Since 2015, mobile devices have represented approximately half of the global internet traffic. For website owners, this indicates that many visitors access their sites using smartphones, often on slow devices and poor connections. How can you create an enjoyable website experience for this audience segment?
If you’re using WordPress, one solution is to incorporate Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework into your site. However, don’t be intimidated by terms like “framework” and “code.” With a WordPress AMP plugin, you can enhance your mobile’s page load speed without the need to edit any HTML. Let’s explore how.
What is AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a framework created by Google. Its primary objective is to speed up loading times on mobile devices by eliminating unnecessary page elements and features that demand more processing resources. Heavier websites, those laden with extensive HTML, CSS, and scripts, tend to load slower on mobile devices.
Introduced in 2015, AMP emerged in response to the surge in mobile web browsing and the growing focus on enhancing the mobile user experience. Slow-loading websites can significantly detract from user engagement, as the likelihood of users leaving a site (bounce rate) more than doubles when a page’s load time increases from one to ten seconds.
AMP addresses this issue by generating simplified mobile versions of web pages, stripping away excess code and large media files. This streamlining reduces load times, thereby enhancing the user experience on mobile devices.
Why are WordPress AMP Plugins Important to Use in 2024?
For WordPress website owners, AMP plugins offer the easiest and most efficient way to implement AMP. These plugins handle the technical details, allowing you to simply install the plugin, configure the settings, and let the plugin create your AMP pages.
If you’re considering whether AMP is right for your WordPress site, it’s important to note that AMP benefits any site with mobile traffic. Faster load times, which translate to improved website performance, positively impact various aspects of your online business.
Firstly, quicker load times enhance the user experience. Mobile users, both new and returning, are more likely to stay on your site longer and view your business favorably, which can lead to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Secondly, improved performance results in lower bounce rates, as users are less inclined to leave your website for a competitor’s if your pages load swiftly.
Lastly, page speed is a known ranking factor for Google. Faster mobile pages can help your site rank higher in search results, driving more traffic and potential conversions.
Given these benefits, let’s explore the best AMP plugins to integrate AMP into your WordPress site.
Best AMP Plugins
1. AMP by AMP Project Contributors
This pioneering WordPress AMP plugin is available for free download and was among the first to integrate AMP with WordPress. Developed through a collaboration between Google, Automattic (the creators of WordPress), XWP, and other contributors, this AMP plugin allows any WordPress website to implement AMP effortlessly. As a result, it is now recognized as the official AMP plugin for WordPress, offering a reliable and well-coded solution that evolves with AMP standards.
The plugin offers three AMP modes: Standard, Transitional, and Reader. While the default settings provide a quick and straightforward way to implement AMP, customizing your site to avoid a generic look requires some technical expertise. This customization ensures your site stands out from the thousands of other AMP pages.
2. AMP by Pixelative
This Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) WordPress plugin helps you quickly adapt your content to AMP. Its biggest strengths are the user-friendly settings designed with native WordPress functionality and seamless integration with various third-party tools. This AMP plugin offers customization options for menus, colors, and more and supports posts, custom post types, and taxonomies.
To monitor your AMP performance and track organic traffic and revenue, you can easily connect popular analytics tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Segment Analytics, Quantcast Tracking, Alexa Metrics, Chartbeat Analytics, comScore, Yandex Metrica, AFS Analytics, and Adobe Analytics.
Additionally, this AMP plugin is fully compatible with the Yoast SEO plugin and all cache plugins, ensuring smooth operation and enhanced SEO performance.
3. Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
The PWA plugin is a free WordPress solution that enhances your website with Progressive Web App functionality, making it operate like a native app. It supports both offline and online users, notifying visitors about the app-like experience with a banner on the home screen.
A Service Worker handles essential tasks like caching automatically in the background. The PWA plugin is featured among the best plugins for WordPress AMP pages due to its seamless compatibility with the AMPforWP plugin.
You can easily upload an application icon, set up background color options, and configure the start page, ensuring a smooth and customizable user experience.
4. Instantify
Instantify is a premium AMP WordPress plugin that presents a comprehensive suite of tools for creating, optimizing, and customizing AMP websites without requiring coding skills. This plugin integrates Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Progressive Web Apps (PWA), and Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA).
Instantify supports various post types and automatically generates AMP pages, adapting to the style of your active theme for a cohesive design. For publishers, it provides a straightforward way to integrate and customize AdSense ad blocks, allowing control over their size and placement. Additionally, you can easily analyze the performance of your AMP pages using Google Analytics.
Overall, Instantify delivers essential features expected from a top-tier Google AMP WordPress tool.
5. AIOSEO
Why is All in One SEO considered a Google AMP plugin? Once installed and activated, it optimizes AMP pages and sites, helping them rank higher in search results. With its user-friendly interface, this AMP-compatible plugin facilitates site optimization.
All in One SEO supports XML sitemaps, meta titles and descriptions, keywords, and Open Graph SEO Knowledge Panel information. It also allows you to set up social media integration, Google Search Console, schema markup for SEO, and other features.
The premium version offers an extended feature list, including smart SEO schema markup, advanced SEO modules, local SEO modules, Google AMP SEO, and more.
6. Jetpack
Jetpack is an all-in-one solution for site optimization, covering performance, backups, SEO, design, marketing, and security. Its features are modular, allowing users to purchase only the tools they need within the plugin.
Among its performance tools, this AMP plugin offers Google AMP integration to enhance mobile user experience. By installing Jetpack alongside the AMP plugin, you can manage your AMP tools directly from Jetpack, simplifying the process of adding AMP to WordPress.
Jetpack’s AMP integration is completely free and includes access to Jetpack’s content delivery network. Additionally, it provides performance improvement suggestions to further optimize your site.
7. Easy AMP
Easy AMP is a free and straightforward option for converting a WordPress website to comply with AMP standards. True to its name, this plugin is hands-off—simply install it, and an AMP version of your site is automatically generated.
Noteworthy features include SSL encryption for all AMP pages, Google Analytics compatibility, and a cookie consent notice for GDPR compliance. Additionally, it allows seamless integration of YouTube videos and social sharing buttons.
8. Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
This tool won’t enable AMP on your site but will enhance it by applying HTML markup to your AMP content, helping your site appear as rich snippets in Google search results.
You don’t need an AMP website to use this plugin, but it’s designed to be AMP-compatible, so you can use both together. The plugin supports over 35 schema types, including standard ones like Blog Post and News Article, as well as Recipes, Video, and more.
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP works seamlessly with both the official AMP plugin and AMP for WP. Additionally, it allows you to import data from other schema plugins you might have used previously.
To Conclude,
AMP has revolutionized mobile-first website design. Site speed ranks among the highest priorities for users in terms of UX, and nothing drives them away faster than a slow-loading page.
Thankfully, numerous free WordPress AMP plugins are available for you to experiment with and gauge their impact on your site’s traffic. By prioritizing your mobile users, you’re likely to attract more traffic, generate leads, and eventually secure purchases from this vital demographic.
FAQs
Is AMP outdated?
Initially, AMP pages held a prominent position in the Top Stories section. However, both AMP and non-AMP pages are now eligible for display there. Nonetheless, AMP continues to provide advantages such as enhanced engagement on swift-loading pages, improved rankings owing to faster page loading times, and increased view rates.
Is AMP still crucial for SEO?
The significance of AMP for SEO has waned. Google no longer gives AMP priority for rankings but emphasizes mobile page speed instead. While AMP can still enhance user experience, it’s no longer a primary SEO determinant.
