Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are a great tool for many blogs and sites to consider. Popular sites like CNN.com and Pinterest are already on AMP.
With a few clicks, ie by downloading the AMP plugin, your site would be on its way to being AMP enabled.
Indexing your sites to AMP would be in stages- it is not instantaneous. My Visit Malaysia website took about 3 months before I saw most of the blog posts being displayed in mobile search results as AMP enabled.
I noticed the indexing would start with more popular blog posts first or the posts that display your page at search results.
However, you need to consider carefully before choosing to enable your site for AMP.
Reason being, if you have enabled your site and then change your mind (by deactivating the AMP plugin)…. Google would still point to the AMP page which would cause a 404 error to be returned.
Of course with time, Google would re-index back the original page. But we all know that a site that display 404 messages or page no found are bad for business because:
- it can impact your site rank
- it will increase your bounce rate
- it will reduce the number of visitors to your site
I did turn off AMP for one of my more popular site and was shocked to the search results which display my page still show the AMP sign but when I click it arrived at ‘page not found’. Totally no good.
So almost immediately, I turn the AMP back on and made modifications to my AMP sites to help increase my conversions.
What happen if you really want to disable AMP on your site?
The longer you decide to switch to non AMP after having AMP enabled, the more pages would have been AMP enabled.
You would need to do 301 redirects like crazy. Download the redirection plugin and then point the link from the amp url back to your blog’s original url.
And spruce up your 404 page to give other call of actions to your visitors like displaying your recent and/or best posts, etc.
The above exercise is painful (doing 301 redirects) and while you are working on your redirections, you are also losing valuable traffic.
My experience
Overall, my experience has been much more positive after enabling my sites to AMP. Mainly I have seen increase in visitors like never before compared to before enabling my sites to AMP.