Just when Facebook announced Instant Articles in early 2015, Google came up with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Which promises a faster web page on Mobile devices.
The concept is simple, get rid of all the unnecessary codes and server only the content (along with Ads in them).
We all know Google loves Fast websites, this is why making our blogs fast is number one priority. Not just because our blogs will rank better in Search Engines (Google’s one of the factors to rank websites) It will also provide a better experience to our readers.
And that is what Google’s AMP aims for. To serve a better web experience on Mobile.
Why should you bother about Enabling AMP for your blog
Normally the pages take somewhere between 15-20 seconds to load completely. But the AMP pages would love in 3-5 seconds, or maybe even faster.
This makes a huge difference in how a user will interact with your sites, they may read one more article, browser more pages, view more ads, you get the gist.
This is why you should enable AMP.
How to Enable AMP for your blog.
Again, to enable this, Google has put together a lot of documentation, just like Facebook did for Instant Articles.
But we are WordPress people, and we do this with Plugins, no getting our hands dirty with codes and stuff.
So, install this plugin from Pagefrog. Which also lets you enable Facebook Instant Article. And then go to Setup page of the plugin.
Now, to activate AMP on your blog, you need to install another plugin called AMP, it’s a plugin by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.
Clicking on Active AMP plugin will activate the plugin and you can enter the styling area of the plugin.
In the styling area, you can upload your logo, change the colours to give the AMP pages the look and feel of your blog. Â This can be previewed right away on the right-hand side of the styling page.
In the Analytics section of the plugin, you can authorise and link your Google Analytics to track the pages. And the Ads section will let you connect to your Google Adsense account and link one Ad to it.
After you are done with all these steps, you can check how AMP would perform, and to check it on your mobile, you and add AMP on every blog post of your blog.
Normal Link
yourblog.com/normal-link
AMP Link
yourblog.com/normal-link/amp
You can head over to Seach Console to see if your AMP pages are being indexed or not. You will find some problems with pages this would happen because of some missing schema.org tags. I would advise you to not bother too much about it.
But if it does bother you, then Yoast has also developed a plugin which can minimise the code errors. it is similar to the Pagefrog Plugin but would only give you AMP.
And you might not want to miss enabling Instant Articles for your blog.
