weeblrAMP overview
weeblrAMP is a specialized plugin for the WordPress Content Management System. Its purpose is to provide AMP support to WordPress. It creates an alternate version of the pages of a WordPress site in accordance with the AMP specification. weeblrAMP will also properly manage inserting suitable tags into your regular pages, so that search engines are aware of the AMP version of a page, and start indexing and using it. It also allows building AMP-only sites, suited for mobile applications for instance.
weeblrAMP has a strong focus on letting WordPress sites owners and developers create valid AMP pages with a lot of interactivity, while still automating the AMP conversion. It includes integrations with WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, ContactForm 7, WPForms, Yoast, JetPack and more, so that an AMP version of your contact forms, shop, add to cart buttons, etc can still be operative on your AMP pages, without requiring manual customization or coding.
Accelerated Mobile Pages are not meant to be automatically displayed on your site to mobile users. The standard use case is that Google will display them to searchers in the search results pages. Enabling weeblrAMP will not change the display of your site when viewed from a phone. It will however let search engines know that you have an AMP version of your pages available, and let search engines find and index them. An exception to this is if you select to enable an AMP-only site, where your site only has pages that complies with the AMP format.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page. It is an attempt to provide much faster display of content to viewers on mobile devices. Mobile users accounting for more than 50% of all searches, it certainly is an important goal to achieve. This initiative is fully open source and comes from Google, which has stated that providing AMP pages will not provide an SEO boost per se, but...
- Google also restated that speed is (on desktop) and will be an important ranking factor on mobile
- AMP results will be displayed proheminently, in an image carousel or other visual enhancement. Currently, for some queries, AMP results can represent over 80% of all results displayed on the first results pages
so it's hard to not think as AMP as something you want to have if it applies to your content.
Google also stated that initially news-like content will be displayed in search results (in a carousel), but the goal is that all types of content make use of this technology. After the last few months, more content types are available, such as recipes. And general content, including products and shops, is now being built-in. It is expected to bring significant benefits. Large organizations such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ebay, Pinterest and others have now published AMP pages on a large scale.
How does the AMP plugin work?
The plugin will monitor the pages displayed by your site. On some pages, and following your choice about content to AMPlify or not, weeblrAMP will:
- Insert a specific html tag in the HTML source code of the original HTML page, with the address of the AMP version of the page. Search engines reads those tags, see that this page has an AMP equivalent, and go fetch and index the AMP version (in addition to the full HTML one of course)
- Whenever a search engine or a visitor requests the AMP version of a page - which has a special URL, ending in amp usually, weeblrAMP will render the page normally, converting it on the fly, stripping out all invalid (per AMP specification) content and adding required markup, CSS and javascript to create a valid AMP page.
Alternatively, you can also instruct weeblrAMP to make all the pages on your site AMP, meaning the regular HTML WordPress output will never be visible. This operation mode can be very well suited for sites with a strong mobile devices focus for instance, but not only. The AMP By Example website is an example of such a site.
weeblrAMP Community is an edition of weeblrAMP available on the WordPress plugins repository free of charge. The regular edition has more features and includes some services such as One-click Disqus operation. This documentation applies to both editions. Comments marked with this icon identify the differences between editions.
How are AMP pages accessed?
The AMP versions of your pages can be accessed following this convention:
- /one-sample-page --> /one-sample-page/amp
- /one-sample-page.html --> /one-sample-page.amp.html
- /one-sample-page/ --> /one-sample-page/amp/
When using thestandalone mode, where the entire site is AMP compliant, URLs have no suffix, and the standard URLs are used throughout.
