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Google AMP

Rebecca Coleman

It seems like the interwebz have a serious need for speed right now.

Last week, I wrote a post about Facebook’s Instant Articles, a new way to publish your blog posts on Facebook. The idea is, the articles load up instantly because they are stripped of any fancy stuff like CSS that can slow down your load times.

Google has a similar feature, called Google AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. With now over half the world accessing the web via mobile instead of desktop, it’s important that we make things more mobile-friendly, and AMP aims to do just that. Additionally, people’s attention spans are short. If your content doesn’t load quickly, they are likely to click away and go somewhere else.

There are advantages to publishing your posts as accelerated mobile pages. You will get more traffic from mobile, and rank higher in mobile searches. However, because all extraneous content is stripped in AMP, there’s no way to do advertising or pop-ups, if your business depends on those. Viewers will see a very clean, simple page with only your text and images, no headers, no menus, just the post, clean and simple.

Here’s what my last post looked like when I published it.

Click on the image to see the actual blog post

And here’s what it looks like as a Google AMP post.

Click on the image to see the actual post

For someone like me, who doesn’t really do advertising on her site, there are more benefits than not.

For WordPress, there is a plugin that will automatically create an AMP version of each blog post you write. Google will then sense whether or not the seeker is on a mobile device, and deliver them the appropriate version of your post.

How to install Google AMP on your WordPress site:

  1. Login to your dashboard and head to Plugins–>add new. Search for “AMP.” I am using the one by Auttomatic. Install and activate the plugin. That’s it!
  2. To check if your plugin is working, go to Settings–>Permalinks, and then scroll down and it the “save” button at the bottom of the page. Now go to any blog post on your site and add /amp to the end of the post. It should now show up as a Google AMP post.
  3. There are a few ways to customize your Google AMP settings. Yoast has an additional plugin that allows some customization, and the Page Frog Plugin allows for customization of both Instant Articles and AMP.

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