AMP Setup for WordPress
Recently, mobile platform speed competition is very fierce. Earlier this year, Facebook launched instant Articles, which provides a platform optimized for its mobile apps, and Apple showed Apple News. And in the second half of last year, as Google launches a mobile optimization platform called Accelerated Mobile Page, competition in the mobile market seems to accelerate.
What is Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page?
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page project was developed for a better mobile user experience. Simply Accelerated Mobile Page provides very fast site loading speed and improved environment for your mobile site. Google argues that online media that create and distribute static content, such as online news and blogs, can produce about 15% to 85% more performance than traditional mobile content by creating and publishing content that conforms to this AMP standard. To this end, Accelerated Mobile Page constrains the technology used to create Web content.
The Accelerated Mobile Page removes dynamic elements such as advertisements, JavaScript, and CSS animations from a regular HTML page. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you can’t insert ads or JavaScript, but you have to follow the rules set by Google Accelerated Mobile Page.
How to setup?
In order to setup your WordPress for Accelerated Mobile Page, you need to download the AMP plugin. It’s very simple! Just download the plugin and activate it then your Accelerated Mobile Page will be automatically created in WordPress site. Simply put, you will have two different websites for desktop and mobile. We will explain it using pictures to help your understanding.
01. Log in your WordPress site. Place your mouse cursor on Plugins and click on Add New
02. Type amp in the search field and Install the plugin and activate it. That’s all! Your WordPress site for Accelerated mobile page is ready to go.
How to Check if Accelerated Mobile Page has applied to WordPress site
If you installed Accelerated Mobile Page on your wordpress site, we need to check if it’s successfully installed. Visit any of your posts and type “amp” in the end of your site address. For example “https://www.pntbrother.com/apply-amp-wordpress-site/amp”
What do you see? It will look simple and feel faster because Accelerated Mobile Page minimizes the use of Java Scrips, CSS Animation, and Advertisements.
Regular Web Page VS AMP Page
Here is one more important thing to check out. We are going to check if your Accelerated Mobile Page is validated by Google bot. Please visit AMP Validate Site to validate your Accelerated Mobile Page. In the search field, type the address that you would like to test. Here is a picture for an example.
If your site is validated as Accelerated Mobile Page by Google Bot, you will get passed screen. If you failed to validate, you would get invalid AMP Page screen in red colour. In that case you, Google Bot will tell you what to fix for valid page.
After installing AMP plugin on the WordPress site, your Accelerated mobile page won’t be indexed right away. It takes few days for Google Bot to index Accelerated Mobile Page. When the google bot successfully indexed your site as AMP, it will be showing like the picture below. All the webpages with lightning icon means Accelerated Mobile Page. Which means, that page is pretty well optimized for mobile user experience. You can only check Accelerated Mobile Pages in a mobile device because Accelerated Mobile Page doesn’t show up in desktops or Laptops or some tablets.
The Site Loading Speed Test
If you are running a WordPress site, I think you might have been worried about the speed of the site loading. However, the accelerated mobile page can solve this problem. We had a loading speed test on regular web page and the amp site to prove how fast the AMP page is. Please visit Website Speed Test if you like to test your site.
As you can see, the amp page is showing improved results in all parts. It means that you should have accelerated mobile page for your mobile users experiences. Just as Google has always considered the site speed, it’s going to affect to your site ranking as well.
Regular Web Page VS AMP Page