How to Open Integrate the AMP Project with WordPress?

Nowadays, there are an increasing number of people using smartphones, phablets, or tablets to get information. However, the page loading speed on these mobile devices is usually clunky and frustrating, which in return breaks readers’ browsing momentum as well as damages the interests of content providers.
That’s why Google comes to the rescue by launching the project of Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP for short. In this post, we will provide an in-depth introduction to the AMP project and some detailed guidance for you to integrate it in WordPress if you are exactly running a website on this popular CMS platform.

What Is AMP?

AMP is a new open-source initiative launched by Google in October 2015 with the mission of dramatically improving the performance of the mobile web. It primarily consists of the following three parts.

Similar to Facebook Instant Articles, the AMP project is designed to deliver rich content web pages along with smart ads in a fast and highly streamlined manner. However, while the former project is developed for the Facebook mobile application only, AMP can work smoothly on multiple platforms, making it possible for visitors to load the website contents instantly regardless what mobile devices they are using.
AMP is a project that Google stands behind. Despite the fact that the project is currently in its infancy, it can be predicted that Google will make the AMP optimization mandatory and even penalize those non-accelerated pages. Against this background, you will be obliged to integrate this project with your sooner or later.

How to Get Your WordPress Site AMPed?

Being widely favored by newbies and web professionals alike, WordPress is an excellent platform for you to get your hands dirty with AMP. To tell the truth, it is fairly simple to accelerate your WordPress web pages for mobile devices at the bare minimum by following the instructions below.

Step 1 – Initialize the official WordPress AMP plugin

The very first thing you need to do is logging into your WordPress site’s back end and install the  through “Plugins” > “Add New”. Alternatively, you can visit, search for the plugin, and download its ZIP file to the WordPress site of your own.



When the plugin is enabled, it will create an AMP version for each of your WordPress posts. There are no more settings to configure. All you need to do is appending “/amp/” to the end of a post’s URL and you will see its AMP version. If you don’t have beautiful permalinks yet, add “? amp=1” instead.

Step 2 – Validate your AMP pages and their schema markups

Having multiple AMP pages being ready, you need to confirm whether they are guaranteed to work without depending on any external resources. In regular, this can be done with Google Search Console , the tool that can pick up the AMP versions of your WordPress posts through the rel=”amphtml” tag appended by the AMP plugin.
However, the problem is that Google Search Console usually takes up to several days for detecting and showing up the changes that you’ve made to your AMP versions. In this case, we suggest you use the tool above along with Chrome validation process.
Simply navigate to one of your WordPress AMP pages, open it in Chrome, and then append “#development=1” to the end of its URL. In the next, press “Ctrl+Shift+I” to open Chrome Developer Tools and hit the “Console” tab.