Setting up WordPress for AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages

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 »