I’m well versed in SEO and site performance but I wonder if my conscious decision not to implement SSL or AMP is going to actually cost me some traffic. So far I haven’t noticed any traffic loss but Google has repeatedly mentioned that they are increasing the importance of both in their web rankings.
Why no HTTPS?
Because it’s not free, or even cheap in some cases, and my site does not sell any product, have any login or solicit any visitor interaction at all. It’s a static html based site that simply has nothing to secure in terms of visitor interaction.
Why no AMP?
Because, as I mentioned above, my site is static html that actually slows down when I add more code, there is no database or other typical slowdowns to deal with and I’ve tested both with and without. Without comes out ahead. Also, I no longer jump on Google only things, like authorship, as I once did.
Why no AMP?
Because, as I mentioned above, my site is static html that actually slows down when I add more code, there is no database or other typical slowdowns to deal with and I’ve tested both with and without. Without comes out ahead. Also, I no longer jump on Google only things, like authorship, as I once did.
Should I be worried?
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AMP is for optimizing the user’s mobile web experience, not to make pages render faster on the server. Without AMP, your news content will likely be less likely to be shown in News search results.
This is probably not the right forum to discuss the SEO side of things, ranking etc because it would all be random speculation. We can discuss the why’s and hows of HTTPS and AMP though.
For HTTPS, it doesn’t really matter how you code your site (static HTML, database, etc). The issue sunjohn pointed out is that there are an increasing number of cases where the content you serve from your server isn’t what actually arrives at the user’s broweser. ISPs in particular are notorious for injecting javascript that inserts their own ads or other content into your HTML. It’s up to you if that is a concern or not but that is just one of the many reasons to consider it.
As far as the performance cost, that is going to depend a LOT on your setup and hosting environment. Configured optimally, HTTPS will add one round trip to each HTTPS connection (usually the only overall cost is on the first connection): https://istlsfastyet.com/
If you are serving more than just a single HTML file (i.e. if there are any images, js, css) then that round trip (and more) can usually be made up by enabling HTTP/2 which is also only available on HTTPS. HTTP/2 will eliminate the connection set-up time for all of the subsequent resources on the page.
On the AMP side of things, beyond the placement in the news carousel and better user experience in search (flipping between articles, etc) you also get a pretty big performance boost because your content is 100% hosted on and served from the AMP provider’s CDN/edge cache (in the case you are talking about, Google but lots of other companies are also looking at serving AMP pages within their platforms).