Accelerated Mobile Pages Project or Google which is popularly known as AMP, came into the search engine world in October, 2015. This project dwells on AMP HTML which is a set of new framework built entirely out of existing web technologies and it allows websites to build light-weight webpages. In essence, AMP offers a way to serve up a stripped down or compressed version of your current website page.
The urge to achieve speed made the reasons backing AMP up focus on speed. Speed is one essential thing that makes internet users want to stay on a particular page and a Google research showed that 53% of mobile web users gets frustrated and leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less, hence, the introduction of speed by AMP.
To know a page that has adopted AMP or a page that is served through AMP on Google, you will see the AMP symbol next to it with timing. It should be noted that you must be on a mobile device to test this or you can also use the device emulator in Chrome devtools to be able to experience this. AMP works with structured data markup system that allows Google to present contents more prominently in search results.
The advantages of AMP lie within it being free or falling under an open source app in app development language. Like it was mentioned above, it can definitely improve the speed of your WordPress site and considering a time that we are that speed is a sacrosanct factor in designing a website. And AMP also a best shot for anyone looking to make contents on his or her website lead to conversions in a positive way among other advantages.
While you would love to jump to your back-end and implement AMP in your site, it is very important to note that it only supports posts, not pages. Though, there has been an announcement that Google is working on adding this feature to work for pages but presently, it only work with posts.
How do you implement it?
WordPress seems to be the most common platform used in building most websites and blog sites and luckily it is a lot easier to implement Google AMP in WordPress than it used to be before now. Bearing in mind that your code must validate with Google to show the AMP version of your site in SERPs, a plugin will turn your post into an AMP version but it is Google that would decide to show the AMP version instead.
Currently, there are two popular WordPress plugins in the repository that can help you get your Google AMP setup on your site. The first one comes free as the official AMP plugin, which is actually developed by automatic team.
To know how it works, you would see that your WordPress post gets a different URL added to it. Don’t bother to know how it would get there. It is handled by the WordPress plugin automatically. Basically ‘/amp’ or ‘/?amp’ is assigned to your current post’s URL. For example: Original Blog Post URL: https://domain.com/blog-post, while AMP Blog Post URL: https://domain.com/bolg-post/amp/
