AMP Blogger Templates - Advantages Vs. Disadvantages

Posted: 18 May 2017 12:00 PM PDT

amp-blogger-template-advantages-disadvantages

Do you want to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Blogger? Or you would like to know the advantages and serious disadvantages of creating an AMP Blogger Template? If your answer is yes, then you have landed on the right page. Before making your site ready for AMP, please read why major companies have not yet adopted AMP.

IMPORTANT: All AMP Blogger Templates that you find online are not AMP at all!

What are Mobile Accelerated Pages (AMP)?

AMP HTML is an open source project by Google to provide mobile-optimized content that can load instantly everywhere. In short AMP makes your site load faster like a speeding bullet on smart phones but by sacrificing major portion of your advertisement revenue and third-party JavaScript.

Google started this project as competition to Apple News App and Facebook Instant articles.

FB instant articles is platform dependent, meaning your website get traffic from Facebook users alone and you can't provide the same bullet speed to your website visitors coming from search engines.

Same is the disadvantage with Apple News App where you can't publish your own content.

But AMP is platform independent, providing publishers to optimize content for mobile and make it accessible for all devices through a web browser. It has some advantages but several cons, which are worth noting before you opt-for AMP.

Following are some of AMP restrictions

Allow only asynchronous scripts
Size all resources statically
Don't let extension mechanisms block rendering
Keep all third-party JavaScript out of the critical path
All CSS must be inline and size-bound less than 50,000 bytes
Font triggering must be efficient
Minimize style recalculations
Prioritize resource loading

Can you Implement AMP in Blogger?

Yes you can but partially!

Blogger team has officially not implemented AMP in Blogger blogs. Blogger XHTML templates currently do not support AMP HTML tags.

Designers who are implementing AMP in blogspot are forcibly removing important XML tags from the template which is not recommended and will seriously effect your blog in the long run.

This forcible action of making a blogger template AMP, is same as if you place a Mercedes engine inside a low budget car and expect it to drive fast. Yes the car could be forced to run the Mercedes engine but with no support to its best features. Thus wasting your entire effort!

You can surely create an AMP Blogger Template for your blogspot blog but by sacrificing several important features of Blogger and look of the template. AMP in short will convert your blog into an ugly Flat CSS/HTML design without allowing third-party fancy jQuery and JS effects.

amp-icon-in-search-results

AMP uses just some custom HTML tags that needs to be inserted inside your blogger theme to make it AMP validated. Once validated, Google will add the AMP icon next to your blogspot blog in search results. You can expect better traffic but by sacrificing ad revenue and blog look.

Difference Between AMP and Responsive Templates

AMP = Responsive Template + Custom HTML Tags

Before converting your template to AMP, it must be first made mobile responsive by adding CSS media queries and several breakpoints.

AMP is basically a much simplified/optimized version of your responsive template with addition of some custom HTML tags.

Just like your have a diet Pepsi Cola, you have a Diet HTML page today named as AMP.

Are AMP Templates Faster Than Responsive Templates?

Theoretically AMP Page must load faster than a normal responsive page but if a page is not coded properly than the same AMP page could load slower compared to a mobile responsive page.

Responsive Templates displays both the sidebar, footer and run all third-party JavaScript. Responsive blogger theme is simply a mobile compatible version of your desktop theme with almost the same features, widgets, plugins and other web elements.

In AMP Templates, you can't use a stylesheet greater than 50,000 bytes, you also can not use third-party widgets such as add-to-cart buttons or social media sharing buttons of your choice. AMP will convert your professional looking desktop look into a flat design with just the Logo, Menu, Post Body and footer.

When you sacrifice so much for load time, then of course, such a light weight AMP page will perform and load much faster compared to a responsive page.

