How to Properly Setup Google AMP on Your WordPress Site

Over the years, we’ve seen countless WordPress site owners get excited about Google AMP, thinking it’s the secret to lightning-fast mobile pages and better search rankings.

While the technology certainly has its merits, we’ve learned that rushing into AMP without understanding its implications can actually hurt your website’s performance.

The landscape has changed significantly since AMP’s early days. Google now emphasizes page experience signals and Core Web Vitals over AMP implementation, which means optimizing your existing pages often provides better ROI than creating separate AMP versions.

Still, there are scenarios where AMP can be valuable for certain types of WordPress sites.

If you’ve decided that AMP is right for your WordPress website, this guide will show you how to implement it correctly from start to finish. We’ll walk you through the entire setup process and help you avoid the common pitfalls that can impact your site’s performance and user experience.

What Is Google AMP?

Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source framework launched by Google in October 2015 to address slow mobile web loading times. The technology creates stripped-down versions of web pages that load almost instantly on mobile devices.

Here’s how it works: AMP uses a simplified version of HTML (called AMP HTML), restricts JavaScript usage, and stores your content on Google’s global cache network.

When someone clicks on your AMP link from search results, Google serves the cached version directly from their servers, eliminating the usual loading delays.

Think of it like Facebook Instant Articles, but with broader reach. While Instant Articles only work within Facebook’s mobile app, AMP pages can be accessed from any browser or platform that supports the technology.

The reality today: AMP adoption has significantly declined since its peak popularity. Major platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit have all discontinued their AMP implementations.

More importantly, Google no longer gives AMP pages preferential treatment in search rankings, which was one of the main reasons websites adopted it initially.

Based on our experience running WPBeginner, we’ve never implemented AMP on our own site. Instead, we recommend focusing your optimization efforts on improving Core Web Vitals, which delivers better long-term results for both user experience and search performance.

That said, if you’ve decided that AMP fits your business goals and technical requirements, the official AMP plugin remains available and functional. This guide will walk you through the complete setup process so you can implement it correctly.

Setting Up Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the AMP plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you open the plugin’s onboarding wizard by clicking the link at the top of the Plugins page.

The first page gives you an overview of what the plugin does. Once you read this, you can click the ‘Next’ button to continue.

The second page of the wizard lets you choose your technical background.

Advanced users who understand PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code can click the first option. However, we recommend most users choose the second ‘non-technical’ option because it makes setting up Google AMP much simpler.

Once you have chosen a technical background, click the ‘Next’ button to continue.

The plugin will now scan your site for compatibility issues with your active theme and plugins. Once the scan is complete, you will be notified of any issues.

In the next step of the onboarding wizard, you need to choose a templates mode. If there were no issues found during the site scan, then you should choose the Standard option.

Otherwise, you should read the text in the Transitional and Reader sections and choose the recommended option.

Congratulations, when you click the ‘Next’ button the wizard will be complete and you will see several mobile AMP previews of your website.

Make sure you click the ‘Finish’ button to store your settings.

You can now visit any post on your website and add /amp/ to the end of the URL like this to see a stripped-down AMP version of the post.

http://example.com/my-blog-post/amp/

This will be automatically displayed on mobile devices.

Getting Accurate Analytics on AMP Pages

One of the major issues with AMP is that it can skew your Google Analytics data. Visitors to your AMP pages aren’t tracked accurately and can even be double-counted.

For the most accurate analytics, we recommend using MonsterInsights. It’s the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

The MonsterInsights AMP addon will automatically fix your tracking so that you get the real stats on your visitors.

You can learn how to set up MonsterInsights in our beginner’s guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Expert Guides on WordPress Performance

Google AMP is one way to improve website performance on mobile. You may like to see some articles on our preferred methods for speeding up your WordPress website.

• The Ultimate Guide to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance
• How to Speed Up Your eCommerce Website (Proven Tips)
• Why Do You Need a CDN for Your WordPress Blog? [Infographic]
• How to Optimize Core Web Vitals for WordPress (Ultimate Guide)
• What Is Google’s INP Score and How to Improve It in WordPress
• How to Optimize Images for Web Performance Without Losing Quality
• How to Use GTmetrix Plugin to Improve WordPress Site Performance
• How We Boost Page Load Speed on WPBeginner
• How to Properly Run a Website Speed Test (Best Tools)

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to improve your WordPress site health or our expert picks on the fastest WordPress hosting.

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