Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucaspiller | Hacker News Reader

The whole idea of AMP seems like it's really the wrong way to solve the problem. If you remove all the third party JavaScript, fonts, large images and "like" buttons you'll have effectively the same. I guess it already messes up ads and analytics (although I'd assume Google's services still work), so what's the problem?

Kind of related: I recently switched my blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I found a minimal theme, but the amount of junk it was loading was shocking. I created a stripped down version if anyone is interested: https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-theme

View on HN

In the last 5 years there was NO WORDPRESS THEME OR PLUGIN that I didn't have to modify. I never saw any WP theme that comes with minified CSS/JS, handles sidebars correctly - sidebar created after post content, generated by PHP not JS, generates correct <a> tags, even one "modern" theme had links in sidebar with "nofollow"... "SEO-friendly" plugins that make blog generation time 3-5 times longer than before, of course JS not minified, jQuery and fonts linked with ?version=xxxx (prevents server and browser from caching it), social buttons that were downloading ~1MB of scripts and CSS (for Facebook, Twitter, G+ and Pinterest).

Whole WP ecosystem is a huge pile of crap, each plugin adds more and more mess to it. I tried Hugo and Joomla, but they were even worse (Joomla had a few security issues that developers refuse to fix, Hugo was more bloated than WP).

After trying and modifying over 20 acceptable themes I decided to start working on my own blogging platform that will be SEO-friendly and clean.

Agreed on the WP part. At the same time, when you make a WP theme from scratch, with Twig and without all the crap, your WP becomes surprisingly fast.

Hugo is a completely different thing, don't compare it to WP.

Why not compare Hugo to WP? That is what people do who want to create a new website.

They take a different angle, but the goal for both is to allow for easy maintainable websites.

I completely agree about most commercially available WP themes... but it's eminently possible (and quite easy) to roll your own very good theme, if you like the WP interface.

> Joomla had a few security issues that developers refuse to fix

Care to elaborate on this?

Is your blogging platform available as a service or do you sell the themes? I was looking for simple and clean website templates just a few days ago, but couldn't find anything.

Writing my own blogging engine that will work for my needs. Not themes. Not related to anything existing.

I think you are missing one point though - Having that AMP message with the lightning symbol next to your search result in the rich snippet as well as coming up as a result in the carousel at the top of the search results (search for some news terms and you will see what I am talking about) increases organic search traffic as well as CTR. Almost all of the media companies are doing it for that reason and actually making pages fast.

You have a good point, but how Google approaches this problem is wrong in my opinion. Why can't they just rank the page by the amount of junk it has in the first place, instead of actively looking for an AMP-optimized page?

If they were doing that, the media companies (and any other site which isn't in the deep web) would be working towards making their content minimal at the core, not branching off with an "optimized" version of the page. This would make the browsing experience better for all devices, not just mobile users.

Page speed is still a ranking factor. Optimizing pages and reducing bloat does have a positive effect in all SERPs. By my understanding though, AMP is more specific to mobile. A light page may or may not render well on mobile, but AMP pages almost always will.

I'm still undecided on if I like AMP or not, but I do see the reason for the distinction.

I also don't get it.

Anyone that wants to provide a responsive web site (as in fast to use and load) should stick to plain HTML/CSS, no need for JavaScript or "patterns".

It's like people who develop those ideas can't notice when they dug themselves into a hole, and just think all the problems can be solved by more digging.

In my experience, it's the terrible ad servers that are to blame. Run with an ad blocker turned on for a while and the whole web feels amp'd.

If you say to thousands of developers "make your site faster", you'll have very little luck. How do you make it faster? Which optimisation is appropriate to make? What about all the 'tech debt' our pages have accumulated.

AMP is a single 'framework' you can work with in making your site faster - it's just one thing to learn and reimplement your article pages from scratch.

This is of course ignoring the "ecosystem" capture Google gets as well from this, and the pressure/persuasiveness they put on media companies to implement AMP.

Just stick to PageSpeed/YSlow recommendations, don't rely on JavaScript (and AMP relies on JS).

There's validation, so you can run a checker as part of your deployment routine. Validation and routine checking is great.

I don't understand how validation requires the parts of AMP I dislike, though...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com