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Google Is Tightening Its Grip on Your Website
A new AMP update shows how the speed-boosting technology can infiltrate every corner of the internet
Almost five years ago, Google debuted a splashy new project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that promised to speed up load times on websites accessed via phone. Fast-forward to today, and AMP has grown into something much more ambitious: Earlier this month, Google rolled out a new feature that allows AMP to use server-side rendering (SSR), boosting performance for sites that adopt the technology across their entire domain.
The overall AMP project launched with a focus on news publishers. They’re asked to create a second, lightweight version of their articles; these versions surface in Google Search and load relatively quickly on mobile devices. In return, Google raises the search-results ranking of pages that use AMP, providing an influx of free traffic. Google itself even hosts “approved” AMP pages for publishers accepted into Google News, circumventing publishers’ websites entirely unless users click through on a separate URL that appears at the top of a page. AMP adoption is also the only way to gain access to Google’s Discover feed, which features articles on the page that appears when you open a new tab in the Chrome browser…
