wbAMP overview
As of September 1st, 2022, wbAMP is discontinued. The AMP technology is on its way out and most users are progressively phasing it out, while Google itself no longer requires it for SERP features such as Top Stories or News carousels. The extension will be in security mode only, meaning only security issues will be fixed going forward, for existing subscribers. It is no longer possible to purchase or renew wbAMP subscription.
wbAMP is a specialized plugin for the Joomla! Content Management System. Its purpose is to provide AMP support to Joomla!, by creating on the fly an alternate version of the pages of a Joomla site that complies with the AMP specification. wbAMP will also properly manage inserting suitable tags into your regular pages, so that search engines are aware of the AMP version of a page, and start indexing and using it. It also allows building AMP-only sites, suited for mobile applications for instance.
Accelerated Mobile Pages are not meant to be displayed on your site for mobile users. Google will display them to searchers in the search results pages. Enabling wbAMP will not change the display of your site when viewed from a phone. It will however let search engines know that you have an AMP version of your pages available, and let search engines find and index them. An exception to this is if you select to enable an AMP-only site, where your site only has pages that complies with the AMP format.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page. It is an attempt to provide much faster display of content to readers on mobile devices. Mobile searchers accounting for more than 50% of all searches, it certainly is an important goal to achieve. This initiative comes from Google, which has stated that providing AMP pages will not provide an SEO boost per se, but...
- Google also restated that speed is and will be an important ranking factor, especially on mobile
- AMP results will be displayed proheminently, in an image carousel so it's hard to not think as AMP as something you want to have if it applies to your content.
Google also stated that initially news-like content will be displayed in search results (in a carousel), but the goal is that all types of content make use of this technology. After the last few months, they have now startetd to add more types of content such as recipes. And general content, including products and shops, is now on their roadmap. It is expected to bring significant benefits. Large organizations such as the New York Times, the Guardian and others are part of the initial test groups and already use AMP pages.
How does the AMP plugin work?
The plugin will monitor the pages displayed by your site. On some pages, and following simple selection rules you create, wbAMP will:
- Insert a specific html tag in the HTML source code of the page, with the address of the AMP version of the page. Search engines reads those tags, see that this page has an AMP equivalent, and go fetch and index the AMP version (in addition to the full HTML one of course)
- Whenever a search engine or a visitor requests the AMP version of a page - which has a special URL, ending in amp usually, wbAMP will let Joomla render the page normally, but will process it just before returning the result, stripping out all invalid (per AMP specification) content and adding required markup, CSS and javascript to create a valid AMP page.
Alternatively, you can also instruct wbAMP to make all the pages on your site AMP, meaning the regular HTML Joomla output will never be visible.
How are AMP pages accessed?
The AMP versions of your pages can be accessed following this convention:
- /one-sample-page --> /one-sample-page/amp
- /one-sample-page.html --> /one-sample-page.amp.html
- /one-sample-page/ --> /one-sample-page/amp/
When using the "standalone" mode, where the entire site is AMP compliant, URLs have no suffix, and the standard SEF URLs are used throughout.