Pros and Cons of AMP Blogger Templates

Following are important advantages and disadvantages of using AMP Blogger Templates:

Advantages	Disadvantages
1. AMP templates load Faster AMP pages load much faster compared to a responsive blogger template.	1. AMP Badly Effects Your Ad Revenue. You won't make as much money as you were making with a full mobile website.
2. AMP templates Improves Ranking AMP improved SERPs ranking and organic traffic The Washington Post by 23%	2. You Can Not Use JavaScript at all! All those interactive widgets and plugins that make your blog look cool are not allowed. You have to use an off-the-shelf JavaScript library that Google provides you with. You can however use the AMP iframe but it will be loaded slowly with a condition that the iframe must be at least 600px or 75% of the first viewport away from the top.
3. Your Blog pageviews would increase. Blog Pages will load instantly thus providing a better user experience as far as speed is concerned.	3. You Can't use Blogger Comment Form. You can however use either Facebook/Disqus/Google+ comment plugins instead but since the official comment form by Blogger uses iframe which can't be edited so it's not allowed.
4. AMP templates are best suited for news blogs.	5. You Can't Use Blogger Template Editor You can't customize your template in Template Editor. `<b:skin>` tags and `<b:template-skin>` tags are removed or comment-out.
	6. All Images Posted Must Be Edited You will need to edit <img> tags of all images inside your blog posts one by one with amp supported tag of `<amp-img>`. Which of course is time consuming in blogger if you have over 100 posts.
	7. You can't use Widgets in Sidebar AMP does not allow third-party JavaScript. If you wish to use a widget that runs on JavaScript then you can't use it. Some widgets available in layout section that uses text+image are supported only after their code is edited inside template section to make it compatible.
	8. You Can't Sell items on your Blog The Add-to-Cart button is not allowed
	9. All Videos and Audios embedded inside Posts Must Be Edited You will need to edit all your YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo videos, all your soundcloud audio clips through different embed tags as mentioned on this page.
	10. All iframe tags used inside Posts must be edited You can display an iframe on your page only through the `amp-iframe` element.
	11. Email Subscription Form Can't Be Used `onclick`, `action`, `onsubmit`, `onfocus`, `onblur` attributes are not allowed in AMP without which you can't possible create a subscription form for your blog readers.
	AMP supports limited Ad Networks. BuySellAds does not currently support AMP. You will suffer greatly in BSA revenue if you go for AMP. At present only AdSense ads are properly supported.
	XMLNS attributes must be removed `xmlns` attribute are added inside the opening `<html>` tag if your blog that gives important information to web browser about the web technology being used by your blog. AMP asks you to remove all such attributes and add only the `amp="amp"` attribute. Your blog will not be validated by http://w3.org if the xmlns attribute which specifies the xml namespace for a document is missing.

Do We Recommend AMP?

Honestly speaking AMP is not the best choice of all publishers. Even corporate news blogs like Washington Post and CNN who were using AMP previously and openly supported last year, seems reluctant to support it in 2017. You can clearly seem AMP tags removed by these two sites and they no more support it.

AMP does speed up your site but on the expense of your Ad revenue and less freedom on customization. Without freedom of UI customization, no technology can survive.

An article by Wall Street Journal expressed serious concerns of publishers who did not find AMP very helpful in improving their ad revenue. Some even complained that an AMP page view currently generates around half as much revenue as a page view on their full mobile responsive websites.

Some publishers aren't generating as much ad revenue as they had hoped - The Wall Street Journal

AMP is not a good option for Blogger platform at present because there is no official support present for it currently. Forcibly converting a templates code to AMP will only make it a headache for people not quite well versed with code tweaking.

I will recommend that you wait and let Blogger team provide a CMS support to implement AMP in Blogger themes. Just like Blogger provided support for https when we raised questions on how Blogger blogs will solve absolute image urls issue in https.

MBT is currently mobile responsive and we won't opt for AMP unless a proper support is given officially by Blogger.

For Wordpress users, there is a plugin called AMP For Wordpress that you can use to convert your WP site into an AMP site, but as I mentioned, yes you will get a fast load time but at the expense of ad revenue and less freedom.

Please share your precious thoughts on this trending topic and let us know whether you like AMP or you would expect more improvement on it. If you are already using an AMP supported blogger theme, please share your experience with us. Peace buddies! =)