the website engagement. Here is a screenshot of the past four days of data:

After I dropped AMP

After I dropped AMP

You can clearly see my bounce rate has gone down and pages/ session has also increased. Moreover, I am happy that now I can work on my website to increase engagement.

But is AMP that bad?

Well, AMP is not bad for the content which is made to die instantly. For example, if you are a news agency or you write short-lived content such as live coverage etc. In that case, AMP is a big deal because people are looking for stuff like you live. On the other hand, If you write content which will be relevant for quite some months, I would suggest going the legacy way that AMP.

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