When I launched this blog back in 2016, it felt like the perfect sandbox to try out Google Accelerated Mobile Pages. Plus, everyone likes fast websites. Given that I was going for a minimalistic layout, I was unlikely to face any implementation issues. Indeed, working with AMP on this site was almost trivial.

However, over time, I grew quite uneasy towards AMP. The idea that Google was pushing a proprietary publishing layer that was masquerading as open source technology was just not right. There are plenty of posts pointing out the issues and controversies, such as this one or the more measured AMP letter. But mainly, in my case, AMP was just unnecessary: one doesn’t need AMP to make a barebones statically generated site fast.

Then, in April 2021, Google quietly deprecated AMP. I finally ripped it out of my blog, which is now even lighter and faster1,2 with all the AMP boilerplate gone. Oh the irony!

  1. WebPageTest Before: SpeedIndex = 0.800s / Size = 112kb ↩

  2. WebPageTest After: SpeedIndex = 0.300s / Size = 29kb ↩