The release of version 5.X of WordPress, on December 6, brought quite a few changes and updates to WordPress installations around the world. One of the plugins affected by the release of this major version of the CMS was the official AMP plugin for WordPress. demonstrates the commitment of the WordPress community to adapt to this new web standard. But what exactly is this AMP thing and how does it affect you?
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google project launched in . This project is based on the AMP HTML standard. A new framework, built entirely on existing web technologies, that allows any website to create very light and fast pages.
Or what is the same, AMP allows you to serve a simplified version, but much faster of your current mobile web page. So that? Basically, to improve loading time of the mobile version of your website. Because although having AMP technology implemented on your website, since July 2018, it is considered a positioning factor in mobile search results.
So if your WordPress is facing any of the following scenarios, maybe you should start thinking about taking the step of jumping to AMP on your website:
- Do you have a website with a mobile version whose loading time is excessive and you cannot undertake a code redesign or optimization in the medium term.
- You want the results of your website to be included in the mobile search results carousel of Google.
- EITHER you are creating a new website and AMP gives you the ability to implement its functionality using it as the canonical version throughout your mobile website.
If your WordPress installation does not meet any of these three approaches, it may be because you have a well-optimized mobile version and with a relatively low loading time (less than two seconds). But if your website is in any of these three scenarios, maybe you should implement AMP in your WordPress installation to improve the experience of your users when they visit you through their mobile devices.
Well, once you have decided to implement AMP in your WordPress installation, let’s see what options are available to you both in the official repository and outside of it. For this we are going to make a comparison between four plugins plugins that will allow you to implement AMP into your WordPress installation without too much technical hassle.
The requirements that we have chosen to select them have been:
- that have more than 1,000 active installations
- that are compatible with the latest version of WordPress (5.0.2)
The plugins resulting from this filter are:
- MPA
- Better AMP – WordPress Complete AMP
- AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
- WP AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages for WordPress and WooCommerce
1.MPA
With more than 300,000 active installations, we start the comparison by the official AMP plugin for WordPress. This plugin you can freely from the official repository. After installing and activating it in your WordPress installation, the following menu will appear on your Dashboard:
Once activated, AMP technology will already be active on your website. To check it, you just have to access any post on your blog and add the sequence to the url /amp/ to see the AMP version of it:
As you can see, the AMP version is quite minimalist in terms of design, since therein lies its difference in loading speed. If you access the plugin configuration panel (AMP > General)you will find the following options:
template mode
Establish what will be the behavior of the and non-canonical on your site, and which one will take AMP as a reference to index in Google. It is vital to understand the differences between:
- Native: This mode reuses your active theme’s templates to display AMP responses, but don’t use separate URLs for AMP. This means your site is AMP-first and your canonical URLs are AMP. That is, the mobile version of your site will be replaced by the AMP version in those types of content where AMP is active.
- Paired up: It is similar to the native mode in terms of appearance since it reuses the templates of the active theme to display the AMP responses, but use separate urls for AMP. That is, each canonical URL has a corresponding AMP URL.
- Classic– Displays AMP responses in classic post templates (inherited from the plugin itself) with a basic layout that often doesn’t match your active theme’s templates.
Compatible templates
The following check box that you will find, allow you to select the types of content in which the AMP pages will be active within your WordPress installation. Depending on the plugins you have installed, you can have more types of content to select from:
Within the AMP menu of your WordPress Dashboard, you will also find the Analytics option (AMP > Analytics) which will allow you to adjust the settings for the Google Analytics tracking code on your AMP pages.
Finally, if you are using the classic template mode that we saw before, within the Appearance menu, you will find the AMP option (Appearance > AMP) with which you can customize the style of the AMP legacy template.
As you can see, the customization options do not go beyond defining the colors of the header text and the background color of the header and links. So the customization of the design of your AMP pages in the classic mode is quite limited. On the other hand, if you use native or paired modes, you will need to have a theme that supports AMP installed, so that your urls can pass AMP validation.
