Browsing the web on the desktop is getting hefty; imagine on the mobile devices. So, Google and Twitter designed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)which is an open-source coding standard that aims for faster loading of the sites on mobile devices. Fundamentally, it’s an HTML page designed to be super lightweight and critically designed for really fast loading.
Why is it fast ?
If the AMP standard is strictly followed, it provides faster speed in browsing. It uses Google AMP Cache which is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves page performance automatically. The cache also comes with a built-in validation system which confirms that the page is guaranteed to work, and that it doesn’t depend on external resources. The validation system runs a series of assertions confirming the page’s markup meets the AMP HTML specification.
AMP v/s Non AMP pages
AMP urges to use the strict specifications for hosting an AMP page. AMP believes like “It’s my way or highwayâ€.
- AMP forces you to use a streamlined version of CSS but one can add custom amp style-sheet.
- JavaScript is not allowed at all i.e just the static page.
- You are forced to use an off-the-shelf Javascript library that AMP provides you with – which forces your images to lazy load.
Use cases?
I don’t think that one would want to make services or product landing pages into AMP. It would be stripped down of its first-impressions. That would defeat the purpose of the original design, but instead some part of the pages under the same project to be served under AMP.
The main notion to use AMP in the webpage is if you prefer speed and readability over anything else. So, there might be a use case in CMS. You want AMP pages to be something that all pages or as many pages as possible have an AMP version of those pages. So there’s already — for the most popular CMSs, things like WordPress already have plugins available — that one can go away, can download that plugin, and basically for a lot of the pages it will do a lot of the work  in creating those AMP pages. Also, obviously, if one is building own CMS, then one should prioritize trying to get similar functionality into that CMS.
One can also use AMP analytics for tracking user engagement using amp-analytics and Google Analytics such as:
- Tracking page views
- Tracking page clicks
- Tracking scrolling
- Tracking social interactions.
Why was it halted for now?
Finding a use case that fits the AMP is a tough ask, if there are not much use of static pages creation. AMP is not a ranking factor, John Mueller an Analyst from Google, confirmed this statement. So, in case of SEO, AMP directly provides little to the equation, but however AMP does affect clicks, impressions, and user experience,  which in turn affects SEO. But, despite of the performance, lack of dynamic content loading, too much restrictions and little direct effect in page rank has led us to currently halt the utilization of AMP until something exciting pops up.