Are you aware slow loading time is one of the main reasons readers get frustrated with your blog?
It’s such a problem, plugins are made to try to speed up a blog’s loading time.
I actually participated in a guest post where participants were interviewed as to how they were dealing with the problem of slow loading time.
Are you dealing with it or are you sticking your head in the sand?
Today’s guest author Pankaj Dhawan is here to tell you how to solve the problem by accelerating your blog’s loading time on mobile devices.
How to Set Up Accelerated Mobile Pages for WordPress
Pankaj Dhawan
First of all, what are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
In simple terms, it is about the loading time of a website on the mobile device, which also means making a website mobile-friendly, as much as possible.
We know that loading time of a page is one of the critical factors while doing right On-Page SEO for your website and boosting your traffic.
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
We, as bloggers, need to keep this thing in mind that we are able to hold the user on our page.
To check how your website loading time is, you can visit PingDom or Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
I would test with both anyway since both are industry leaders but, of course, Google would always be better and preferred.
Why is focusing on mobile important?
If you see how mobile is doing, you can simply see below the graph:
Just look at the trend. By 2015, users on the phone globally arose and surpassed the users on the desktop.
Just ask yourself – what do you use more? You will get the answer yourself.
There are literally tons of articles on how to make your site mobile friendly or AMP friendly but if you aren’t aware of it, this article is for you, keep reading:
What is AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open source project developed by Google. It is recognized by the users globally because by using this technology, webmasters are able to increase the page loading speed and hence make a website mobile-friendly.
What more do you get? Since this is a project initiated by Google, you are in safe hands and what bonus do you get? If you use Google’s AMP HTML, your site will be cached by Google.
AMP is very critical for your website since page-loading is not just the factor for SEO but also a positive boost for the users on your site.
Pros and Cons of applying AMP on your website:
Pros first:
There are few important advantages of AMP:
- Reduced Page-loading time
- Better SEO results
- Automatic caching by Google
Cons:
- Menu bar change which might not look as appealing to the users
- Some content like videos may take longer to load on the mobile page
That being said, AMP has more advantages than disadvantages and more reasons to consider having it for your website.
How does AMP work?
Here below are the ways how the AMP is working to make sure your website on mobile loads faster:
- Execute all AMP JavaScript asynchronously
- Size all resources statically
- Don’t let extension mechanisms block rendering
- Keep all third-party JavaScript out of the critical path
- All CSS must be inline and size-bound
- Font triggering must be efficient
- Minimize style recalculations
- Only run GPU-accelerated animations
- Prioritize resource loading
- Load pages in an instant
You can learn more about the details here.
How to setup AMP for your WordPress Website?
With the project released by Google, several developers jumped in and made efforts to build plugins that make the job much easier for us.
Below are the two methods that you can use to make your site run as AMP:
- AMP by Automattic
Automattic is the company behind developing all of the WordPress and Jetpack, quite famous among the WordPress site owners.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
It is much easier done than said. To start using it, just add this plugin and activate it, you are done!
How does it work?
It adds a meta tag in the header of the page which lets Google know that an AMP version of the website is also available.
To view how your AMP site looks, just add /amp/ in the end of the URL. For example, in the case of Blogeomics, you can use http://blogeomics.com which will result into AMP version of your website.
The drawback of this plugin is that it doesn’t allow customization.
This plugin offers much more customization features and can be used on any WordPress site. But to do the customization, you must install the AMP by Automattic which is mentioned above.
What can you do with this plugin?
Setting up Google analytics
Updating logo of your site
Updating navigation of your site
Displaying WordPress comments
Adding featured images to posts
Bonus Tip:
If you are a user of SEO plugin by Yoast, you would be glad to read ahead.
To make your site better SEO friendly, Yoast has developed another plugin called Glue for Yoast SEO and AMP.
What this plugin does for you is it makes sure that the settings you used for SEO by Yoast plugin remain intact even on the AMP site.
To use this, you simply download and install, activate the plugin and you are done. You can now keep updating your website like you used to do earlier, no further efforts needed.
Validation:
After you are done setting up your AMP website, it is important that you once validate using the AMP validator.
You simply add your website URL and add /amp/ to it to check the homepage.
To check other post pages, you simply add /amp/ in the end.
Conclusion:
We all know how important it is to keep yourself updated with the trend, especially when it comes to technology.
I am sure you have understood the importance of AMP and how to implement it on your WordPress website. If you happen to have any questions, please do not hesitate to email me or comment below.
Happy AMP-lifying ☺
Author Bio:
Pankaj Dhawan is the enthusiastic writer and owner of Blogeomics having a keen interest in learning about tech stuff, mostly about blogging, SEO and money-making online and so he writes about these things online at his blog. He loves sharing knowledge, collaborating with similar minded people and talking about ideas. You can make him happy by sending more comments and some pizzas 😉
Host Blogger’s Comments:
Pankaj has written an important post. Readers expect quick loading time, and Google penalizes for slow loading time. Follow his tips. It’s win-win!
Please share so other bloggers know how to speed up their sites and the consequences if they don’t.
I look forward to your answers in the comments section:
What are your experiences with loading speed? Have you given any thought to Accelerated Mobile Pages?
Related:
6 Ways You Can Save Time Blogging, Technology You Should Know
Source:
Screenshots 1 and 2: Courtesy of Neil Patel, Quicksprout.com
