What are AMP blog pages in Squarespace & should you be using them?
What are AMP Blog posts in Squarespace and should you be using them, or not?
You may have noticed the little button in Squarespace under blogging that says “enable AMP Blog Posts”, and you may be thinking, what the heck is that? (I was, too).
Go to Settings > Blogging > Scroll to the bottom:
AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”, and as you can probably tell by its name, it’s a way to display pages on mobile faster.
Squarespace is already awesome and is totally adapted for mobile use, so your blog probably already looks great on mobile.
But, it might be slow to load. You’ve probably never really checked, have you?
And as you may know, a faster loading website equals better SEO, aka a higher ranking in Google! So it's really important.
Related Post > How to Optimize Squarespace Blog Posts for SEO
AMP is a general term for all of your pages, but in this instance Squarespace only applies it to your Blog Posts. And, it only applies it to your blog posts if someone has searched for something (through a search engine like Google) and your blog post showed in their search results.
The aim of AMP is to get searchers the answers they want as fast as possible.
Pros of AMP blog posts
It all sounds great right? Well, it kinda is! There are a lot of PRO's to using AMP Blog Posts.
Faster loading blog posts
Better rank in Google
People more likely to be seeing and reading your posts..
Those are all REALLY important things when you’re trying to grow your online presence.
Cons of AMP blog posts
But I’ll just stop you there. There are a few potential cons to enabling AMP Blog Posts, so let’s talk about those.
All of your custom design and styling gets removed. Yup, all custom styling get’s wiped. Your fonts and colors are all replaced with white background, black text and a super #basic font (Muli, to be exact).
Your headings will all be in this font too, and auto sized.
Your images may display differently, or even be totally hidden, and all gallery images display as slideshows.
There’s a few other minor design things to be aware of. They aren’t ideal, but they are manageable. If you don’t have much going on in terms of styling or design, this isn’t a huge problem. The posts still look clean and very readable. But if your posts really rely on images and styling, then AMP might not be good for you.
They strip all of the styling and make everything more basic because it makes the page load extremely fast.
Why I disabled my AMP Blog posts
The next 2 points are the reasons I disabled my AMP blog posts, even though they could be beneficial.
The header of your site will look different (again, super basic and not cute, but manageable) BUT your site navigation is non existent. Yes, non-existent. There’s no menu for readers to navigate around your site, which means that they will just leave after they have read the post.
Some blocks are disabled, including the code block, where I host all of my opt in forms (that I should mention are in lots of blog posts!) and sometimes other important things that relate to the post.
Final verdict
As much as I write blog posts to help people out, I spend so much time and effort on them that if they weren’t converting readers onto my email list or into clients, there wouldn’t be much point in doing them.
My whole marketing strategy revolves around getting people to my blog, and then getting them onto either my email list or the rest of my website (generally this what every blogger wants!)
AMP blog posts gets people onto my blog, but then they can’t get any further. For my business, that’s a huge waste.
Also, there are plenty of blog posts on my site that are centered around opting-in and downloading a free resource, or the blog post relies on the code blocks or images, and without those specific blocks, the blog post would literally make no sense.
For my business it made sense to disable AMP pages. My blog posts will take a bit longer to load than those with AMP, and might get slightly bumped down by Google, but I would rather that, than no one be able to opt in on my posts or navigate around my site.
For now I will stick to manually optimizing my Squarespace blog posts for SEO to make sure they load as fast as possible.
Related Post > How to Optimize Squarespace Blog Posts for SEO
So, should YOU be using AMP blog posts in Squarespace?
You’ll have to come to your own conclusion on whether or not you should be using AMP Blog Posts in Squarespace depending on your business.
AMP Pages can be a HUGE benefit to your blog posts, but you need to make sure that the automatic settings Squarespace implements aren’t doing more harm than good to your business.
I strongly suggest you enable AMP Blog Posts, then head over to Google on your phone and find one of your blog posts and check out what your AMP layout looks like before you decide.
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