About a couple years ago, Google introduced the AMP project in its bid to create faster websites. Unfortunately, not every site benefits from AMP as it’s not suitable for some. With that said, this guide was created to help you determine if you should implement AMP to your site.

Let’s begin by defining what AMP is.

What is AMP?

Accelerate Mobile Pages or AMP, built using AMP HTML, is made to speed up rendering process thereby making web page loading time faster for pages built by using the standard HTML. That makes the median load time for AMP pages 1 second. That’s 4x faster than the average web page made with the standard HTML.
 

Why AMP is important

Below is a list of benefits provided by AMP:

• AMP provides less strain on servers because Google serves these pages from its cache
• AMP has shown to provide quite a significant increase in conversion rates as well as a noticeable decrease in bounce rates
• AMP will enable your website to load faster compared to usual which, in turn, will benefit to UX
• AMP will help you hasten your site’s rank improvement because your pages will have faster loading time
• Google favours AMP content because it gets featured during mobile search
• Your relevant pages will be featured in Google’s AMP carousel

Disadvantages to AMP

• While there is, arguably, a benefit to using AMP which will improve your website rankings, there are also disadvantages to take note of:
• Developing pages with AMP may prove to add more work than usual because you would have to optimise your website for desktops and AMP
• Google Analytics will not be able to track visits to your websites unless you apply a separate tracking code to your AMP Pages. This is because your visitors will be served the cached versions of your AMP pages.
• Other designs created with the standard HTML is not possible in AMP because HTML is stripped down to maintain page loading speed.

Should you use AMP?

This largely depends on your site. You have to understand that many functions will not be available to AMP because the standard HTML will be stripped-down. Certain pages will not be built especially those with large amounts of javascript.

However, if your website is made for blogging or news articles, then AMP is a great alternative for you. It can be used for pages depending on what javascript is implemented into that particular site. These pages comprise of:

• Forms
• Category pages
• PPC landing pages
• Product pages

While there are some benefits and restrictions to take note of, remember that Google continues to further improve AMP and increase the benefits of using it while getting rid of the disadvantages to using it. So if you’re thinking of implement it on your site, weigh in on the advantages we mentioned against the amount of work it will take you to fully implement it and create adjustments to your site.

Before implementing, be sure to ask these questions first.

• Is the amount of work and adjustments to your site to implement AMP worth the benefits of having it?
• Does your site need have AMP implemented?
• Is it possible to implement it onto your existing site?

Beaver and AMP

The AMP plugin works with posts and it would strip out the BB/Themer designed code and serve the basic AMP coded pages just fine. Yoast and others are already testing AMP on pages, but do note that Beaver Builder doesn’t create AMP code. At this point in time, you cannot use BB to create AMP Pages. Please stay tuned for updates regarding this matter.