A quick shout out to Chad Lio who brought AMP to my attention about three months ago.  The web is moving so fast, there’s so much innovation and evolution going on, how do companies, web departments, and web developers keep up and prioritize?!  Really, you can’t keep up with it all, but you can learn enough to make an informed decision to figure out where best to allocate one’s time and resources.

After all, you can’t manage new web projects and initiatives if you don’t understand what impact they will have on your website traffic and bottom line.  In the end, that’s what it’s all about.  Still, a while back, I read some articles about AMP and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  One thing’s certain, when Google decides to get into the mix, we best all pay attention.

I encourage business owners and web developers to explore the information about AMP and come to your own conclusions.  Sooner or later, we will all have to implement it on our sites.

My own experience with AMP so far

As a business systems architect, one of my other careers is an open source PHP web developer here in Jacksonville.  When it comes to the web, you can’t afford to be idle, you have to constantly be curious, learn and experiment.  So I came to the conclusion that it’s usually a good idea to be an early adapter of these things if for no other reason than to prepare to implement and understand its limitations, among other issues we may encounter.  It makes sense for a business systems architect to know the solutions and issues a company may face before the owner asks.  Who wants to look ill-informed?

Sure enough, what I’ve learned so far is that AMP isn’t yet fully mature — but accelerating mobile pages?!  That sounds like a great idea to me, especially when page load directly speeds affect your website’s SERPs!

So simple in WordPress, but limited

So, the first thing I did was notice that Automattic, the makers of WordPress already has a plug-in, so I tried it out.  It works great, you just activate it, but it doesn’t support AMP for pages or categories yet.  Another more effective plug-in I tried was Page Frog, it created AMP pages seamlessly.

To check your website, if you have a Google Webmaster account, it’s a little hard to find the AMP validation tool.  Here’s a quick link to just pasting in your website domain to validate it for AMP.

My conclusion about AMP

My conclusion is that you should phase AMP into your websites, there are still unknowns about how it interacts with certain themes that may interfere with certain Javascript and theming elements you might otherwise expect to be delivered to mobile that may be excluded or error out.  PROCEED WITH CAUTION with AMP for now.  Try the WP AMP plug-in if you have WordPress and for non-CMS pages, start working in the AMP markup, it’s really not a lot of extra code and it can reduce load on your site at no extra charge!