Web Performance Journal #03

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WEB PERFORMANCE JOURNAL 03
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This is a special edition of the Web Performance
Journal focused on articles related to a single
topic Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In the last
week there has been quite a bit of buzz about
this new offering from Google and a proposed
alternative called Content Performance Policies
(CPP). Google is always experimenting with ways
to make the web faster with initiatives such
as SPDY which led to HTTP/2, QUIC an alternative
to TCP, and now AMP a subset of HTML to build
light-weight web pages. AMP was announced in
October 2015 t so what caused the sudden rise in
interest and articles this week? On February 24th
Google began to display AMP-optimized content in
the carousel for mobile searches. Do a search for
a news item and a carousel with lightening bolts
appears indicating the content is
AMP. What this means is when
searching on a topic the results presented in Top
Stories will be AMP pages - this can be seen as a
reward to those companies adopting this new
technology, while other companies are punished
for not being early adopters.
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This has brought people out on both sides of the
fence weighing the pros and cons of AMP,
analyzing what makes it faster and proposing
alternatives. Below is a summary of just a few of
those articles THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO AMP FROM
RIGOR An in-depth article covering the
technology, the background, examples, as well as
the pros and cons. This is a great place to start
to learn more about AMP and potential
consequences. The article touches lightly on the
reduction in JavaScript and potential impact to
analytics. I see this as a potentially much
larger issue. Organizations have come to rely on
third party content for items such as analytics,
advertising, social media, A/B testing, and real
user monitoring just to name a few. There are
some vendors whose technology works with AMP but
for those that dont they will have to contact
Google to report the problem and in the meantime
the publisher has to decide between losing what
may be a critical metric or improving page load
times and search rankings on mobile devices. HOW
FAST IS AMP When a new technology appears touting
impressive page load times I always like
to understand how it does what it does and see
examples. This article from Kezz Bracey provides
just that. It starts with a background on AMP but
towards the bottom it dives into just how AMP is
improving load times and 11 different comparisons
of pages with and without AMP. As with any
technology there are some with very impressive
gains while some show more modest gains and in
some AMP is a little bit slower. ALTERNATIVE TO
AMP PROPOSED Its always good to have choices.
Tim Kadlec and Yoav Weis propose a standards
based alternative to AMP called Content
Performance Policies (CPP). Tim writes about the
reasoning behind CPP here. Instead of forcing
developers to use a specific framework or set of
tools CPP will provide verification that certain
performance best practices have been applied.
These policies ensure that the user experience
that was intended by the developer or content
creator is maintained and third-party scripts
behave in ways that do not negatively alter the
intended experience. It is still early days for
AMP and CPP and I look forward to seeing how
these stories unfold.
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