Challenge
Why We Tried AMP on Our Blog Armed with the knowledge that users want faster loading pages, we set goals to increase organic views of our content as well as decrease page load speed and improve the UX of our blog. But we also knew that Google was prioritizing AMP, so we also set out to improve our search rankings with faster page speed.
Solution
Limitations of AMP AMP doesn’t support custom JavaScript on pages – likely because JavaScript has a reputation for poor performance. This creates some interesting programming and design challenges; certain plugins and, therefore, the functionality of those elements utilizing JavaScript on the site, may not work anymore, but there is even the possibility that design elements could be incompatible with Google’s custom AMP-HTML language. That means you might lose some of the opportunity to stay “on brand” when using AMP. We chose to AMP the blog for a few reasons. To simplify the creation of our original AMP template, the implementation did not include some of the design components from our main website – but since then, our general site style has been updated to be more “AMP ready” and we’ve been able to match the AMP templates nearly 1:1 with our primary templates. That’s something to look out for in your own website’s implementation of AMP. Depending on the complexity of the design and existing layout, a matching AMP template may not be possible without a larger redesign of your website. Even very common elements like drop-down menus and accordion content can require overly complicated hacks and bad practice workarounds to accomplish. The limitation of custom JavaScript also made custom tracking 3rd-party tracking scripts an impossibility. We presently partner with HubSpot to provide better data on our website visitors and follow their path into our CRM. But at the time of launch, HubSpot’s tracking code was not on AMP’s whitelist of supported 3rd-party tracking scripts. Even after working directly with HubSpot to try to address the problem, we were unable to bring this functionality to our AMP-compatible pages. You too may run into similar issues when trying to implement 3rd-party marketing scripts, which could range from simple visitor tracking to chat popup support to contact formfills. Going AMP How We Approached Implementing AMP on Our Site AMP is meant for delivering information to a user, so we chose to implement AMP only on our blog, not the rest of the site. Clients or other users navigating our website get the full Oneupweb brand experience. Of course, we aim to have our pages load in three seconds or less so every user has a good experience. We tracked analytics over six months and compared the data to the previous six months as well as year-over-year. Even though we only applied AMP to our blog, we analyzed data from non-blog traffic to show it wasn’t just our website performing better. We also looked only at organic traffic, excluding social media efforts and other sharing options that might have elevated numbers. We pulled data from January 2017, and then implemented the AMP in January 2018.
Results
The following statistics were pulled year-over-year comparing August – December 2017 vs. August – December 2018. We pulled year over year versus period over period data to account for the seasonality of the business. Other Variables to Consider During this time, other site improvements were also being made and should be considered: Production of new content that could be deemed as better and could attract more visitors. New content published during the AMP study (between January 1, 2018 and June 28, 2018) 19 new blogs New content published in 2017 57 blogs Optimized old content on site Fixing site errors (broken links, images, etc.) Site audits were run on December 27, 2017 and May 10, 2018. These errors were fixed during the time period we started running AMP on the blog: Total site errors down 74 percent from 20,221 to 5,354 Page errors down 4 percent from 160 to 153 Pages missing a meta description down 90 percent from 4,571 to 474 Meta description too long or too short down 83 percent from 4,621 to 785 Broken links down 10 percent from 478 to 432 Rel=’nofollow” down 99 percent from 928 to 4 Image issues (broken, alt text, title text) down 90 percent from 3,930 to 372
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