AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

What Is AMP?

Many websites have since dismantled AMP because the extra effort is no longer justified. With modern CSS, asynchronous JavaScript, and good Core Web Vitals, regular pages can achieve comparable load times — without AMP’s restrictions. The time you would invest in AMP maintenance brings more return when spent on general performance optimization like caching, image optimization, and lazy loading.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a framework launched by Google in 2015 that optimizes web pages for extremely fast loading on mobile devices. Through restricted use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, blazing-fast mobile pages are created that often load in under 1 second. For a long time, AMP was a major focus for Google, and AMP pages received a slight ranking advantage in mobile search. However, the situation has changed: with improved mobile page technologies and Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor, AMP has lost significance. Today, Google no longer actively promotes or favors AMP.

Technically, AMP is a kind of restricted version of HTML with a special AMP JavaScript framework. It prohibits or limits certain features (custom JavaScript often not possible, certain CSS tricks don’t work) to guarantee fast pages. AMP pages are cached by Google and delivered very quickly. This resulted in load times otherwise unachievable. However, AMP was less flexible and often came with additional effort — developers had to maintain AMP versions separately, or use an AMP plugin (e.g., for WordPress).

In practice, AMP is optional today. If you have a high-performance website with good Core Web Vitals, you don’t need AMP. With modern CSS and asynchronous JavaScript, regular pages can load just as fast. Many websites have dismantled AMP because the effort wasn’t justified. For news publishers or content sites that prioritize absolute loading speed, AMP may still make sense. But for most websites, the investment is no longer worthwhile — time is better spent on general performance optimization (caching, image optimization, Lazy Loading).