How to set up Accelerated Mobile Pages on your WordPress site

With the news that Google will soon be rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to all search listings, you’ll be forgiven for getting a little anxious about your organic visibility.

But don’t worry, you’ve got until the end of this year to make the necessary changes, and it isn’t that difficult to do.

If your site is powered by WordPress, all you’ll need to do is download a couple of plug-ins and have access to Search Console.

You may be thinking that this seems like a lot of effort for an uncertain return, but ultimately, AMP means a faster, more user-friendly experience for mobile visitors.

Yes, you should be providing the fastest, most user-friendly mobile experience already with your standard pages, but for the time being Google is really pushing AMP, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to go away anytime soon.

These are the steps you’ll need to take to successfully implemented AMP on your WordPress site:

1. First, you’ll need to download the Automattic AMP plugin, as recommended by Yoast. Once enabled, the plugin adds a standard meta tag to the header of your pages to help Google recognise that AMP-enabled versions exist. You can check this for yourself by adding the /amp/ suffix to the end of any URL on your site.

2. Next, you’ll need to download Yoast’s Glue plugin. Think of this as a visual companion to Automattic’s plugin, as it’ll add styling options for you to play around with. Once enabled, you’ll find the settings under SEO>AMP>Design in your WordPress menu. Now you can set the colours and fonts to be closer to your branding, as well as uploading your logo and adding custom CSS.

3. Now you’ll need to check that Google is indexing your AMP pages properly. If you don’t have a Search Console account, then sign-up, or ask your webmaster for permission. Once you’re in, select your site from the dashboard, then click on Search Appearance>Accelerated Mobile Pages.

You may run into problems at this point, as it’s fairly common for Google to report AMP errors upon implementation.

Luckily, the company provides a tool to check exactly what the cause may be:

4. At this stage you’ll need to run the AMP validator tool provided by Google. You may find that there are a number of reasons why Google is throwing up errors, from unauthorised JavaScript, through to invalid use of tags. Click on the issue(s) you need to address, and follow Google’s guidance. Once fixed, you should begin to see an improvement within a couple of days, with the number of errors either dropping off entirely, or decreasing one-by-one. AMP WordPress
   

All you need to do now is sit back and wait for your AMP pages to appear in organic results, and for a new mobile-first audience to come knocking!

Getting stuck along the way? Need help with AMP errors? Connect with us, we can help with that.

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