It has been some years since Google release AMP features for a mobile site in 2016. The AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page; it helps to speed up for those mobile users opening the website when searching on google. When you enable the Google AMP on your site, you will get a fancy thunder icon to hook your audience coming to your site.
Last several months, I had enabled the Google AMP on my site. My site loads significantly faster after enabling AMP and I got the fancy thunder icon too. Before then, my site was around 600KB, after enabling it my site is about 250KB. I’m lucky that AMP site doesn’t change my website layout because I’m using Astra Pro theme that allow me to use the same design even with AMP.
Lighter and Faster than AMP
Just a few days back, I restructured my site again. Now my web page is lighter, faster and more features rich than AMP site. The AMP site will turn off my DOM activity with JavaScript and now I disabled it. After disabling AMP, my site is only with a weight about 158KB. I got even faster speed with that change without AMP and I decided to quit AMP to save my visitors mobile data.
Let me show you the differences before and after AMP.
Original Website Speed
AMP Speed
According to the report, you can see that the fully loaded time from the original website is about 0.5 seconds. However, the first requests is slightly slower than AMP. I have also done a couple test with both AMP and non-AMP on my site, the first requests on my original site is almost similar than AMP like no much difference. However, the fully loaded time and weight is much difference.
AMP unnecessary features
The AMP site also enabled some features that I never want to use like image light-box, amp form and many more on all the pages. I was planning to disable it, but it seems to take some time for making the change and I gave up.
AMP maintainability
If your site is not feature rich one, the maintainability of AMP site on your site should be good. But if you plan to add features over the time on your site, it can be extra works to check the AMP site works correctly or not.
Since I got even lighter site than AMP, I finally stopped using AMP on my site to keep my site simpler. Every time I change my site layout, I need not take extra works to check the AMP is working or not.