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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

There are no AMP pages that weigh less than 1MB.

However, since Google aggressively preloads most of that data while you search, it gives you the illusion of AMP pages being lightweight.

Non-AMP pages? Oh, Google will happily penalize them even if they perform better.

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I did a mobile Google search for "Trump" to bring up the top news section on Google, and was able to find sites (generally non TV-news sites which aren't doing video with every story) that weighed less than 1MB:

USA Today (582KB, first item in the top news section) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/3431466002

Vox (486KB) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy...

The New Yorker (565KB) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/current/...

Unless those articles are packed with raster infographics that's pretty bloated just to send a couple of pages worth of text.

I meam, why exactly are 500kb of cruft is being served to present 5kb worth of data?

The EU experience of USA today weighs on at 248KB and that's without AMP

So even if the AMP Pages are small, they're still much larger than the page ought to be

Sure. But USA Today EU is not really a fair example. You can‘t really expect publishers to serve absolutely no ads and tracking at all. Unless you want them to die. There are initiatives like Apple News+ and Subscribe with Google but they are not mainstream yet. And individual subscriber options for news portals are way to cumbersome (and perceived as too expensive) for users.

I agree, but the solution is for ad companies to improve so you don't need tons of JavaScript to display an advert. Why can't they be done server side, rather than handled by client side JavaScript? A lot of web apps now employ SSR, so having the adverts use SSR should considerably speed them up

I ran all links below with Google Chrome Tools enabled, no cache. Switched to mobile view to make sure that AMP pages are loaded. Cache disabled to see the actual weight of the page.

---

USA Today AMP page: 45 requests. 755 KB transferred. 1.6 MB resource

USA Today EU Experience: 10 requests. 209 KB transferred. 251 KB resources.

AMP version is significantly worse for essentially the same content (AMP version and EU version are nearly identical)

---

VOX AMP: 37 requests. 575 KB transferred. 1.4 MB resources.

VOX AMP not served from Google [1]: 22 requests. 403 KB transferred. 935 KB resources.

VOX non-AMP [2]: 19 requests. 627 KB transferred. 1.3 MB resources

So, AMP is worse when served from Google. And on par with non-AMP version

---

The New Yorker AMP: 129 requests (and they keep coming). 796 KB transferred. 1.9 MB resources

The New Yorker AMP not served from Google [3]: 70 requests (and they keep coming). 745 KB transferred. 1.5 MB resources

The New Yorker non-AMP page[4]: 245 requests (and they keep coming). 8.2 MB transferred. 13 MB resources.

So. The only example where the AMP page is significantly better than the non-AMP pages.

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But the page weight is already accounted for in Google Search algorithms, and The New Yorker page should have been deprioritised from search. It's not, it's in the carousel, it will redirect to the 13MB version on desktop. Meanwhile, as Vox, and USA Today and many many many others show, the regular properly made website will not differ significantly from AMP versions.

[1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/4/...

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/10/18305175/t...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/william-barr-goes-ful...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/william-barr-goes-ful...

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