wbAMP AMP Standalone mode

Use case

On its main settings page, wbAMP has an Operation mode selector. The Development and Normal modes have been covered before, but the last option, Standalone is an experimental feature that lets you build a 100% AMP site.

AMP pages are normally an alternate version of a site's regular HTML pages. When Joomla! creates a page for your site - http://example.com/my-page, wbAMP creates another page, at a different URL - http://example.com/my-page/amp, and inserts a hidden tag in the regular page, telling Google that the AMP page exists and should be displayed to mobile users.

When Standalone mode is enabled, your site only has AMP pages! AMP pages are served on Joomla! standard URLs - http://example.com/my-page. Google has stated that those pages will be crawled and indexed normally, so we think this might be a good opportunity to very simply get a mobile-friendly web sites.

Be aware that:

• long-term SEO consequences are unknown (good or bad). We do expect an AMP-only site to perform very well in mobile search though.
• usual AMP technical restrictions applies, so your site won't have javascript, forms, etc (workarounds exist)
• an AMP site can be viewed and will work the same on desktop and mobile. Its design and tech specifications just make it more suited for mobile, that's all.

Thus the most common use case for this technique is probably for mobile-only web sites, fairly static such as event sites, temporary products sites, etc

How to

Enabling the Standalone mode is only a matter of selecting it in the Operation mode selector on wbAMP settings main page. All other settings and requirements stay the same as in the other operation modes.

When you enable Standalone mode, the amp URLs are no longer used to serve content, and will return a 404 error. AMP content is served on your site standard URLs. Your regular HTML pages, those originally created by Joomla, can no longer be accessed.

404 and other error pages

In standalone mode, all errors (404, 500) must also be displayed in AMP mode. So wbAMP now comes with a 404 page, used only when in Standalone operation mode.