Wondering how to make your website AMP ready? If you’re a WordPress user, I’m going to show you which plugins you need and how to test that the plugins are actually working.
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, otherwise known as AMP. What exactly is it and what are the benefits? I want to talk about this first before we go into the install. Essentially, what’s it’s designed to do is speed up pages, especially for mobile devices. This we can see in Facebook. If you’ve ever gone to Facebook and you click on an instant article, boom, it loads right away. However, if you click on an article and it’s not instant, even on high-speed internet access, it might take two, three seconds for that page to load, sometimes longer. Instant articles, boom, they hit right away and essentially, Google is trying to do the same thing, especially on mobile devices. So let’s take a look at what the difference is.
This is a blog post that will normally show up if you were to visit my page today. If we put the AMP code behind it, this is what it looks like now. You can see it’s really stripped down of a lot of the non-essential information. Now, what’s interesting is we don’t have a lot of information, so they have to click on the home link here in order to get back or click the back link, but who knows how they came into your page, first of all. So that is the difference.
Now, in order to install AMP on your website, you’ll need to install this plugin, the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project plugin, I’ll put a link down below for you. If you are a Yoast, Google Yoast user, you’re also going to want to install Glue for SEO YOAST. This is very important. There are some coding issues that they had to fix in order to make sure that it worked with their plugin. Once you go back to the website, install the two plugins, one of the things that you’ll see, if we go back to our dashboard, on the bottom left-hand side is our SEO Yoast, and you’ll see the AMP option here. A couple of things I did tweak on the post type tab here, I left post enabled, everything else is disabled. This is the default way it came, so essentially that AMP stripped down version, you’re only going to see it on blog posts, none of the other pages will be affected.
On the design side, you have an option to install an AMP icon that will show up at the top of the page, and also, you’ll want to make sure that you have a default image. Yoast ran into some issues initially, where if you had a blog post that did not have a default image, it created some software issues. So you want to make sure that, put this in as a backup, it’s a great way of branding your company also. The only other change I made was right here on links, the default color was white. I’m still a firm believer if you want people to know about links, text links, they’re used to blue, so make it blue, and that’s all I did.
The only thing you may need to do if you’re not using the Yoast plugin for your Google Analytics, you’ll have to add the code, since I am, they automatically took care of all of that. So, how do you test that everything works? Well, it’s pretty easy, all we need to do is go to a post, and let’s check this one out. I’m clicking the view, so I actually have the URL, and then all you need to do is type in AMP right behind it and if you get the stripped down version, you know it’s working. If you want to double-check that it’s working, you can also go to technical SEO. They have an AMP tool here, and one of the things I want to show you is here’s a blog that I put in. If I click on run, you’re going to get all these error messages and that is essentially going “This is not an AMP page.” So if I type in AMP behind it and click run again, you’re going to get all of these issues. And the reason being is you do need to close out with a backslash, so make sure you have one of your blog posts, slash AMP, with a slash on the backside, and now you’ll get accurate information.
Slowly, slowly, here we go. So everything is working correctly. So, one tool you’ll definitely need is AMP. If you’re using SEO Yoast, make sure you get the Glue plugin also. Install those plugins on your website, double test is by just typing “AMP,” or going onto the tool here, and double-checking that it’s actually working. If you have any questions, comments, or other ways of installing, or your just general thoughts about AMP, it is a new thing, be curious to know how Google sticks to it, or are they just going to abandon it in three months? But leave your comments below. If you like the content, you feel it had value, be sure to hit the like button. Much appreciated, take care everybody.
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