What to Do Following Google’s Major AMP Announcement of Your Site Runs on WordPress

Since last year, SEOs around the world have been a bit flummoxed as to what to do with Google’s accelerated mobile pages (AMP) feature, with mainly SEO-aware news publications putting them into effect, which made sense as AMPs appeared in the Top Stories results within Google. However, this all changed when Google made the recent announcement that AMPs would now join the rest of the organic search results. So what are we tonnage of this news?

 

First and foremost, don’t just jump into trying and figure out how to implement the AMP feature on your site as, outside of WordPress, developers are still getting the hang of it. And keep in mind that Google has stated that not only will it not roll out until the end of the year, but that, reportedly, it will not serve as a ranking signal. But the question remains, should you be seeing what AMPs can do for your site?

 

If your main focus in running your site to provide a worthwhile user experience, then you definitely do want to look into setting up AMPs as doing so will provide a faster and more user-friendly experience, and this is arguably the most important ranking signal of all. And while Google has been rather frugal in terms of the information they have provided to developers, we do know that those sites that are built on the WordPress platform have plug-ins available to them to make installing AMPs far less of a headache than it appears.

 

First and foremost, you’ll need to make sure that you have access to your site’s Google search console in addition to the WordPress backend. From there, download the Automatic AMP plug-in and enable it, which will add a standard meta tag to every page you convert letting Google know that AMP is installed on the page. Please note that you can double check this by adding the /amp/ suffix to the URL you want to check.

 

Once you’ve enabled Automatic, you’ll see that it leaves you with rather bare-looking pages, meaning that some styling will be needed. For this you can download the Yoast Glue plug-in and upon enabling it, go to SEO>AMP>Design and change the text fonts and colors, upload your logo, and add your own custom CSS. Once you have your page looking like the rest of your site, mosey over to your Google search console where you can check for any errors on your AMP pages under search appearance>Accelerated Mobile Pages.

 

From there, be sure that there are no issues with your JavaScript and then sit back and see just how AMPs will effect mobile organic search traffic going to your site.