Today I received a notification from Google AMP that the images I use in my posts are smaller than their recommended size. This came as quite a surprise to me – all this time I thought I was helping AMP’s mission to keep things lightweight for mobile browsers. It keeps my blog posts from unnecessarily using up readers’ cell phone data plans, but maybe this is just a grumpy old man talking. It is clear that Google wants me to use up more bandwidth.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, an open source initiative that was launched by Google to make web pages that are quick to download and easy to render by cell phones. Cutting the fat also meant cutting web revenue for some publishers, because heavyweight interactive ads were forbidden. Speaking for myself, I am perfectly happy to leave those annoying “Shock the Monkey” ads behind.

As a WordPress.com blog writer I don’t usually worry about AMP, because they automatically creates and serves an AMP-optimized version of my page to appropriate readers. And since I don’t run ads on my page there’s little loss on my side. As a statistics junkie, I do miss out on knowing about my AMP viewership numbers, because people who read AMP cached versions of my posts don’t interact with WordPress.com servers and don’t show on my statistics. But that’s a minor detail. And in theory, having an AMP alternate is supposed to help my Google search rankings so I get more desktop visitors than I would otherwise. This might matter to people whose income depends on their web content. I have the privilege that I’m just writing this blog for fun.

Anyway, back to the warning about my content. While I leave AMP optimization up to WordPress.com, I do control the images I upload. And apparently I’ve been scaling them down too far for Google.

I’m curious why they chose 1200 pixel width, that seems awfully large for a supposedly small lightweight experience. Most Chromebook screens are only around 1300 pixels wide, a 1200 pixel wide image is almost full screen! Even normal desktop web browsers visiting this site retrieves only a 700 pixel wide version of my images. Because of that fact, I had been uploading images 1024 pixels wide and thought I had plenty of headroom. Now that I know Google’s not happy with 1024, I’ll increase to 1200 pixels wide going forward.