To AMP or not to AMP

[thetiger2015]

Basically, I have an ecommerce site that Google is flagging up as quite slow under the page speed insights tool. It's scoring a poor 34/100 for Mobile pages and only marginally better for desktop.

The site has over 5,000 products and hundreds of supporting pages (articles/news). I've tried to optimise the site as best I can but someone has suggested using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?

It seems like a bit of a headache to implement on a Magento website that has so many products and pages though?

Also, the category pages are constantly evolving e.g. we add new products almost every day and some products are discontinued and eventually removed from the website. That would mean rebuilding the AMP categories every few days, to keep them up to date?

 

[fisicx]

AMP is for news type sites not ecommerce.

Your low page score is usually a result of images and scripts. These are normally because of themes and extensions. But fixing Magento isn't the easiest.

 

[Ninja Commerce]

As mentioned above, AMP isn't for eCommerce but rather News sites, nothing to see here.
The only 'quick fix' that I can suggest is an extension. It depends upon how much 'fiddling' you have done to your store as to whether it will work for you.

But as is always the case - chuck it on your staging site first and see whether any issues crop up before you push it to the live version. There are a few extensions out there such as this.

 

[Simon.P]

Out of curiosity do you have dedicated hosting?

 

[WhizzPeople]

AMP is for news type sites not ecommerce.

Eventually, Google will roll-out AMP for e-commerce websites. https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2016/08/22/getting-started-with-amp-for-e-commerce/

 

[makeusvisible]

If Google Page Insights is giving you a low score, it is extremely unlikely moving to a new host will change that score in any way, even if you move to the fastest dedicated server possible.

Rather than server speed, the page speed report is focused on the structure of the site, and the way it has been coded. for example, do you have render blocking java script on the page.

As others have mentioned, debugging a Magento site to speed optimise it is a complex and time consuming task. To give you a very vague benchmark, we recently took a Magento site from a score of 12 (yes 12), to 83... and it took around 6 hours of coding and debugging.

AMP is not the solution..... yes it will improve your mobile score, but it would kill your conversion rate and is not meant for your scenario.

I would suggest you get your coders to go through your insight report point by point, and debug/fix on a dev server. As your site is magento you are never going to score 100%, but as you have right recognised there is much improvement to be had from 34%.

 

[altonroot]

Magento 1 pretty slow as we all know and that is its main weakness. You have to use powerful server which uses CDN and many other things to speed up the things. Magento 2 is much better in speed. If you have budget on hand you can think about upgrade little early. Eventually every one will migrate may be in 2018.

And AMP for normal pages will come but not any timeline at the moment. Only news pages as benefits in Google search for now. As Google rolls out for normal pages, more guidelines and plugins will come in market. At the moment not much.

 

[thetiger2015]

Hmm. The site is already hosted on dedicated servers with all the load balancing and back up stuff you get when you pay a few hundred pounds per month.

It's also been optimised using some of the page cache plugins you can get for Magento.

On any phone or laptop I've used, the site loads in less than a second, 2 at the most but for some reason, Google still sees the pages as incredibly slow loading. I guess that's the background scripts running after the page content has been displayed.

 

[Tony Smith]

Speaking from experience (having migrated onto AMP in phases), using a plugin can provide varying results and should be tested on minor sections (not key pages) before implementing site-wide. Good luck!

 

[squirrelsaver]

Do you use cloudflare? This has a lot of great features for speeding up websites straight off the bat. Caching amongst other things.

AMP I found works really well on a wordpress site for articles. I would probably try other methods for your site currently. Look at your host, database optimisation, images etc.

As others have said though it will eventually translate to other types of sites, but it's still fairly early to resort to that in terms of cost of implementation for you.

 

[fisicx]

AMP I found works really well on a wordpress site for articles.

Why do you even want to do this? All it's doing is blocking access to the article. A pointless exercise.

 

[andygambles]

There is a lot of reasons to not use AMP and it is facing a backlash from lots of site owners who have discovered problems with it.

https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/
https://www.alexkras.com/i-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my-site/
https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-amp/
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/google-amp-not-good-thing/#gs.wnABqNo

 

[fisicx]

and the UX is awful. On your phone do a search for news and you get loads of AMP results. Click on them and you have to click again to read the whole article. And it's not even clear what yu need to click on.

The sooner it dies (like the stupid cookie law) the better.

 

[StevePoster]

Its better to understand first what's AMP really works because it will determine if your website really needs it. Using AMP will cut down your HTML in order to load fast.

 

[Steve Alphabet]

As fisicx said, images are usually a major culprit. Compress all images to below 100kb using something like http://optimizilla.com/

 

[Mark_Taylor_]

I've trailed AMP for a magento store and the results were mixed at best, the page loaded really quickly from the google AMP cache, but the pages were so stripped down that i think it confused people, also when they went to purchase they jumped back onto the full website as checkout pages can't be AMPed.

At the bottom of google page speed insights page, it allows you to download a zip file containing ll the optimised images, css and js for the page being tested. Simply unzip this and replace the images on your site with these new versions... dead simple quick win.

I will happily spend a little time looking through this for you and offer some suggestions if you want (for free of course) it's an area of expertise of mine. Just let me know.

 

[fisicx]

At the bottom of google page speed insights page, it allows you to download a zip file containing ll the optimised images, css and js for the page being tested. Simply unzip this and replace the images on your site with these new versions... dead simple quick win.

Makes almost no difference at all. It might shave a few nanoseconds off the page load speed but that's about it. It won't improve your page load speed score.

 

[Mark_Taylor_]

serving optimised images, with the correct dimensions, compression and all meta data removed absolutely does make a difference to page speed score. I've used these techniques myself on probably a hundred different websites and always with an improved page speed score.

If the images are already compressed and correctly sized, then running them through smushit or similar processes will reduce the file size by a little (a few kb normally) so in real terms may not offer much visible difference in load speed.

However Google does not time the page load (except for Time to First Byte), it runs a set of rules and algorithms and gives a score based on this checklist. It's about marginal gains as they say in cycling and chipping away at as many as possible can give big increases overall.