More traffic through Google AMP

What is Google AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP goes a significant step further than Responsive websites in that it is based on HTML, but has some strong limitations:

• Not all HTML commands are allowed. There are alternatives for some HTMl commands.
• Self-developed Javascript is not allowed. Only some common scripts that are supported and offered by AMP can be used.
• Only one CSS file is allowed. Inline style specifications are prohibited
• Advertising banners may only be integrated by marketers that have been approved by AMP.
• AMP pages are not delivered directly from your own server. AMP pages are cached by Google, i.e. stored on Google's servers and delivered from there.

What are the advantages of AMP?

The aim of AMP is to deliver websites particularly quickly even with low bandwidth and thus positively influence the user experience. This can be achieved through the greatly simplified structure of AMP websites in contrast to normal or responsive websites. The fact that AMP pages are cached on Google servers and delivered from there also ensures a very fast page load time.

Google also highlights AMP pages in search results with a flash(⚡).

AMP parallel to the actual website

AMP was designed in such a way that it is normally offered in addition to a desktop version of a website. To link from the desktop version to the AMP page, the following tag is used:

<link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html">

The other way round this day:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/full/document.html">

This helps the Google crawler to find and index corresponding AMP pages.

AMP with WordPress

With WordPress, it is particularly easy to offer an AMP variant of your own site. There are corresponding plugins that can be installed for this purpose.

After you have activated AMP, it is a good idea to test the AMP page. Google has set up a page for this purpose: https://search.google.com/test/amp

Conveniently, on this page you can send the AMP website directly to the Google index.