August 12, 2021
5 mins to read
AMP For WordPress: Know Why It Might Be Important For You
As mobile phones are increasingly taking over how people consume material on the internet, it’s critical to make your web sites mobile-friendly.
Page load speed is an essential ranking indication according to Google, which is why every website owner attempts to reduce their page load time score by milliseconds. Optimizing page load speed on mobile devices, on the other hand, has proven to be a difficult task for everyone.
In February 2015, Google, the current standard for search engine optimization, launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. The goal was to provide a set of guidelines for websites to follow in order to reduce page load time and thereby enhance the user experience on smartphones.
What is AMP?
Google’s AMP project is an open-source initiative that aids in the delivery of fast website content. AMP enhances content navigation on mobile devices in addition to increasing page load speed.
In a nutshell, AMP pages are stripped-down versions of web pages that keep all of the key content components when delivered. The syntax of AMP sites may differ from the standard HTML code of web pages, and it restricts the usage of JavaScript and CSS to decrease page size.
How Does AMP Work?
AMP simply replicates existing online information in a stripped-down HTML format.
Pages that are “converted” to AMP undergo a three-step transformation:
HTML – AMP converts standard HTML code into a slim, distinctive markup.
JavaScript — a resource fetching language that has been reduced down to remove non-essential rendering.
CDN – instantly caches websites and adjusts them to AMP.
AMP also reduces CSS requests and eliminates a lot of heavy graphics, backend code, and often CTAs.
The existing canonical version of the page will not be replaced by the AMP pages. Both versions will be available to readers.
Accelerated mobile pages Google have a special advantage. Google top stories include AMP- enabled websites. They provide the best possible version of the web pages.
AMP pages are suitable for content-focused pages that need further optimization for smartphone rendering. AMP shortens the time it takes for these sites to load on all devices.
You do, however, have the option of choosing from-
A responsive website for desktop, smartphone, and tablet users, as well as an AMP version for mobile search results on Google.
For desktops, there’s a website, and for mobiles, there’s an AMP version.
A mobile-friendly, desktop-friendly, and tablet-friendly website
It doesn’t matter if you don’t utilize AMP as long as your website is appropriately prepared for speed and uses Rich Snippets (where feasible). This eliminates the possibility of consumers being confused by several listings in the SERP.
The most common questions are
Should I get accelerated mobile pages for WordPress?
What if I want to implement AMP for my website?
So much confusion right?? We had it too. But the final conclusion for all the above questions, whether it’s required or not, is totally based on your website’s requirements and the needs of your users.
Here are some pros and cons of AMP which can let you decide if AMP is right for you or not. Let’s have a look together
Pros :
Accelerated mobile pages AMP helps pages to load faster.
Since mobile phones are a wide and common way to grab content on the web, it is necessary to optimize your web pages for mobile devices and AMP does the exact thing for your website.
It can get more traffic to your website because of the faster load of the pages.
AMP SEO also helps to enhance your Search engine ranking. Because of the faster load of ads on your website, users can get more engaged with it.
If you’re setting up the AMP for your website then your server can get reallocated to the desktop traffic most as mobile content of the AMP pages SEO will load from the Content Delivery Network (Google’s Server).
Here are the two most used plugin AMP :
AMP
AMP for WP – Accelerated mobile pages WP lets you set the AMP and speeds up the mobile pages.
But wait, every good thing comes up with cons or we can say limitations.
Cons:
The main limitation of AMP is: loss of control over your mobile web pages
As AMP will create its own structure to minimize the HTML code, your custom CSS can’t be applied on those pages. You need to design AMP mobile pages separately. This means you need the extra resources/efforts to make the Accelerated mobile pages AMP look similar to the established aesthetics of your website.
As said above, AMP is separated from the mobile version of the page, additional tasks will be added up with AMP to manage the new addition of the product or frequent changes of content.
Some experts may say that it’s preferable to build the front end with highly optimized mobile pages rather than giving twisted efforts to the AMP.
For the accelerated mobile pages for wordpress, you need plugins extensions to match the aesthetics of your website. For example website’s default popup will not work on the AMP pages, we need to recreate this popup again. No doubt WordPress has many plugins which can do it by the sleeves but we need to give the twisted efforts for the single task.
