Should you use AMP with Shopify?

Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sounds great right?

That’s what a customer was asking about recently.

Should I worry about AMP right now? In other words, is it already necessary to get my shop’s pages AMP ready?

If you’re not familiar with AMP, it’s a Google technology that uses different, more-minimal HTML pages for a website in order to improve performance for mobile users.

Google’s been pushing it hard and a lot of websites have been jumping on the bandwagon.

But not me.

From what I’ve seen, AMP with Shopify causes more problems than it’s worth.

Shopify doesn’t support AMP by default so you have to code it by hand or use an 3rd party app for it. The few 3rd party apps I’ve seen have been very low quality and one actually destroyed a store’s entire SEO setup due to a single tpyo in the app.

See the thing with AMP is that you’re basically building an entirely new website with it. So on Shopify you either need to code it by hand with all the extra technology AMP entails or you’re stuck using a 3rd party app to create a generic AMP site for you.

And those generic AMP sites from an app will always lack the features, performance, and support of your real Shopify store.

If Shopify themselves supported AMP and they made it easy to use, then I might recommend it. Until then, it’s probably not worthwhile.

If you’re looking for an SEO improvement, an easier choice be to audit your structured data and update it.

Most Shopify stores don’t have enough structured data to quality for Google’s Rich Results so they lose out on highly visible SEO enhancements.

JSON-LD for SEO provides high-quality data that will help your store qualify for Rich Results. Often times faster than the industry averages.

P.S. There’s also the technology hype cycle that developers tend to forget about. Google has pushed multiple of these “rewrite your website in our new cool technology” initiatives over the years. And they all ended up dying off or becoming abandoned in favor of regular old HTML. I wouldn’t be surprised if AMP falls victim to this too. HTML still works (and in every search engine too) and it’ll work for years to come.