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How to Use the Official Google AMP WordPress Plugin

You wouldn’t want potential customers to bounce off your website without even getting a glimpse of your work. Slow response time and heavily-loaded content pages can lead to such situations. WordPress’s Plugin Development team has reduced the severity of this issue by giving users access to Google AMP and the WordPress AMP plugin. These plugins ensure that your site loads super-fast, whether on the mobile or the laptop. This leads to an enhanced user experience and a chance to generate greater traffic.

AMP, also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages, is an open-source resource to enable website owners to make web content more efficiently available. It is due to the lesser amounts of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code utilized by AMP, that webpages load faster. Google also caches the websites that inculcate AMP and this helps in high SERPs. The few drawbacks that Google AMP comes with are – advertising deficiency, supports only Google Analytics, crucial widgets may have to be dropped to use a limited portion of HTML, JavaScript code, etc.

The process to set up and use Google AMP WordPress Plugin

Step 1 – Install and activate the AMP plugin

Step 2 – Once activated, head to the appearance tab and choose AMP page.This lets you see how does your website look on smartphone browsers.

Step 3 – You will be given options to alter your background theme, color, and text of the webpage. For this, you need to access the design tab. There will also be an option that allows you to display a link that permits visitors to exit the reader mode.

Step 4 – You also have an option to add your site’s logo to the plugin if your theme has a feature for it.

Step 5 – Type in the URL of any post you would like to see on your website. Type /amp/ at the end of the link and this allows you the scan the AMP version of your website.

You may face a 404 error when you try accessing the AMP version. Do you think you need to consult a WordPress development companyfor this? If yes, then please clear your head and consider choosing the internet for such menial issues. All you got to do is access the settings page and then access the permalinks page. Click on save changes and you are in the clear.

Need a different website mode?

The WordPress AMP plugin offers its users access to 3 different modes to activate. To access this feature, simply click on the AMP Plugin and then click on general. The following options will be available at your disposal –

– Reader This is the default mode. Be aware that each webpage is equipped with an AMP URL and a canonical URL. This mode only allows AMP to be applied to single webpages, posts, articles, videos, etc.

Standard You will not have to go through the trouble of separating non-AMP and AMP versions as AMP becomes the default framework for the entire website.

– Transitional –This mode allows AMP to be applied all over the website and also allocates each page a canonical URL and an AMP URL.

Further Customization

The WordPress plugin development team has somehow managed to allow only a few customization options for the WordPress AMP plugin. For this reason, other plugins have been made compatible with this plugin to help give people more choices to personalize their web content. You can make use of plugins that let you add less-loaded social icons to link your digital presence across networks.

You can also customize your background, text, color, and other visual elements on your mobile webpage via the AMP plugin. Wondering what about ads? WordPress also provides high-end support for executing promotional ad campaigns.

A sure-shot way to exploit the benefits of the AMP plugin is by using the Glue for Yoast SEO addition. This optimizes your page with accurate SEO data and makes it worthy of high-ranking in search engines.

Key Features of the Google AMP WordPress AMP Plugin

CSS tree truncationThis is an automated feature that analyses your webpage for less-utilized CSS code and truncates it within the 50 KB limit provided by AMP.

– AMP story builder You will get access to a full-fledged high-end story feature that allows the creation of full-screen ads. Now customize your UI and UX for your website’s smartphone visibility for greater user experiences.

Compatibility and ValidationStruggling with automatic conversion to AMP? No worries. The plugin gives you details on all validation errors for you to identify in the invalid markup. Whether or not you want to store the markup completely depends on your personal preference.

–  High-end theme support Themes are the make-it or break-it feature most websites that have hours being spent on their visual appearance. AMP is fully compatible with the entire range of core WordPress themes and also a handful of the non-core ones.

Keep in mind to validate all your AMP pages after installing any additional plugins. WordPress has cut the hush-a-hush and enabled users to reap the benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) without being involved in the complex behind the scene technicalities. Besides, who does not want an impeccable user experience across all possible user devices?

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