In today’s mobile-centric world, having pages that load quickly is essential for satisfying the user. Not only that, but the effects of slow page speed have been correlated to a decease in overall revenue and an increase in page abandonment.
Users have come to expect mobile sites to load just as quickly as their desktop counterparts. In fact, Amazon, one of the largest online retailers, concluded that even a one-second lag in page load speed accounted for a $1.6B decrease in annual revenue.
Accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) are quickly becoming the standard for how a fast-loading page should be built. Using a pre-render, AMPs are able to load 15-80 percent faster than standard mobile pages without compromising functionality. While the ease of AMP implementation will vary depending on your CMS (content management system), WordPress can be a good test environment for previewing what your AMP page might look like.
Follow this quick seven-step guide to enable AMP for WordPress.
Note: Parts of this guide assume that you have activated the Yoast SEO plugin as part of your WordPress setup. If you haven’t, you can simply skip the parts that reference this plugin — you can still activate AMP functionality without it — but I highly recommend this plugin if you are serious about SEO for your WordPress site.
Step 1: Install and activate your AMP plugin(s)
The AMP plugin by Automattic is required to begin AMP implementation. This is the base plugin that you’ll need in order for AMP to work.
The AMP plugin will automatically generate AMP-compatible versions of all your posts, which you can view by appending /amp/ to the end of your post URLs. For example:
Note that only your posts — not your pages — will be AMP-compatible with this base plugin. In order to make your pages AMP-compatible as well, you’ll need to install an additional plugin (detailed below).
Once you have the AMP plugin installed, you can layer on additional plugins in order to gain greater functionality. There are several free options you can choose from, but the ones I use throughout this guide are as follows:
AMP for WP — Accelerated Mobile Pages — Notable features of this plugin include Google AdSense integration, rel=canonical tag support, an AMP drag-and-drop page builder and the ability to create AMP content that differs from the content on standard mobile pages.
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