Your thoughts on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) push that went out today?

My thoughts: "Ugh..."

I really can't stand most mobile sites. It's 2016, my phone is more than capable of loading the full version of a site.

It's funny though. The page MUST load in a second... Yet, you're still there for five fucking minutes wasting time reading some stupid blog post or newspaper article. Really?

AMP talk has been really quiet. I haven't heard anyone really mention it, and when does it get brought up briefly, it's always negative. Can't say I'm a fan myself.

Also as a non-developer, it doesn't make sense. There are wordpress plugins out there but looking at the reviews, most have a lot of bugs and issues. Just a hassle to sort all of this out.
 
You guys need to understand that your tier 1 internet is NOT what 99% of users are using. This is the purpose behind AMP and pre-rendering. Testing on your 4G is NOT what you should be using for speed tests. Testing on your top of the line wifi, fiber, etc is NOT what you should be testing on either. Overall, I am not really thrilled with AMP, but I absolutely understand their push for it.
 
I was looking around the web for thoughts (I don't have any amp'd pages and am still a scrub). So far, the response seems to have been lukewarm, but we'll see. I don't really do much mobile searching on my phone, other than a few websites. It's kind of tough because a lot of these websites that use gifs, will use 50mb gifs and kill my data plan. I try to only use 500mb data a month, so you can see the issue.
 
Yea.. noooope. It will fail just like Facebook's attempt.
 
knownerror said:
Yea.. noooope. It will fail just like Facebook's attempt.
Click to expand...

^ This is how I look at it: I reject it entirely.

I respect @Flex's view, which is entirely agreeable, and also @gcomt pointing out those of us with data caps.

I feel like AMP is providing that as a secondary benefit while touting it as the primary benefit.

AMP is an attempt to control the ecosystem by hijacking, or rather inserting a virtual layer over, the platform. Instead of simply split testing font sizes, colors, etc, they will now be able to control positioning as well while stripping out distractions. Google isn't a charity organization. It's all about increasing clicks on CPC ads.

Same with Facebooks attempt. Their's is/was about increasing impressions and engagement by keeping you within their environment even when you intended to exit it, by layering a virtual sandbox over the top. When you're done playing in the sandbox, you can get back to the swing set and the slides. But in the end, you never left their playground.

It's very similar to what Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and many other companies figured out... crowdsourced, user-generated products, users, equipment... they just provide the virtual infrastructure.

The big money is coming out of increasingly abstract, illusory plane of existence. It's weird as hell.
 
Agreed. It will end up being a "line item" that they will probably monetize on a little bit, but probably not much more to it than that. I highly doubt it will ever see massive adoption much beyond big media brands.

I have a few WP microsites I got running with the AMP plugin, which was easy enough. Figured I might as well play the game and get a few visits from it, which it already has. That being said, I was not at all impressed with the performance aspect, which is supposedly the entire point of the AMP framework. The performance offered literally NOTHING over simply generating a static page. Might as well generate static pages, with JS for interactivity, that YOU have full control over. At the end of the day, it's always great to keep in mind that, with "free" things like this, WE'RE the "product".
 
In an effort to save people time, so they're not potentially wasting it building revenue streams for Google, here's the cliff's notes from what I can remember I had to do to get AMP running on a WP site. Initially, I had problems getting the code to validate to AMP specifications. This should do it, though I can't remember if I'm missing anything:

  1. Install this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/
  2. In your theme directory, create an /amp/ folder (/theme/amp/)
  3. In that new /amp/ folder, create a file called single.php and put this code in it:
    PHP: 
    <!doctype html>
<html amp>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1,maximum-scale=1,user-scalable=no">
    <?php do_action( 'amp_post_template_head', $this ); ?>

    <style amp-custom>
    <?php $this->load_parts( array( 'style' ) ); ?>
    <?php do_action( 'amp_post_template_css', $this ); ?>
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<nav class="amp-wp-title-bar">
    <div>
        <a href="<?php echo esc_url( $this->get( 'home_url' ) ); ?>">
            <?php $site_icon_url = $this->get( 'site_icon_url' ); ?>
            <?php if ( $site_icon_url ) : ?>
                <amp-img src="<?php echo esc_url( $site_icon_url ); ?>" width="32" height="32" class="amp-wp-site-icon"></amp-img>
            <?php endif; ?>
            <?php echo esc_html( $this->get( 'blog_name' ) ); ?>
        </a>
    </div>
</nav>
<div class="amp-wp-content">
    <div><?php isa_amp_featured_img('medium'); ?></div>
    <h1 class="amp-wp-title"><?php echo wp_kses_data( $this->get( 'post_title' ) ); ?></h1>
    <ul class="amp-wp-meta">
        <?php $this->load_parts( apply_filters( 'amp_post_template_meta_parts', array( 'meta-author', 'meta-time', 'meta-taxonomy' ) ) ); ?>
    </ul>
    <?php echo $this->get( 'post_amp_content' ); ?>
</div>
<?php do_action( 'amp_post_template_footer', $this ); ?>
</body>
</html>
  4. Add this code to your theme's functions.php, to tell it to use this new template file:
    PHP: 
    function my_amp_set_custom_template( $file, $type, $post ) {
    if ( 'single' === $type ) {
        $file =  get_stylesheet_directory() . '/amp/single.php';
    }
    return $file;
}
add_filter( 'amp_post_template_file', 'my_amp_set_custom_template', 10, 3 );
  5. If you're using Yoast, you can also install this plugin to make certain modifications a little easier: https://wordpress.org/plugins/glue-for-yoast-seo-amp/ This will give you an AMP menu in Yoast, for some of the basic AMP configuration options, so you can avoid manually messing with PHP a little bit more.

I feel like I'm missing something, but I can't remember what. That should be enough to get you up and running, and it generating AMP pages for each of your posts. They'll be generated at /amp/ on the end of each post (example.com/my-post/amp/).

Here's the details on testing and validating your AMP pages: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/validate.html

In short, in Chrome Developer Tools (hit F12 while on an AMP page in Chrome):
  • Click the 'Console' tab
  • Append this to the end of your AMP URL: #development=1
  • Hit ctrl + F5 to refresh
If everything is fine, you'll see a blue tag in the console that says 'AMP validation successful'. If there are any issues, you'll see red errors in the console. Let me know if you see any, and I'll see if I can remember what I did to fix them. All of the above should get you up and running (or 95% of the way there, if I forgot anything), though with a very rudimentary framework. There's a lot of other stuff that can be added with the AMP framework, but I haven't even bothered since it's low-to-no ROI for my needs.
 
Now that almost two years have passed, do you think it's worth integrating AMP?
 
Hope that EU will drop another multi-billion fine on top if they actually try to increase the rankings artificially simply because the AMP is implemented. Just like they did with own shopping cart SERP listings and other tricks they tried.
 
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