Thus far it was enough for your WordPress site to have a responsive theme and look good on mobile devices, but have you considered AMP? Now that mobile searches have exceeded their desktop counterparts you may want your website to load as quickly as possible on the mobile platform.
Within this article, we want to discuss a few top-notch AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) plugins that will help your website achieve this goal, and the good news is that most of them are completely free.
An important suggestion, before you try these AMT plugins, you should first make a backup of your WordPress website to avoid any data or content loss.
Our favorite – the official AMP plugin for WordPress
Accelerated mobile pages is a somewhat new and trendy topic with WordPress, so the best and the wisest choice is to use plugins made by the official AMP project for a number of reasons:
- Support for most popular core themes (such as Twenty Twenty).
- Troubleshooting and compatibility – when there is an issue with automated AMP insertion, the plugin can display a notification about specific components that are behind the problem.
- CSS tree-shaking – unused style sheets (CSS) will be removed in order to stay under the AMP-mandated limit.
- AMP stories – you will be able to create and publish AMP stories though bear in mind that this feature is still very much a beta.
Additionally, you can configure this tool to operate under one of three possible modes – Standard, Reader or Transitional.
The Standard mode will apply AMP to a whole website, while Reader displays pages with a simpler design that meets AMP specifications, and Transitional will aim to deliver AMP and non-AMP pages with the same look.
It is important to note that the official AMP plugin for WordPress receives very frequent updates, meaning any bugs and issues are dealt with promptly.
AMP for WP plugin
We would like to note AMP for WP plugin as one of the highly-rated ones by the community, with over +100.000 active installations, which is even more than the official AMP project.
What makes this plugin so appealing is:
- AdSense functionality
- Contact Form 7 support
- Call-To-Action support
- Email opt-in support
We would agree that using this plugin will transform your site into something very similar to a mobile app that can be used for digital marketing.
However, the main reason why AMP for WP is so popular may bee with the fact that it works well with other popular WordPress SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, Rank Math and others, as well as its integration with WooCommerce.
If you own a web-shop or sell a product online, this may be the main reason why this would be your best choice.
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP plugin
It has never been easier to add a markup to your pages so that they appear as rich snippets in search results, by using Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP plugin.
Yes, it may not be advertised as an AMP plugin but we can note that it supports AMP, which is enough to include it here. What this plugin provides is around 33 different schema types such as blog posts, news articles, recipes, products … etc.
How does this sound: if the schema type you need is not supported the developers say you can request it and they will add it for you, amazing right?
Additionally, the tool even supports conditional display fields. This means you get to decide which posts, pages, or other content gets marked up.
Bear in mind that this plugin is offered as free or premium, with the latter providing priority support.
PWA for WP & AMP
If you choose to make your website available as a progressive web app then this is the perfect AMP plugin for you.
The PWA for WP & AMP provides complete AMP support, with TMU tracking and cache expiration option. The premium version of PWA for WP & AMP gives you access to a loading icon library, calls to action, and data analytics.
Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP
We talked about the official AMP plugin for WordPress, but if you are a user of Yoast SEO then we need to mention that for these two plugins to work together you will need the Glue.
Besides enabling these plugins operation, Glue adds some basic styling features you can use to keep some of your site looks. Note this plugin is developed by creators of Yoast SEO.
AMP WP for WordPress
Not that popular with a little over a thousand active installs, AMP WP is a plugin that promises up to 5x faster loading times and compatibility with Yoast SEO.
The notable features of this plugin are:
- GDPR support (Europe).
- Related posts view.
- Slider support.
- Ability to configure AMP for specific taxonomies (tags and categories).
- Support for third-party analytics (like Google Analytics).
- Image lightboxes.
- Optional sticky header.
Because this plugin is not used extensively, we would strongly recommend that you make sure to have website backup handy, if any issues arise.
Conclusion
After going through all of this, you may be swayed by the need to delve and configure all of them individually, but the time invested will produce dividends in the form of a better search engine mobile result ranking.
The mobile era is upon us!