Editor’s Note: the following guest post was written by Dan Walmsley, Lead Architect for Jetpack, and originally appeared on the Jetpack blog.
We spend more of our lives online than ever before. Whether you are building a business or expressing your creative side, you need a website that is fast, beautiful, and able to gracefully present your biggest ideas. And with search engines prioritizing performance more than ever, a slow website can really hurt your ability to optimize your SEO.
In this article, we’ll discuss how just two plugins working together, Jetpack and the official AMP for WordPress plugin, will give you world-class performance and SEO. Are you ready? Let’s go!
The plugin conundrum
WordPress’ 55,000+ plugins give you a lot of power, but finding the right plugin can be difficult. Once you’ve chosen your plugins, making everything fast is a huge challenge — each plugin adds its own files to the page, bogging down your site.
Often the only option is to edit the plugin or theme itself. This leads many site owners to hire expert help, which can get expensive fast.
One of the best tools for making a fast website is AMP, originally created by Google and now a part of the OpenJS Foundation. AMP does a lot to improve performance automatically, but the AMP ecosystem is still growing and is thus not compatible with all other WordPress plugins just yet.
What if there was another plugin, that when paired with AMP provided an even simpler solution for non-programmers? Good news, now there is a way to get all the power and performance you need for almost any website from one set of tools.
AMP + Jetpack: Simplicity, power, and speed
Over the last six months, Google and Jetpack have worked closely with XWP, a premier WordPress development agency, to create a high performance all-in-one toolkit for WordPress.
Jetpack has always been one of the best all-in-one plugins for WordPress. With over 25 blocks and 30 widgets, Jetpack provides all the features that most websites need in one place — stats, social sharing, payment buttons, video hosting, a podcast player, and much more. Plus, with built-in backups, anti-spam and malware scanning, you can rest easy that your site and data are protected.
The official AMP for WordPress plugin, built by AMP project contributors including Google and XWP, provides out-of-the-box solutions to help minimize the amount of resources needed to build and maintain sites that perform consistently well.
By using these plugins together, you get all the features you need to build a beautiful, fast, modern website with no coding required.
Getting started
Installing and configuring Jetpack
- Head to “Plugins > Add New” ([your site URL]/wp-admin/plugins-install.php). Browse or use the search box to find Jetpack, then install and activate it.
- When prompted, click Set Up Jetpack.
Installing and configuring AMP
- Again, head to “Plugins > Add New” ([your site URL]/wp-admin/plugins-install.php). Browse or use the search box to find AMP, then install and activate it.
- Once the plugin is activated, click the AMP “Settings” link from the plugins list, and then configure the AMP plugin to use “Standard Mode”. This tells WordPress to use AMP to render every page on your site. (Using Standard Mode within the AMP Plugin requires using an AMP-compatible theme – visit the AMP for WordPress plugin site to learn more about the various configuration options available for using AMP and Jetpack, even if you are not using an AMP-compatible theme).
Anything is possible
That’s it! You’re ready to go. With Jetpack and AMP, you have all the power to build a website that truly stands out, with blazing fast performance and top-notch SEO.
Now that you’re set with the backbone of a great website, check out how you can use Jetpack blocks to add all types of engaging content. Once again, no coding needed.