Is AMP faster than my Astra WordPress optimize theme for giving users the fastest mobile experience?
Google AMP Pagespeed Test vs Astra Optimized Wordpress Theme
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Google AMP is a project formerly named "Accelerated Mobile Pages" to speed up websites and I did a head to head test on my website on five of the top pages, Jerrybanfield.com and Jerrybanfield.com/amp to test out if amp is faster than my own Astra WordPress theme.
I just got my Astra theme so d that my desktop score is consistently between 90 and a hundred on most pages.
Now, you will be surprised at the results here for this, if you're like me.
These are the pages we're testing Jerrybayfield.com/amp versus Jerrybanfield.com. Now note that amp is optimized for a mobile device while this is both for mobile and desktop, this is a default homepage I've got with my Astra WordPress theme.
Here's one of the top pages on my website: "Time travel is real."
I show about how to appreciate the now basically crammed in Eckhart Tolle's lessons into a little blog post on time travel and people googling "Is time travel real" are coming to my website and finding this post.
Now, you'll notice in the amp version of this post, it has the YouTube video fully embedded, whereas in my optimized WordPress with Astra, I've used WP YouTube Lyte where this is not actually an embedded YouTube video, even though it looks like it.
This is just a thumbnail with a button, and when you click on it, it pulls the video.
Therefore, I've made some changes to optimize my website. Here's one of the most popular posts on my website for Facebook ads account disabled. As you can see, the amp version again, has an embedded YouTube video, it's also got these share buttons down here, whereas the desktop version doesn't.
Another popular post, same thing, YouTube video here, another popular post, same thing with the YouTube video.
Now note, this homepage does not have any YouTube videos on it.
Let's take a look at the speed test results.
Jerrybanfield.com/amp is 71 on the page speed score, which is better than it was on my old theme, and in fact amp is one of the fastest ways.
If you've got a really slow theme, you can just put amp for WP on your website and speed it up a whole bunch.
However, 71 on mobile is still not very good, in my opinion, for Jerrybanfield.com/amp and an 80 on desktop, which means there's a lot of room for improvement.
How do you think JerryBanfield.com itself did without amp?
Let's take a look.
Let's go, 93 without amp on my home page on mobile.
Very fast load on desktop with 99 even though my webpage is just a listing of blog posts, it should run in theory with all the pages.
My home page was running really slow before, before I spent 20 or 30 hours on Astra getting everything optimized.
I am shocked that I've now got my website so optimized that the non-amp URL is faster and this is the same result on every page.
The main thing that's slowing amp for WP, the plugin I'm using on WordPress, the main thing that's slowing amp down is it's having to pull this embed from YouTube.
This embed from YouTube is so big that it's increasing the page size on it, which is taking a lot longer to load.
That's the same thing on desktop even though the size isn't as much of an issue, 86 on desktop. If you look at this one on mobile, it's 93 on mobile and 100 maximum on desktop and that's because with this little YouTube Lyte plugin I've got, it doesn't load the video and loading an embedded YouTube videos on the beginning of a page slows down the page a lot.
Again, same results. Here's a page that does not have any embedded video on it, which is a good case study and for some reason the amp URL was redirected, I couldn't use this one, but if you want to get rid of your amp pages, you need to do redirects within.
In Kinsta I do them in my host and I will be getting off my amp pages right after that.
This is ridiculous. 42 on the amp on this one, and again it's all because of having to load this embedded YouTube video.
When you go to this same version on my website, it looks the same to the user but it loads at a 95 and I'm shocked that I'm actually slowing my website down with amp.
This one is 51 on amp and the non-amp version is 92 on mobile, 99 on desktop. Therefore it is much better if you can simply get a lightweight WordPress theme like Astra and optimize the theme itself because the page load times are so fast.
Thus, I'm going in and disabling amp for WP on my website right now, I'm redirecting all my old amp URLs over based on this speed data.
I actually just put amp back on my website and I actually just took my search results down by slowing my website down.
I hope this little speed test has been helpful for you if you are interested to know or you're thinking about having amp on your website or not.
If you've got a really slow theme, amp can be a short-term solution to get your search traffic up, which it helped me initially to do that.
However, my theme is so fast now, I don't need amp.
I still like the idea of amp, but amp is the clear loser in this race.
You can continue learning with us in the full class today “My WordPress Course for a Fast Ecommerce Website with Kinsta, Astra, WooCommerce, and LearnDash” at https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/wordpress/
I love you.
You’re awesome.
I appreciate the chance to serve you today and I will see you again soon.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard at www.michelgerardonline.com.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/amp-pagespeed-test/