I've got to admit, these days it feels like you have to do anything it takes to make a site faster but these days it's becoming a fine line of weighing up features vs speed. The more features you have the less speed your going to get. Now the genius behind modern websites is caching. Although caching is fantastic it takes that initial load which may be a little longer but then it can almost be instant afterwards. On a good connection it may be hardly noticeable. Although search engines care only about that initial load, when someone comes from them to you it's likely going to be that initial load anyway. Now the rebuild has allowed me to make the site lightning fast compared to before. I've done everything I can to speed things up from using webp for all images to database optimisations. Taking advantage of every technique possible except for one thing, AMP. So that's exactly what I have now done:
https://play.idevgames.co.uk/amp
AMP if you don't know stands for accelerated mobile pages. It's all about making your website with the bare minimum, so you can be fast for mobile devices. Now if you've checked out the link you will have noticed the AMP version is it's own site, it is skimmed down and isn't a complete version of the main site. Which is something I will be improving on as we move forward but I'm very excited to see what happens with the AMP pages to see if I have done this right and I had a very late night yesterday getting it to this point so we could go live with it.
This is an experiment, most updates I do usually are but I really have no idea if I may have done something wrong and it actually has an adverse affect on our rankings in search engines. It's a scary thing to duplicate your content as in search engine rankings that is a big no no and the AMP site is duplicate content of our best ranking pages on the main site. There is obviously ways to make sure search engines know one is an AMP site and one is your main site, I've done what I have needed to do but knowing how it could hurt our rankings if I get this wrong is still a scary thought. So I will be monitoring closely and will update if this is a feature I may drop due to complications.
I was shocked to make this work, it wasn't straight forward but all of the games including the ad supported games are available on the AMP site! As well as all the tutorials and dev logs. I haven't noticed any other platform to offer an AMP solution, certainly not offering their complete catalogue of games through AMP. This should hopefully make our games far more accessible to play regardless of connection.
The best part is that AMP should be favored by search engines on mobile searches. When ever search engines decide to serve the AMP version they will also show a little lighting bolt symbol next to the listing. As I said though, this is an experiment, it may not work out at all. I will continue making it better as I see it being used. If it's a feature that isn't getting used then I may not carry on building it.
You can switch between the AMP site in the footer of the main site and back to the main site through the footer or the menu of the AMP site. This is important as you will not get the full experience through the AMP site, the AMP site doesn't allow you to login or interact with the site (comments, reviews and liking etc) as I said the main site is fast on mobile. You won't be forced to the AMP site when you visit on mobile, the only way you will likely get there is through search engines or if you click the link in the footer.
Fingers crossed that AMP works out for us!
Thanks,
-iDev
