Posted by Alberto Medina, AMP and WordPress Developer Advocate, Google
Enabling a first-class AMP experience on WordPress is one of the ways the AMP Project aims to bring a user-first experience to websites and content on the web. There has been a lot of work over the last year to improve the quality of the official AMP plugin and today we are releasing version 1.0-stable of the Official AMP Plugin for WordPress.
Version 1.0 of the plugin integrates AMP content creation seamlessly with standard WordPress content creation workflows across both classic editing, or Gutenberg-based editing. In particular, a native AMP experience is supported in this release, allowing for WordPress sites to be built entirely with AMP, without a duplicate AMP version of a page in ‘paired mode’.
Features and capabilities of the 1.0 release include:
- Content sanitizers: to help substituting HTML tags for their corresponding AMP components ones, implement optimizations, and feed validation information to the plugin compatibility’s tool (see below)
- Compatibility tool: to assist the development of AMP experiences by enabling AMP debugging based on exposing extensive and detailed information about validation errors that may exist, the markup/scripts causing them, and the specific components on site (e.g theme, plugin, core) bearing the responsibility of that page content.
- CSS Tree Shaking: to assist in the process of putting the CSS-house in order in cases where existing CSS rule exceed the maximum limited permitted on single AMP pages.
- Core theme support: enabling full AMP validity for four default themes (i.e. 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019).
- Gutenberg integration: enabling AMP content creation fully integrated with Gutenberg, the new and powerful editing experience in WordPress.
- Native AMP experiences support: enabling full-site AMP experiences without sacrificing by one-bit the flexibility of the platform, or the fidelity of content.
- A myriad of code, performance, and developer experience improvements: from customization flexibility, to better UI flows, internationalization, accessibility, etc. Check the full list in the release post.
- Opti-in/Opt-out support: all functionality is available in an opt-in manner. And users that do opt-in have the option of enabling AMP only on specific sections of their site, and also disable AMP at a granular level (e.g. on a single post)
- Compatibility enforcement: to ensure that a site stays AMP compatible and that only AMP-valid content is ever served
We invite you to try the new release by:
- Upload the plugin to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory in your site
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- If you currently use older versions of the plugin in Classic mode, it is strongly encouraged to migrate to Paired or Native mode
- Learn more details about the features above in the Plugin site
The Journey Ahead
The official AMP plugin for WordPress provides essential tools and functionality for AMP content creation, the WordPress way. It is important to note that the plugin is not a completely turn-key solution to “AMPlify your site”, but instead functions as a key enabling technology for a fully AMP compatible WordPress ecosystem.
The journey ahead is one along the road of ecosystem adoption. As we advance on this road, more plugins and themes will be available with full AMP-compatibility provided out-of-the-box, and site owners will easily find AMP-compatible components to assemble full sites when selecting plugins from WordPress.org plugins/themes page.
In the future, we expect there to be turn-key solutions site owners can leverage to easily provide awesome AMP experiences regardless of their level of savviness. Our ultimate aim is for high-quality AMP content in WordPress-powered sites to be ubiquitous.
Join us as we continue on this journey and please share your feedback on the latest release. We’re enthusiastic about the potential the plugin has to improve the user experience on the web and look forward to what is ahead.