I build mainly small, static sites for small businesses - such as holiday accommodation providers - who seldom need to update their sites and have no interest in doing so themselves. There is no need for a CMS such as WordPress.
One thing which concerns me about the plethora of sites built with WP is the necessity of keeping WP up-to-date. Where a CMS is clearly required, then the extra expense of paying a developer to keep the site updated is obviously acceptable, but many developers seem to use WP merely as a way of churning out sites quickly.
Google has made an effort to curb the ease and misuse of just adding extra CSS and JavaScript files by introducing benefits to the open-source AmpProject.org.
Valid Amp pages benefit by being given priority to Google mobile search results. Also and maybe more of an importance, both content and images are cached globally making all pages load in less than a second!
Results are achieved by restricting the CSS content to less than 50,000 Bytes and allowing only their own Amp JavaScript Components. This is a bold and necessary step to curb the ever increasing mobile usage and associated poor rendering performance.
Judicious use of a PHP Framework benefits the ease of extracting data/content from a MySql resource and inserting into an Amp template. This is now used by many major sites.
@John_Betong: are you suggesting that Google specifically prioritises AMP pages, or just that they benefit in the same way that any mobile-optimised site benefits?
And why the need for so many updates?
Security is another big concern with WP. Hackers do seem to target it, so they need regular updates just to stay ahead of the game. With the back-end code being available they are able to study it, to discover and exploit any security holes that may exist.
With a custom built back-end, hackers can only make blind guesses at how it works and what holes may or may not exist. That makes it much harder to hack so long as it has been coded with reasonable attention to security. Admittedly, I see it regularly in the PHP forum, there are quite a few naive developers who don’t give proper attention to security and unknowingly leave their sites wide open.
Now when you search on your mobile device, you’ll see a label that indicates a page is AMP’d. This doesn’t change Search results but will show you which sites have pages that are ready to load lightning fast.
This quote from your first link seems to answer my question, as far as general results go.
So it’s not specifically favouring AMP, but they do favour pages that are fast and ones that are “mobile friendly”, where AMP pages likely will be both of these. Is that it?
Screen dump from today’s Google Analytics and considering I have not updated any content for the past couple of months I think the increase must be due to the Amp converted pages.
Edit
Image truncated and shows Monthly Report. (This is hard work tapping on a tablet
Why not create custom wordpress themes? Though you need php but it will be easy for you and your team to learn it. Also you can work with premade themes but add some customization with code and make them to fit your clients needs at 98%. Happy clients that can make changes and money for your company.
One problem I have with Google prioritising “Mobile friendly” is I have a site that can never be mobile friendly and I am sure there are other people in the same boat. I COULD make it mobile friendly but 50% of it would be unusable.
This priority only affects mobile searches, it should not affect your ranking for people searching on desktop.
Yes, for me I think the most challenging things to make mobile friendly are wide tables with many columns, but there are various methods for dealing with them.
When I think of “Mobile friendly” I think of phones. The site I was talking about is http://www.rubbleimages.com/Distort.php and is a online tool and would be very difficult to work on this section with a small screen. You have made me think @John_Betong and I could make the rest of the site mobile friendly as that would still be usable.
Some time ago… In order to make a site completely Google Mobile Friendly I added a style=“width:88%; max-width:888px” to all large images. All AMP pages now fail validation because of the inline style Hindsight has shown a class would have been better but I started with a style and did not realize there were so many pages that needed changing!
@Rubble, i should imagine your site traffic will benefit the same as mine by not being completely AMP valid.
I also have the mobile friendly issue. Not just for search engines but because people do use pages on mobile. I’m working on a calculator that definitely needs more space than a mobile phone has to offer. Will have to try to find a way to create a simple version for mobiles.
In terms of actually implementing mobile friendly sites, bootstrap together with viewports are quite easy to use.