So, as a summary, the official AMP plugin is an easy extension to configure and manage, but You must take into account the following aspects:
- With the native and paired modes you must make sure that your website generates valid AMP urls and that they do not present any errors. Since if they do not pass the validation, Google will not index them.
- With the classic mode, you will not have any validation problems, since it uses the templates inherited from the plugin. But in return, you will have a very poor user experience when accessing your website through their mobile device, which will translate to more and fewer conversions for your website.
2. Better AMP – WordPress Complete AMP
With over 10,000 active installs, Better AMP is the second free plugin in this comparison. You can get it directly from the . After installing and activating it in your WordPress installation, the following menu will appear on your Dashboard:
At first glance, it already offers a few more features than the official AMP plugin for WordPress. Let’s look at each of your options in a little more detail:
Translation
The option Translation from the Better AMP menu (Better AMP > Translation) offers you the list of available fields to translate and customize to your liking. In this way, you can arrange the text strings that will appear on your AMP pages, so that they are as similar as possible to those of your active theme.
Import Export
If you have multiple sites where you need to replicate the same AMP settings, the option to Import Export by BetterAMP (Better AMP > Import / Export) will allow you to do it easily and quickly. Just copy the data, download the import file or copy the export URL of the site you want to pull the configuration from and import it into your new site via the ‘Import from file’ or ‘Import from URL’ options.
Customize AMP
The third and last plugin option (Better AMP > Customize AMP) allows you to change the appearance of your site’s AMP pages through the WordPress Customizer. By clicking on it, you will access the following options panel:
- header: in this section you can customize both the logo in text and in image, and show and hide the search icon or set the header of the page.
- side bar: allows you to activate the hamburger menu that appears in the upper left, which in turn displays a side bar on the left side, in which you can include: text logo, image logo, links to your and text of copyright.
- footer: The options in the footer are limited to showing or hiding the footer text. copyright that you can customize with the content you want, and enable or disable the bottom link that leads to the mobile website.
- Archive: in the section of archive you will only be able to choose the size of the images that are shown in the loop of WordPress.
- posts: This is the section that allows you the most customization. Your options are:
- Show hide thumbnail
- Show/hide comments
- Show/hide related posts
- Number of related entries to show and filter that applies
- Show/hide social sharing buttons and customization options
- home page: on the front page of the web you can configure a slider with your recent posts and define which home page you want.
- Color– Color customization options include:
- Theme Color
- Background Color
- Content Background Color
- Footer Background
- Footer Navigation Color
- Text Color
- Google Analytics: This option of the customization panel allows you to insert the Google Analytics UA code so that the visits to the AMP urls of your website are counted.
- Custom CSS and HTML: they include several zones on which you can make style customizations through CSS or include those scripts you need in the areas of header or of footer of your AMP pages.
- Advanced Settings: Includes the following three options:
- Show AMP for Mobile Visitors: when activated you will redirect all mobile traffic to AMP urls, so the mobile version of your website will not be visible to your users.
- AMP URL Format: allows you to decide the structure of the urls between these two formats:
- yourdomain.com/amp/post/
- yourdomain.com/post/amp/
- Exclude URL From Auto Link Converting: forces Better AMP so that the urls you indicate do not create the AMP version of them.
- AMP Pages: The last option in the customization panel allows you to decide which types of content and taxonomies you want to disable the use of AMP. As well as activate or deactivate the plugin, both on the home page and in the search results.
As you see, Better AMP is a ‘vitaminized’ version of the official WordPress AMP plugin. With it, you will achieve greater customization in terms of styles and configuration options. But as for its internal operation with the urls, we would find ourselves before the same case as the classic mode of the AMP plugin. Namely, we will always have the canonical url of the mobile website and the non-canonical version of the AMP version for each page of your website.
3. Accelerated Mobile Pages
The third plugin in this comparison is . a plugin freemium with more than 100,000 active installations that you can download directly from the WordPress repository.
The first difference you will find in this AMP plugin is its business model. We are facing a plugin that follows the model freemiumor what is the same, the base plugin that…
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