Guide to Understand Google AMP For WordPress

Guide to Understand Google AMP For WordPress

We all know the importance of quick loading web pages – Improved web traffic, better page rankings, and more conversion which means more revenue. Web pages taking long time to load on mobile impacts your bounce rate and one of the major reasons visitors don’t feel like visiting the website again on their devices.

You will find hundreds of tools and techniques that promise to improve the loading speed of your web page on mobile. Surely, they might be great tools encouraging and aiming to tackle the problem, but AMP project recently launched by Google is said to be one of the best ways to improve the overall performance of the mobile websites.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is intended to build superlight web pages hence; cutting back the loading time.

AMP Is More And Beyond Than Quick Loading Time

Google’s new conception AMP is all about instantly loading the web pages on your mobile device.

AMP is not just a light framework designed specifically for reducing the loading time, but offers your website a better page ranking on Google. How? Website using AMP will be automatically cached by the Google. If quick loading time and better page ranking on Google aren’t enough, AMP equipped pages provides enhanced web traffic offering better visibility on the web.

To reap in the benefits, your website will require installing AMP Plugin. However; if you are already have a WordPress website, this plugin is readily available.

Coming Over To Installing AMP- Official AMP Plugin

Download AMP plugin from WordPress plugin store. Installation of the plugin is now the easiest and hassle free task. All you have to do is search for “amp-wp” in the add new section in your Plugin WordPress admin panel, and click “install” and then activate to start using AMP on your WordPress site.

Step By Step Explained On How To Integrate AMP for WordPress

Step1: Login to the WordPress installation with your administrator account;then:

• Go to  Plugins
• Choose add new
• In the search box type, amp-wp, press enter
• Click on install tab
• Click on activate button
• Then, from the dashboard go to “settings”
• Choose permalinks
• Click on save changes button

You can customize AMP as well, using CUSTOM AMP Plugin, which will:

• Add custom code to your all posts footer and CSS
• Show the WordPress comment section
• Let’s you modify your website logo and appear accordingly on mobile devices
• Shows navigation menu
• Add featured images to the posts

It may seem easy to download and install AMP; however there are additional steps where you can use them to enhance the performance of your website and SEO – Install Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP.

Step2: Install and activate your YOAST SEO GLUE

It is no surprise, that a most WordPress users are using YOAST SEO plugin.  The next step is about installing Glue for YOAST SEO & AMP. It’s a free plugin that lets your AMP posts to work with SEO data.

The Glue Plugin comes equipped with all the enhanced features that you require to optimize the AMP setup. The plugin allows styling your AMP posts, changing colors, replacing logos, adding various elements which take your website branding to the next level.

Step3: Validating Your AMP Webpages

People often forget this important step after installing AMP. It is important to ensure that the AMP webpages are working properly.

Here is how you can make sure that the webpages are working correctly:

• Go to Chrome, open one of your AMP URL’s and add /amp#development=1 at the end of the URL.
• Right click and inspect the element
• Now click on the console button
• Look for the message conveying that your AMP post has not been authenticated or similar errors

If not than your AMP installation has been rightly done, or else contact WordPress support to remove the errors.

Measuring The Impact Of AMP Performance

The results are strikingly visible. There were tremendous improvements such as:

• Bounce rate was extremely low
• Page size reduced by 70%
• Page loading time reduced by37% to fewer than 900 milliseconds

Closing Thought

Twitter, WordPress and Google all are supporting Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which aims to make mobile web experience improved and efficient.

It is evident that installing AMP is no brainer; it not onlyimproves the visibility on the web, but offers enhanced, uncluttered and beautiful user experience.

Google AMP is raw this time; however the day is no far wherein it will be sharing amazing functionalities as an added bonus for the WordPress users.