If you run a WordPress site, you’ve probably already contemplated at some point whether or not to implement the new and popular Google AMP for mobile. We had the same dilemma here at Kinsta and ended up testing it out for a while. In the end, we didn’t see any good results and it ended up hurting our mobile conversion rate.
So today we’re going to look at how to disable Google AMP on your blog and how to do it safely without 404 errors or harming your SEO. Simply disabling the AMP plugin itself could end up really harming your site, so be careful. The good news is that both methods mentioned below don’t require a WordPress developer and can be done in just a few minutes!
- What is Google AMP?
- How to Disable Google AMP
- Monitoring Reindexing
Google AMP
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) was originally launched in October 2015. The project is based on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely from web technologies, which allows websites to create lightweight web pages. To put it simply, it offers a way to serve a stripped-down version of your current web page. You can read more about it in our in-depth post about Google AMP , and compare all the pros and cons.
Why Google AMP Didn’t Work for Us?
Because of all the hype around Google AMP, we decided to test it on our site Kinsta. You never know what’s going to happen until you test something. So we let it run for two months and here’s where we came to the conclusions. Note: This could vary across almost every industry, so we recommend testing it on your own site before jumping to conclusions. A couple of ways to test this include:
- View data in Google Search Console before and after.
- Compare Google Analytics data on your /amp/ URLs vs original organic traffic URLs before and after.
Here is some data from the time AMP was enabled on our site.
PositionsAs you can see, after enabling Google AMP Google AMP and giving it time to index we definitely saw a drop in average SERP positions on mobile.
After activating Google AMP we saw a israel email list decrease in CTR on mobile.
After activating Google AMP we saw an increased number of impressions.
Google AMP Clicks
After activating we saw a slight increase in total clicks.
For us, there is good and bad in the above data. However, the most important part was looking at the Google Analytics data for the time that AMP was enabled:
- Our mobile leads decreased by 59.09%.
- Our mobile email newsletter signups decreased by 16.67%.
- Our mobile account creations decreased by 10.53%.
For this reason, we decided that wasn’t working deposit and withdrawal of money in adMaven for our business model. So why haven’t we seen good results when others have? Well, probably one of the main reasons is that our site is already pretty fast on mobile . So we didn’t see a huge speed boost like other ad-heavy sites might. According to Google , 70% of mobile belgium numbers network connections globally will take place on 3G or slower speeds by 2020. So while it’s super important to optimize for mobile, those who already have a well-optimized mobile site probably won’t notice much of a difference.
Another reason is that we don’t publish news . A large number of publications are using AMP and taking advantage of the carousel in SERPs. A lot of big companies like Washington Post, Gizmodo, and Wired all saw big improvements with but these are all news-oriented, ad-heavy content sites. We, of course, publish a ton of content, but our main focus is still on generating leads and signing up customers.
