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Setting up WordPress for AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages

Jono Alderson 6 June 2019 28 , ,

This post explains what AMP is and aims to do, who should implement and why, how to get your WordPress site ready for AMP and how to make sure Yoast SEO integrates nicely with it.

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages/AMP?

The Accelerated Mobile Pages project aims to make pages load instantly on mobile. The web is slow for lots and lots of people, in fact, the majority of the people using the internet do so over a mobile phone, often on a 2G or sometimes 3G connection. To make pages load instantly, AMP restricts what you can do in HTML pages. Fancy design is stripped out in favor of speed. AMP is very much a function over form project.

AMP pages look like a very stripped down version of normal web pages but do contain all the important content. Not all ads will work on AMP, not all analytics will work with AMP. All the “fluff” of your pages is stripped in AMP, including the read more links you might have built into your theme, etc.

The trade-off is that, by sacrificing some of that flexibility (your custom JavaScript, ads, etc.), not only do you speed up your site, but you may become eligible for new, rich results in search engines.

Which plugin(s) to use?

The official AMP plugin does an incredible job of enabling AMP on your site. It can even automatically convert your template and content.

When you enable this plugin, all the post URLs on your site will have a /amp/ version. So you can go to any post, add /amp/ to the end of the URL and you’ll see the AMP version. The plugin adds a standard meta tag in the head of your normal pages. This makes it possible for Google and others to recognize that these pages exist.

You can also configure the plugin to use ‘native mode’. This will simply replace your existing theme code and content with an amp-compatible version. You may need to make some tweaks in the plugin’s configuration options to get this working correctly on your site.

How does this work with Yoast SEO?

We automatically integrate with the official AMP plugin to output correct metadata, structured markup, and other SEO elements. Don’t worry – we take care of everything!

Read more: How site speed influences SEO »

Jono Alderson

Jono was the Head of SEO and part of the leadership team at Yoast. He's a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He's into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

Discussion (28)

  1. Hi Jono,
    Thanks for the informative article on the importance of AMP.

    However I am facing issues with some of my pages, what could be the possible fix for such errors.

    Thanks

  • Hey Jono Alderson

    Thanks for the insight.

    Somehow, I have a concern. I read a post on your website that talked about duplicate content.

    Will having AMP in a blog not imply the existence of duplicate contents?

    • Hey Emmanuel, If your AMP pages are implemented well (include a canonical tag pointing to the original article) there shouldn’t be a problem.

  • Can Yoast please reply to the earlier comments. Also, as the reviews of advised AMP plugin are very, very mixed. Almost as much 5* as 1*…what does not look good. I just installed it, switched the ‘native’ on and it created a mess. Mobile was somewhat ok, but my laptop version was a drama. Switched off and I am happy again. I trust Yoast advices normally but I have to be more carefull from now on.

  • Some time ago I also implemented pages per amp, but I didn’t notice any bigger results, even though I expected them.

  • You might like to mention the limited number of themes this works with and save your reputation. Or try to. Some actually bounce off your recommendations thinking you must know what you are talking about. You probably won’t allow this comment for obvious reasons.

  • I’ve been using the official AMP plugin and I keep getting 404 errors on most of the AMP pages which is a problem. All AMP pages seem to auto-redirect to the homepage which makes for poor UX.
    Why does this happen and is there any way to overcome this?

  • I am using this plugin and from my experience, I can say its a good and light amp page creator plugin. With it’s latest updates I am really satisfied the way it’s working. But I am finding a solution to an issue where few pages are not converted to amp

  • Although the AMP is very supported, I think it does not see the expected interest. An alternative method will soon be adopted. Because the installation is so confusing and challenging that makes people give up trying more.

  • What’s the down side to enabling AMP ?
    Would there ever be a need to “roll back” to non-amp? is it possible?

    thanks for the article.

  • So no need for the GLUE plugin?

  • how I setup amp for my news type blog

  • Seems easy enough. I’ve used AMP in the past when Google showed the lightning bolts in the SERPS. However, I’ve removed it again later due to some issues.

    Do you think it is necessary/usefull for websites in the Netherlands, where most people are actually on 4G connections these days?