Egg. On. Face. I just got done with no fewer than 3 articles and 3 YouTube videos bragging about how great my design work has been lately to get a 500% improvement on our conversion rate.

And now, I’ve lost a huge chunk of that improvement with some recent changes.

Let’s talk about Google AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated-Mobile-Pages. It’s a technology Google originally introduced to get web developers to speed up their webpages for mobile devices and mobile networks. But in many ways it seems like great technology for any device or network. Who doesn’t want fast websites?

There’s nothing that magical about it. A big part of its performance boost is simply its standards: no javascript, all inline CSS, and CSS can only measure 50KB or less. You’re going to make any page load faster with those requirements.

But Google also hosts AMP pages from their own CDN. So certain pages you bump into from organic search results (and now Google Ads) will actually display your page from Google’s own servers. Yay! That must be fast.

In organic (and recently paid) placements of your page, there’s even a nifty AMP lightning bolt icon.

And it’s been said Google may be ranking these placements higher than non-AMP pages.

Let’s get in on this!

So I spent the last couple weeks going deep into rebuilding our landing page experiences in Google AMP. I was psyched. I was already high on my previous wins, and now things should get even better. Early testing seemed positive. 100% in Google Chrome’s Lighthouse (a performance auditing tool baked into the browser). Straight As from webpagetest.org. Bring on the traffic from those visitors Google hast blessed before me!

Crickets.

Not exactly crickets, but lead flow quickly (and statistically) slowed down. Maybe just the summer vacation doldrums? No, not that, since I’m comparing our numbers with some great conversion performance that had occurred right through the US Independence holiday. This really was bad.

It’s impossible to know exactly what happened for sure because there are a bunch of variables. But let me highlight a few in case you take on the same type of experiment and want to avoid similar trouble.

Is this a scam?

One thing you’ll notice as you hit a Google AMP page is that now your pages, if accessed from a mobile/tablet device, are most likely inside the “Google AMP Viewer.”

google.com is in the URL address bar with some extra UI chrome at the top. Now, having google.com might be a trust signal for folks.

But is it all the time?

I have a feeling not in many cases. For reading the news it’s fine. But I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain. Clicking the “hamburger menu”, a standard design practice now, doesn’t help.

It goes to a support article I doubt any of my visitors are reading.

If you then figure out how to Back Button your way back to our site, now you might likely have even more chrome about being “logged in” to Google.

I really don’t like this experience as a designer or as user of a strange site I found on the internet who is trying to get me as their client.

Maybe AMP is really broken.

Testing AMP pages is also not the most straightforward thing in the world. Sometimes your pages are served from your domain, sometimes they aren’t and are from Google’s CDN. So make sure you thoroughly test from both.

One thing you can do to test your pages is use Google Chrome’s Device emulator to emulate a mobile or tablet device.