Recently we took a look at what AMP is, how it works and how we could actually benefit from it providing our audience hopefully a better and faster mobile access to the quality content we want to share with the world. And considering we have some content to share let's not consider the most popular so far publishing CMS platform which is more or less powering great deals of information sites out there.
Yep! This article is about Wordpress. When it comes to creating and maintaining a page consisting mostly of snippets of quality article content this is the easiest and relatively simple solution to go for and exactly this kind of information the Accelerated Mobile Pages standard accelerates best.
You either are considering starting up some kind of a blog or a magazine maybe, have chosen WordPress for its engine and are infinitely browsing around to pick up the AMP eСommerce Template closest to the appearance you have in your head and the budget in your pocket. Maybe just starting up you have rather a limited budget and a handful of a great ideas to fire your future site straight up and were hoping for a free AMP One Page Template to start with – there are plenty of good looking of them around the net – and get discouraged facing mostly paid themes proclaiming they are AMP out of the box.
Or maybe you have already spent tons of time, money and efforts of raising your site and just need transferring it to the next level making it up to date with this new trend - wondering and hoping not to lose more time and efforts doing something you've already done from the scratch.
Well, guys, good news - there are quite a few easy and cheap solutions making your WordPress blogs and magazines up with AMP and running with relatively small efforts and without remaking stuff if it's already been done. Here is how to:
Now for the themes first – googling AMP – ready WordPress theme produces some of the results and pretty much all of them are paid which isn't bad but for a startup could be an issue. These, however, are AMP out of the box – just download a copy to the themes directory, activate and enjoy – as easy as that. If, however, you are already do have a working page or prefer starting up with a free theme there is an easy solution making it AMP – they don't call WordPress "We have a plugin for that" for no reason.
Since adding AMP mirrors to your posts is more or less a SEO driven exercise let's first talk about that. No personal affection about that but the most popular plugin for making your posts SEO friendly seems to be Yoast WordPress SEO plugin so you probably already have that. Now all you need is two more – AMP by Automatic which you can get from over here https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/ and Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP to make these two form above work along and additionally – give you the ability to apply some custom touch to your AMP pages - like personalizing them better with your own logo and brand colors for example.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/glue-for-yoast-seo-amp/
You are probably wondering – why exactly this AMP webpage builder plugin? The reason is – they are known for best working out with their tools. And as you probably have noticed already when it comes to WordPress - it is much like building a car from a scratch – it's always useful to know which parts are going to work out good together from the start and spare yourself some hours of trials and errors.
1) Pick up the theme suiting you best;
2) Install and activate Yoast! WP SEO (if you haven't yet)
3) Install and activate AMP by Automatic
4) Install and activate "the Glue" from Yoast
5) Go to SEO – AMP Settings – Design to personalize your AMP pages up to your taste.
Eventually, you might add an AMP tracking code if you want and pretty much that's it – it's done!
Why Yoast and "the Glue"? Why not just adding the AMP and go on with it? The answer is you need those to better handle your overall posts SEO anyway – like adding the proper meta tags (including open graph) and giving you some tips about structuring your content to make it look good. And they don't add much load to the site anyway – so our personal suggestion would be – use them.
Additionally, if you're after even better performance – google recommends using structured data for your pages to make them even more favorable for the search engines so you might consider also adding something like Yoast SEO Locale and WP SEO Structured Data Schema to add some structured data descriptions to your posts.
As you can see it's pretty easy making your WordPress site up to AMP – all you need is an hour or so downloading, uploading, installing and setting up a few plugins and of course – testing the results up until everything's just perfectly up to your and the crawler's taste.