Our collective audience’s appetite for content, consumed on mobile devices, has grown exponentially.
Large publishers and search engines seeing this shift have built an open source project to offer pages optimized for a faster mobile experience that can be displayed by search engines (subject to their algorithm).
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) might sound like something from the future but, it’s something that has become increasingly important to bloggers seeking a greater audience. AMP specifies a specific subset of HTML be included in this mobile only format.
Those in the search engine optimization field, with a little more time than me, have tracked Google’s inclusion of AMP pages within search results. At first, AMP pages were only displayed in Google’s Newsfeed but, recently AMP pages made the “hop” to organic results.
What does this mean for you and why is it important? If you have some content getting good readership/ranking it’s a pretty good bet that implementing AMP will expose that content to mobile only users. It might even give you a slight edge over a competitor. Of course, all of this is at the mercy of a search engine’s algorithm. But, of you are doing everything you can for your readers to provide an awesome experience it seems likely that you’ll be “rewarded” in some way by the search engines.
If I Already Have a Mobile Friendly Site Should I Bother with AMP?
In a word… yes.
With an AMP page only the inline page content is served giving the reader a quick loading, easy to read page. While it’s true you miss out on ways to convert the visitor you do gain greater visibility for your content. To combat this loss, consider adding a stronger call to action at the end of your post.
How to Utilize AMP on WordPress (self-hosted)
To enable AMP on your self-hosted WordPress site install the AMP plug-in and a connector plug-in for Google Analytics. This isn’t the only way to setup AMP, but it is the way I was able to do it.
AMP WordPress plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/
AMP Analytics Connector plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp-analytics/
A Word About Blogger Support for AMP
Blogger users, it appears that AMP has not made to your platform yet. To add your request, head over to the Blogger Help forum
Verify You are Serving AMP Content
After you have installed AMP plugins and configured them. You’ll want to verify that AMP content is serving. To verify you are serving AMP content go to any page on your blog and add /amp/ after it. So, and AMP URL might look something like this
Want More of the Technical Details?
The AMP Project has a website: https://www.ampproject.org/
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There is another plugin which works out of the box for AMP, check it out at https://wordpress.org/plugins/accelerated-mobile-pages/