Need help deciding if AMP makes sense for me

I regret AMP, I have problem with page where youtube videos are on it :/ !

For a site like yours, it does not make sense. It is best for News sites and large blogs where traffic and ranking is critical.

AMP pages will get much much better placement in the SERPS on mobile devices, so by installing AMP your AMP page could rank much higher if you don’t have good placement.

If all you have on pages is an image and text, then that will work. If you have a any java/php/contact forms on the page the page won’t validate.

If your sites pages have good ranking, I’d say skip it.

@mddsharpp that’s great advice and much appreciated. And if contact forms won’t render (and I can’t code), that’s the end of the AMP discussion.

What I really want is faster mobile load times. I’m at 4 sec, I need to be much closer to the nice 2 sec and under speeds I get on the desktop. Better SERP/SEO is a bonus, but speed comes first right now.

I’ve done lots of site optimaization already ( the right compression & caching plugins, manual .htaccess mods, CDN etc) when developing the desktop. Can you maybe point me in the right direction of what else I can do specifically for mobile speed?

Can you do without having a contact form IN your AMP pages? I just put a link to my site contact form and turned AMP off on that specific page. It might be better to tell me what types of programming you have on your pages.

AMP can be turned off for certain pages and posts.

@mddsharpp, thanks for getting back. In the meantime, I have installed AMP for WordPress. Just to see what would happen, I enabled all AMP post type(s) support: Posts, Pages, My Templates, Contact Styles, My Libary.

My contact form (Contact Form 7 + Contact Form 7 Style) was unaffected. In fact, my mobile site looks no different than before AMP, which is great (and unexpected!). The mobile site now loads much faster. According to https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/, My load time is “excellent” (3s) and my estimated visitor loss in low.

I am curious about a couple of things though. One, I imagine I only need to enable AMP for posts and pages, correct? Two, I was expecting to se an AMP badge next to my google search results, but it is not there. Google mytechguy calgary and you will see what I mean.

Thanks again for your input!

I SEE THIS URL AMP PAGE but when I searched it via Google on mobile I did not see the AMP badge.

The AMP on that page is valid.

That tells me Google hasn’t crawled it set and taken the AMP in to it’s Google Cache yet.

Look at your Google Search Console and see how many AMP pages Google has discovered.

Did you set a AMP page for your home page?

It can take Google a few weeks to find all your AMP pages, do you have a sitemap?

Yes I did set an AMP page for my home page. And yes, I have both page sitemaps and author sitemaps created months ago through google search console.

Good to know crawling can take a while, I was wondering why nothing was happening yet. Google Search Console is reporting no AMP pages yet and it is “Processing data, please check again in a few days”

I just googled myself on mobile and don’t even see the AMPed blog post you are seeing. Strange. Even stranger, this discussion thread shows up as a google result towards the bottom of the first search page.

And I’m still wondering if I only need to enable AMP for posts and pages? Right now I have AMP enabled for ‘everything’ (Posts, Pages, My Templates, Contact Styles, My Libary.)

Thanks!

No, I don’t see them in search results, I just appended ?amp to a few of your blog posts. For you it looks like all you need is posts, pages, categories.

OK, I’ve limited it to just Posts and Pages (There was no Categories). Now the waiting game while crawl does it’s thing.

And I was mistaken yesterday. My home page AMP was actually disabled. Is this plugin default behaviour? Because all my other pages and posts were AMP enabled.

Yes, the plugin will by default not have the homepage enabled for AMP. So to make the homepage available in AMP, you first enable the post type support for Pages and then you have to go to the page set as the homepage and enable AMP for it. This only applies to the classic mode. In 1.0 it will not apply in the new paired/native modes.

Thanks, looks like I did the right thing. Not to be paranoid or stupid but this is what I did, can you confirm it looks good? I had post type support for pages aleady set yesterday via AMP > General. Earlier this evening, I enabled home page AMP through WordPress Dashboard > Pages > {my home page} > Edit > Set AMP to Enabled in the Publish section of the editor window.

A couple of curiosity questions… I don’t understand why the home page, of all pages, would have AMP disabled by default? Second, how long does a crawl “typically” take?

… and kudos for making AMP implementation so easy. Cheers!

The AMP homepage has an image in the content which looks a bit off: https://mytechguy.ca/?amp

The reason why AMP is not enabled by default for the homepage (and pages with custom templates assigned) is for just this reason: normally it has a custom template which does not work properly in the Classic mode.

I suggest trying the new 1.0 version of the AMP plugin, now available in release candidate 3: https://make.xwp.co/2018/11/22/amp-plugin-release-v1-0-rc3/?amp

With this version, you can go to the AMP settings screen and switch from Classic to Paired mode. In this new mode, the plugin will re-use your active theme’s templates and stylesheets in AMP. The intention here is that the there should be no visual difference between the AMP and non-AMP version of a page.

@westonruter that is good information to know, thank you. In the next few days, I will set up a subdomain staging area on my live site, to test Release Candidate 3.

Hopefully the next question doesn’t put you on the spot too much: Do you have feeling (rough guesstimate is good enough) when the community can expect a mature beta/initial prime-time poduction release of the plugin? Meaning Paired Mode across themes and stylesheets, SERP with AMP badges, and of course mobile pagespeed? (I totally get that that’s a tall order).

Cheers! ??

It depends on which plugins you use and how much JS is required by a theme to function. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. I am using the latest version of the plugin on my own site which uses a child theme of Twenty Seventeen. I went ahead with native mode as opposed to paired, so there aren’t any AMP-specific URL: https://weston.ruter.net

The most recent 4 core themes will be compatible, and there should be a good selection of non-core themes which are also confirmed to be AMP-compatible by the year’s end.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 12 months ago by Weston Ruter.