You’re not paying to read this blog post. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about the experience of people who visit this site. Also, I’m an inveterate experimenter so I like to stay current on web technology and trends. Recently, I’ve been revisiting the page load speed and whether I needed to continue using Google AMP. I decided that I didn’t and it has made all the difference.
Some fundamental truths about my site traffic. Some web posts get picked up by AALL, the professional law librarians’ association. But most of my traffic comes from Google web searches. Many times fewer come from Bing or StartPage or DuckDuckGo or any other site. For better or worse, this means that I will spend more time thinking about how Google feels about my web site.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Aren’t
AMP was a Google-powered concept that was always terrible. In essence, it required you to rework your content so that it could meet certain specifications that Google set. The focus on speed meant AMP pages might be preferred in Google search results. You can see your AMP content – and how it is faring – in your Google Search Console.
AMP pages are stripped of a lot of web site functionality that you would normally encounter on a WordPress site. This included JavaScripts and things like web site analytics (except, of course, Google Analytics and other compliant providers). I ended up using an AMP plugin from the AMP developers to create AMP-capable content in WordPress.
An occasional tinker and review of your site can be healthy. I found that, suddenly, tweets that linked to my site no longer showed a Twitter card. You can test your pages to see how they look. I tried a bunch of things before realizing I’d blocked TwitterBot at my Cloudflare firewall and it couldn’t grab the photos!
Problem solved. Except that, as I’ve been spending the last few weeks looking at theme issues and plugins, I wasn’t convinced this was all that it was cracked up to be. There are a lot of concerns with running your content through Google’s AMP project. It’s certainly not needed for a good mobile experience.
In fact, what I saw was that the AMP plugin was slowing down my mobile content. As you can see below, I used Google PageSpeed (a Lighthouse implementation you can use to check your site speed) and my mobile speed had a score at nearly 90.
But, if I had the AMP plugin back – and make no other changes to my site – and hit a page to put it into my cache, the score drops by about 20%.
Count me among the people who were not sold on the need for AMP content. Google has announced that they’re pulling back from some of the AMP markers they were using. I expect they always intended for web sites to focus on core fundamentals but it’s good to see that they don’t see AMP as necessarily part of that.
Tinkering Under the Hood
So, goodbye AMP. But that just removes an excuse. The next thing I did was to look at my WordPress theme. I like that you can now pull up accessibility-ready themes in the WordPress theme library. If you can make your site more accessible, it seems wrong not to do it.
I had been using a theme from that list but it was loading a lot of other stuff. Javascripts and cascading style sheets (CSS) and so, while it was a lovely theme and had some nice customizations, I reverted back to Automattic’s TwentySeventeen. They do a good job of keeping their themes updated, so I don’t have to worry about it going away. And it’s a nice light theme.
TwentySeventeen has the benefit of being a responsive theme, which eliminates the need for a mobile theme. It should auto-resize to whatever device visits your site. This eliminates the need or urge to create a stripped down mobile site that is different from your main law library site.
As I ran my pages through Google PageSpeed, I could see that the scores were going higher. But there’s always room for improvement. I started to play around with plugins that would minify and otherwise cache or compress files. I use Cloudflare as my content delivery network (CDN) so it handles some of this workload, offloading it from my web host server.
There are loads of tools, none of which I will recommend here. As they say online, your mileage may vary (YMMV). I tried discrete tools – one that would minify, one that would smush images. I tried all-in-one tools: they cache, minify, and compress images. In the end, I found one that worked for me, that I understood how to manipulate, and with which I saw my PageSpeed numbers go up.
At the top of this post, I mentioned how Google is the source of a lot of my site’s traffic. I’m curious to see how these changes to the site’s core web vitals impact traffic, and whether it will increase with higher PageSpeed numbers. Either way, I feel better about how many fewer plugins I’ve got running and hope the overall experience is better for those who make their way to my site.