Healthier Web Pages
I have nothing against AMP or similar projects. Anything that makes a website load faster is progress to me. The point is: why do we need something like AMP? Because pages are slow to load. Perfect. Why web pages are slow to load? My theory is the following.
Web pages are slow to load because they are fat. They are fat because they include crappy and unneeded plugins and third party libraries.
By adopting this perspective, AMP and similar tools look like a pill that helps you to digest, potentially enabling the following attitude:
“I can eat whatever I want and as much as I want, because if I’ll feel fat I’ll take the AMP pill”.
You can take the pill or … you can eat healthier. Out of metaphor, you can use AMP or you can have slimmer web pages by getting rid of unneeded components.
Now:
- are you sure you need jQuery?
- are you sure you need bootstrap?
- are you sure you need 5 different libraries to track analytics?
- are you sure you need comments on your blog?
- are you sure you need WordPress?
- and the 27 plugins you have installed?
For each of the above questions, if the answer is “yes”, ask yourself why, five times. Keep the components that have five valid reasons to be included in your webpages and get rid of the rest. I can guarantee you that your pages will be slimmer.