Over the last year, I’ve been doing quite a bit of testing when it comes to using AMP on WordPress blogs. There’s been a heavy emphasis on optimising for mobile and I built some websites to see what would happen if I created a technical advantage by optimising the site for mobile devices and specifically using AMP to my advantage.
In this post, I will share the process that I used and one of the test sites to give you more insights from my experiment.
I configured the site with Google AMP.
Since I work with WordPress, I simply used a couple of plugins to get this setup on the website. I prefer to use the Yoast Plugin with Glue and the official AMP plugin from WordPress.
You can see my video tutorial for configuring AMP on WordPress below.
I checked to see if the AMP pages were getting indexed by Google.
Log into your Google search console account and check the Accelerated Mobile Pages section to make sure that Google is crawling and indexing the AMP URLs correctly.
This screenshot was taken from the Google Search Console data for myperfectmarriageproposal.club.
I specifically created content for mobile devices.
I did this by only publishing blog posts. So the sites are content sites that focus on a particular niche. I had done another experiment with AMP on the commercial web pages, however the CSS and formatting would get stripped out. So it would cause display rendering issues.
By only publishing text posts, the content could be loaded quickly using simple HTML.
What kind of results have I had?
If you look at the screenshot below, you will see that the site gets quite a few referrals from AMP-specific pages. In Google Analytics, it shows up under referrals. I was even able to get an opt-in from the AMP result.
Surprisingly, it has also driven some Adsense revenue as well. I’ve shared another screenshot below from Google Analytics.
Please bear in mind that these results are only for one of the niche sites that I built as an experiment. I’ve seen some similar trends on other sites that I’ve built and I am yet to test this on other bigger platforms. However, I expect similar results to be transferable to larger web platforms.
What are my takeaways?
I think that this is something that should not be overlooked as a part of your site’s SEO strategy. At the same time, I can only see this working if you have a content element or strategy on your website. I’ve not been able to get this to work on commercial or static pages. However, I have noticed that visibility from posts published in the blog section tend to gain visibility with AMP.
Have you tried AMP on any sites? (WordPress or other CMS platforms? Or custom HTML?)
What results have you seen from implementing AMP? Did you only add it to content pages or did you also experiment with it on posts?
Let me know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading.
Useful links.
AMP Guide (Developers Resource)
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Hi David,
This is a good read. Depending on the niche, I do believe that AMP can affect SEO, especially if you are running some news site, AMP is a must, because loading speed matters nowadays.
Hi April. Thanks for your comment. Based on my experience for the sites that I run, AMP has been beneficial. There are debates as to whether AMP should be implemented across all sites. But in terms of using AMP on news sites, it is definitely beneficial.
I really like ur article on amp seo.. I am just wondering should i go with it or not
Thanks Bily. There’s mixed reviews about installing AMP. You’ll have to do your own testing. It does get the site more visibility. But you will need to test it for conversions. I saw this interesting case study that may help. https://kinsta.com/blog/disable-google-amp/?utm_campaign=StartupResources.io&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter
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