Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project is a front-end framework that allows Google to recognize that a site is free from obnoxious UX elements like pop-ups, full-screen ads, or excessive loads of CSS and JavaScript.
In exchange for abiding by the AMP guidelines, Google has been rewarding sites in three primary ways:
- Preferred placement in the search result carousel.
- A little gray lightning bolt logo near the search result, assuring users that it is, in fact, an AMP page.
- A zero-latency page load, as it is pre-loaded and served from Google’s CDN—also known as Signed Exchange
Google's removal of AMP incentives
Although the AMP project itself is not going away, the motivation for anyone to use it is. Google has announced plans to de-incentive AMP by removing the three incentives mentioned above.
LexBlog's removal of AMP
LexBlog is eliminating AMP support from our platform.
Because our standard front-end templates mostly resemble our AMP front-end templates, this change will not impact site appearance much. And because our sites are already benefiting from our unique integration between WP Engine and CloudFlare, they will still be quite fast when loaded from search results. We will also dedicate a research block to supporting Signed Exchange without using AMP.
Next Steps
There is no need to contact LexBlog or make any changes yourself in support of this change. All of your AMP pages will automatically redirect to their non-AMP version.
Introducing Core Web Vitals
Google will now be using Core Web Vitals (CWV) as a measure of SEO.
The CWV is a set of measurements developed by Google to determine how user-friendly a site is for human users. They stand in opposition to more traditional metrics like page load size, which might look statistically significant to a machine, but might not impact users as much.
LexBlog has been researching and improving CWV scores since late 2020. As a result, all blogs on our core platform are already in a position to benefit from the AMP/CWV shift in SEO priority.
Removing AMP support improves our CWV scores because we don’t have to load Google’s AMP JavaScript file.
A convenient way to review CWV on any website is through Google’s Lighthouse tool.