For most small business sites, no: AMP was built for news publishers and means keeping a stripped-down second copy of every page. Fast regular pages help every visitor, however they arrive.

A lightning bolt in the results

Search for news on a phone and some results carry a small grey lightning bolt and the letters AMP. Tap one and the article appears almost before your thumb leaves the glass.

Those are Accelerated Mobile Pages, a format Google has promoted heavily since last year. Plugins and search newsletters now offer them to every business with a website.

The pitch is faster pages, a badge in the results, perhaps better rankings. AMP grew out of the news business, and for a news site much of that holds.

A small business site is a different animal: a handful of pages whose job is a call or an enquiry, not a page view.

Nobody disputes that AMP pages are fast. The question is whether a second copy of every page is the best way for your business to get there.

What AMP actually is

AMP is a set of rules for building a page, plus a small library of approved components.

The fourth catches most owners off guard. Someone who taps an AMP result is usually reading Google's copy, under a Google address, and the request may never reach your own server.

Why the pages are so fast

Most of the speed comes from what AMP forbids. With no custom scripts, nothing holds up the page while code downloads and runs.

Images declare their size in advance, so the layout never jumps, and load only as the reader scrolls towards them.

Then Google adds the part no ordinary site can copy. Because it already holds the page, it can start loading it while the results are still on screen, before anyone taps.

Everything except that last step can be done on a regular page.

The cost of a second copy

Change a price, a phone number or the opening hours, and the change has to reach both versions. A plugin can generate the copy automatically, but only from what it understands.

Forms, booking widgets, chat and most tracking codes rely on scripts, so they need AMP's own components, set up separately, or they vanish from the copy.

Then there is testing. AMP pages break when a theme or plugin adds something the rules forbid, and Search Console has a report listing those errors, which somebody needs to read.

What a plugin usually produces

On a WordPress site, the usual route is a plugin that makes an AMP version of each blog post. Valid pages appear, which is not the same as useful ones.

They tend to look plain: the logo, the headline, the text and the images, with the menu, the sidebar and the footer gone. Often the phone number and the enquiry form go with them.

So the reader arrives quickly on a page with no obvious way to go further, and going further is the whole reason a business publishes a blog.

Adding the missing pieces back is possible, but it is real development work, repeated whenever the design changes.

Analytics and the address bar

AMP pages need their own analytics tag, separate from the one on the regular site. Without it, visits to the copy never appear in your reports.

With it, a visitor who reads the AMP page and then taps through to your site can be counted as two people, since the pages live at different addresses.

The Google address at the top of the screen confuses some visitors too. People who share or bookmark the page often pass on Google's address rather than yours.

A worked example

An art supply store on an older shopping street published painting tutorials on its blog: watercolour washes, mixing greys, stretching paper. They were well written and did well in search.

A search newsletter recommended AMP, and someone installed a plugin. Within weeks the tutorials carried the lightning bolt on phones.

What the plugin built was a bare copy. Each tutorial had ended with the paints and papers used, linked to the shop, and a note about the Saturday workshops. The AMP versions stopped at the last paragraph.

Readers from search finished the lesson with nowhere to go. In Analytics they appeared as a separate group that never bought anything.

The store turned the plugin off, had the AMP addresses redirected to the regular posts, and spent the effort on those instead: smaller photographs, fewer scripts and a faster hosting plan.

Every visitor now gets the full post, materials list and workshop dates included, from the store's own address.

Fast regular pages first

A regular page can be made quick with the same habits AMP enforces: images sized and compressed for phones, as few scripts as possible, and nothing that stops the text appearing.

Good hosting carries the rest: a server that answers quickly, caching so pages are not rebuilt for every visitor, and HTTP/2 where the host supports it.

Google's free tests show where a page stands. PageSpeed Insights lists what slows it down, and Test My Site shows how long it takes to load over a mobile connection.

A fast regular page helps every visitor, however they arrive. An AMP copy helps only those who tap it in Google's results.

The counter-case

AMP earns its keep on sites that live on articles: a local news site, a magazine, a recipe blog with hundreds of posts. On phones, the Top stories carousel for news searches is made almost entirely of AMP pages.

A business with a large, busy blog and a developer to maintain both versions may also find it worth testing on the articles alone.

Google has said AMP is not a ranking factor in itself, so nobody should expect better positions simply from adding it.

For most small business sites, make the regular pages fast first, and treat AMP as a later question.

Before installing a plugin

  1. Test your main pages on a phone connection.
  2. Fix the slowest pages before adding anything.
  3. Ask what the plugin removes from each copy.
  4. Keep the phone number and next step on any copy.
  5. Add a separate analytics tag to AMP pages.
  6. Check Search Console for AMP errors monthly.
  7. Redirect old AMP addresses if you turn it off.

Step two matters most. A slow regular page stays slow for everyone who does not arrive through an AMP result, and fixing it weakens the case for a copy.

Another search feature that matters less to a local business than the coverage suggests is covered in voice search arrives in Canadian living rooms.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AMP page?

A stripped-down copy of a page, built to strict rules without your own scripts, which Google can store and serve itself.

Does AMP help a page rank?

Google has said it is not a ranking factor in itself. News carousels on phones are mostly AMP pages, which matters to publishers rather than local businesses.

What does a second copy cost?

Every change has to reach both versions, forms and booking tools need separate work or disappear, analytics needs its own tag, and errors need checking in Search Console.

What do AMP plugins usually leave out?

Often the menu, the footer, the phone number and the enquiry form, leaving readers on a fast page with no obvious next step.

Why does the address show Google?

Because the visitor is reading the copy Google stores and serves itself. People who share or bookmark the page often pass on Google's address instead of yours.

When is AMP worth the work?

On sites that live on articles, such as news sites and large blogs, where most visits come from phone searches and reading is the point.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Offered AMP for your business site?

Ask us to test your main pages on a phone first. Most sites gain more from a faster regular version.

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