How Fast Is AMP Really?
Tim Kadlec (via Hacker News):
As Ferdy pointed out, when you click through to an AMP article from Google Search, it loads instantly—AMP’s little lightning bolt icon seems more than appropriate. But what you don’t see is that Google gets that instantaneous loading by actively preloading AMP documents in the background.
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On the other hand, it does appear that AMP documents tend to be faster than their counterparts. AMP’s promise of improved distribution cuts a lot of red tape. Suddenly publishers who have a hard time saying no to third-party scripts for their canonical pages are more willing (or at least, made to) reduce them dramatically for their AMP counterparts.
AMP’s biggest advantage isn’t the library—you can beat that on your own. It isn’t the AMP cache—you can get many of those optimizations through a good build script, and all of them through a decent CDN provider. That’s not to say there aren’t some really smart things happening in the AMP JS library or the cache—there are. It’s just not what makes the biggest difference from a performance perspective.
AMP’s biggest advantage is the restrictions it draws on how much stuff you can cram into a single page.
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