Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA), and Your WordPress Site

If you’re running a business and posting updates on a regular basis, its time to start taking advantage of a new format for readers to digest your content. Both Google and Facebook are pushing mobile friendly formats, tailored for those with slower connections. Its become the trendy thing for home pages and blogs to have a lot of background images, resource heavy content, and other fancy things, all of which slow down the mobile browsing experience. Yes, we’re guilty of this, too.

FBIA is a new mobile format developed by Facebook, which can be served to visitors accessing your content shared from the Facebook mobile app, on either iOS or Android.

AMP is a mobile format developed by Google, which can be served to visitors accessing your content from Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest mobile apps.

Both of these formats are open sourced, which means additional services will quickly implement the new standards.

The Current Status of AMP and FBIA

Google’s AMP is completely ready to start using. To access your AMP’d content, simple add /amp at the end of the post URL. If your website is properly setup, the AMP link will display in Google search pages automatically for mobile visitors.

Facebook Instant Articles are currently closed to the public, however you can apply for manual approval. On April 12, FBIA will open up to all publishers.

Currently, we use a combination of these four plugins to better serve AMP and FBIA to our readers. There is a ton of active development in this realm, with lots of different solutions to choose from. At the time of writing this, none work perfectly, but these seem to be the best combination for a working solution.

1. AMP
2. Yoast SEO
3. Pagefrog
4. Glue

AMP is developed by Automattic, the company which owns and runs WordPress. It automatically adds support to all posts, giving them AMP versions which will show up in the Google search results pages.

Yoast SEO is our favorite SEO plugin – you’re probably using this already.

Pagefrog allows you to customize the styling and perform a bit of quick branding for AMP and FBIA pages. It will also connect Analytics and Adsense back into your pages, if you’re using one or both of those services.

Glue is developed by Yoast, which helps the AMP plugin better read your Yoast data, such as titles and descriptions.

Help In Setting Up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA)

Are you a Sacramento business, or other business needing help in optimizing your posts and content for these new formats? Send us a message and we’ll get you setup and up to speed.