Google announced last week that their Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are already showing in the search results on mobile devices giving publishers the opportunity to provide better and faster experience to their mobile users.
But what are these accelerated mobile pages? They are pages using the new open framework AMP HTML which is intended to build light-weight web pages. Similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News, such web pages are built to load instantaneously no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using by removing all unnecessary elements and delivering a static version of your content.
Using this framework has some cons though, as it doesn’t support optin forms for the time being and if you are a blogger dependent on subscriptions, this might hurt your business. On the other hand, not implementing AMP might cost the loss of a considerable amount of mobile traffic so there is definitely a lot to decide here.
Implementation
We have already implemented the accelerated mobile pages on our blog and Knowledge base which are both using WordPress. There are several plugins for WordPress you can use but if you are using another platform, you might have to find a plugin suitable for it or ask its developers to implement the AMP functionality. As for custom php or html websites, you would have to create whole new web pages using the AMP guidelines and mark them with a meta tag like in this example:
The web page you are currently on has an URL: https://www.webhostface.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-implement/ with a meta tag: <link rel=”amphtml” href=”//www.webhostface.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-implement/amp/”>
Its AMP variation has an URL: https://www.webhostface.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-implement/amp/ with a meta tag: <link rel=”canonical” href=”//www.webhostface.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-implement/”>
This is done so the search bots can find the actual AMP variation and then use it but to also be able to determine which is the original page and not cause and duplicate content issues.
Plugins for WordPress
One of the plugins which adds AMP support to WordPress websites is called “AMP” and is by Automattic who own WordPress.com and are partners in the open source AMP project, the other plugin is Accelerated Mobile Pages by Mohammed Kaludi and Ahmed Kaludi. We are using the plugin by Automattic but there is another plugin you would need which actually creates the AMP variations of your posts and it is called: Facebook Instant Articles & Google AMP Pages by PageFrog. It has a lot of customization options and you probably guessed from the name that it also adds the Facebook Instant Articles functionality to your WordPress website.
This is it for now. Do let me know if you have any questions regarding the AMP pages or their implementation. You can also share your experience with the accelerated mobile pages in the comments below.
