Automattic Adds AMP Support to WordPress

[djbaxter]

Automattic Adds AMP Support to WordPress.com, Releases Plugin for Self-Hosted Sites
by Sarah Gooding, WordPress Tavern
February 24, 2016

What makes AMP pages load so quickly? Google has a strict set of optimizations that are employed to improve mobile loading:

• Allow only asynchronous scripts
• 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

To see just how fast AMP is, check out the Google search demo at g.co/amp.

Automattic also released a plugin that allows self-hosted WordPress users to take advantage of the mobile performance improvements offered by AMP. The plugin has been tested since October and is currently active on 8,000 installs. For most users, it?s as easy as installing the plugin and activating it. The default styles are fairly generic but developers can refer to the documentation on GitHub to further customize AMP styles.

Read more...

Notes:

1. There is an error in the Wordpress Tavern article: To check your amp versions of posts, append /?amp to the end of the URL rather than /amp/ which on some installations will generate a 404 not found error.
2. The plugin does not serve up AMP versions of WordPress pages, just posts.

 

[James Watt]

Cool stuff.

I finally got off my butt and did a little reading to wrap my head around whether or not I need to be paying attention to AMP (read: doing this for clients) so if you've found this thread, and you're like me and you've heard of AMP (or not) but don't fully grasp it's significance, this article's from December and will get you up to speed in about 10 minutes:
https://moz.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-whiteboard-friday

One of the more important quirks I wasn't aware of... Google's planning on caching your AMP pages. Meaning if you want your page load speed to be extra fast, but your hosting is slow, undistributed, or otherwise some kind of a bottleneck, that goes away for free if you follow Google's AMP rules, since they'll be the ones hosting the cached file they serve customers. I'm curious how fast page changes would go 'live' for visitors though, hopefully there's a way to ping Google and let them know you changed the page (if there is, I imagine a wordpress plugin Automattic would do it automatically?)