The Importance of Mobile Performance - XF Designers Take Heed

[skicomau]

Google track a users actions on the page. They can see your entry point, your exit, time on page, how you move around the page, and the list goes on and on

google analytics

the greatest trojan software in the history of computing... ever.

 

[skicomau]

Google would not be able to be manipulated if full AI potential was present for contextual meaning, period. Google can still be manipulated, and it isn't hard to do, and every SEO is doing it.

who's manipulating who exactly?

is it not the case that us lowly publishers are the ones being manipulated to produce better content and better meta signals for Googles AI machine ?

havent met a serious publisher who was not dancing to Googles tune & tempo for over 15 years.

 

[tonmo]

So if responsive is indeed detected, and xenforo is indeed responsive, how important is AMP in our context? Somewhat rhetorical because I don't expect a fully quantified answer. At the end of the day, I have no issues supporting this, besides the fact that there seems no easy or practical way to do this for xenforo.... from what I can tell, it's prohibitively hard - would need native xenforo support or a worthwhile add-on.

 

[Mr Lucky]

So if responsive is indeed detected, and xenforo is indeed responsive, how important is AMP in our context? Somewhat rhetorical because I don't expect a fully quantified answer. At the end of the day, I have no issues supporting this, besides the fact that there seems no easy or practical way to do this for xenforo.... from what I can tell, it's prohibitively hard - would need native xenforo support or a worthwhile add-on.

It is already available via the bd-cache addon, however there seem to be a few issues, and support is hard to come by.

I beieve at least responsive is crucial, because when someone does a serach on a mobile, Google does (or if not will soon) either only return repsonsive pages or at leas return them before anything else.

The thing about AMP is that those pages tend to dominate the mobile search results, and even if you are not a news site per se, if you have competitors for similar search terms, then I would have thought having AMP would pip them to the post.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

how important is AMP in our context? Somewhat rhetorical because I don't expect a fully quantified answer.

See if this satisfies you.

Responsive and AMP are not the same thing.

Responsive is about showing a page in the best aspect for a mobile device, whilst correctly rendered at all times, regardless the device size or orientation. Responsive can be fast or slow.

AMP is about showing the essential content AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, without waiting for normal page nonsense to download (Myriad of Ad types, CSS, JS, non-essential Images, bloated code, et cetera).

Example.

I Googled "sell my home" and ran the below through GTMetrix. A responsive real estate website with poor desktop loading time, let alone a mobile will only be much worse.



That is to demonstrate that responsive has nothing to do with performance. An AMP page is usually around 1 - 2 seconds fully loaded. Why? Because you're not allowed to use anything but AMP structure... so if it isn't important for the user, it isn't delivered to them.

On many of the sites I optimise, I get the responsive theme to the same level as an AMP page for performance, however, I still include AMP because measuring such things on a desktop is lovely, but when you put the same load onto a mobile, suddenly the AMP page out performs the normal version on a mobile connection and mobile processor, because a mobile device is not as powerful as a desktop, nor is 4G in real world use as fast as most home connections (as opposed to its theoretical benchmarks of 2 - 50Mbps).

You will also see a difference in page size and requests between the two. If I look at a blog page of my own optimisation:

• the responsive version is 348kb with 16 requests. (https://njmandco.com.au/myob-vs-xero-choose-carefully/927/)
• the AMP version is 182kb with 9 requests. (https://njmandco.com.au/myob-vs-xero-choose-carefully/927/amp)

Now that's a highly optimised server and site already, server in Melbourne, tested from Sydney, loads on average around 1.3s for either version on desktop. The AMP version though loads faster on a mobile than its desktop version.

Google will factor the lesser page size and lesser requests when they see both, as they're equipment is far superior for evaluating what they want. Test the same versions using their new mobile tester, the responsive takes longer to render on their page than the AMP version.

https://search.google.com/search-co...link&utm_campaign=mft-upgrade-banner&hl=en-US

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Added: a good read about site performance using statistic analysis to define losses incurred as a result of poor performing pages, roughly where Google is headed (a best guess), and whilst you may say such things apply to sales sites, they actually apply to all sites. A sale for most forums is whether a user registers or not, whether they come back to read more, or not.

https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/11/16/how-speed-affects-your-sites-performance-infographic/?ce_b4=*|EMAIL_B64|*&utm_source=Search+Engine+Watch&utm_campaign=43c2d05964-18_11_2016_NL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e118661359-43c2d05964-18086361

 

[tonmo]

got it - thank you

 

[skicomau]

AMP is Google delivering www as a consistent 'App' like experience on mobile devices to their audience.

Google is competing with FB for audience breadth & engagement. Which is why AMP pages get greater weighting in SERP. It's a better, more consistent UX that competes with the UX of the FB feed - this helps keep people on Google's platform*.

*www is effectively Google's platform. We publishers are all just content suppliers to the platform and Google effectively dictates the terms on how we shall supply it and in what format.

 

[tonmo]

So I guess one approach would be:
1) create an AMP directory on my server
2) starting with my most trafficked Pages (articles), follow the tutorial here: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create
3) per instructions, add "link ref=" to point to the XF page version, for cases where users are not visiting via mobile.
4) i guess, create Link nodes for my Articles page which goes to the AMP pages instead of the XF page.
5) permanent 301 redirects from my popular articles to the AMP version?

Do I have that right? Seems a bit messy...

 

[tonmo]

wait... permanent redirect in 5) from original article to AMP page, but then AMP's link rel= in 3) goes back to original article, repeat... that doesn't work!

back to the drawing board...

 

[Fred.]

If you want AMP on XF 1.5 you can use the last version of BD Cache.
https://xfrocks.com/resources/bd-cache.8/