In October 2015 Google announced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), used for making smaller web pages to be shown on mobile devices. Many pages are at this moment not optimized yet for mobile use, which results in downloading lots of data - something can and should be optimized. AMP offers a solution for this.
What is AMP?
AMP HTML is actually normal HTML but with some restrictions to get reliable performance and some extra extensions for rich formatting. The AMP JS library is used for the speedy rendering of the AMP HTML web pages. What really happens is that your web page is stripped from all the unnecessary elements with minimal resources. Also Google offers it's own AMP CDN.
Why is this important?
Google will now show AMP results combined in your search results. So the expectation is websites offering an AMP version will score better in its search results.
How can I use Google AMP on my Joomla! website?
Since February 2016 Weeblr (known from e.g. sh404SEF) is offering an extension who will take care of rendering the AMP versions of your web pages. There is a free community version and a paid version available. The main differences between these two versions are:
- AMP analytics support for Google Analytics
- K2 support
- Social share support
- Complete comparison: https://weeblr.com/frequent-questions/wbamp#community
Both versions do offer support for wbAMP articles in Joomla! and there are many settings in the plugin. You can also add some CSS styling via the plugin. So via this Weeblr plugin you can easily add AMP pages to your Joomla! website.
Further resources for AMP:
About the author
Jisse Reitsma is the founder of Yireo, extension developer, developer trainer and 3x Magento Master. His passion is for technology and open source. And he loves talking as well.
