CentrioHost Blog

If you run a WordPress site you have probably contemplated already at some point whether or not you should implement the hot new Google AMP for mobile. We had the same dilemma here at Host SEO and ended up testing it for a while. In the end, we didn’t see good results and it ended up hurting our conversion rate on mobile devices. So today we are going to dive into how to disable Google AMP on your blog, and how to safely do it without 404 errors or harming your SEO. Simply deactivating the AMP plugin alone 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 a few minutes!

Google AMP

Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) was originally launched back in October 2015. The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight web pages. To put it simply, it offers a way to serve up a stripped down version of your current web page. You can read more about it in our in-depth post on Google AMP, as well compare all the pros and cons.

Why Google AMP Didn’t Work For Us

Due to all the hype around Google AMP, we decided to give it a try on our Host SEO site. You never really know what will happen until you test something. So we let it run for two months and here are the conclusions we came to. Note: This could vary in almost every industry, so we highly recommend testing it on your own site before drawing conclusions. A couple ways to test this include:

• Looking at data in Google Search Console before and after.
• Comparing data from Google Analytics on your /amp/ URLs vs original URLs from organic traffic before and after.

Here is some data from during the time AMP was enabled on our site.

Google AMP Positions

As you can see, after enabling Google AMP and allowing them time to index we definitely saw a decrease in average positions in SERPs on mobile.

Google AMP CTR

After enabling Google AMP we saw a decrease in CTR on mobile.

Google AMP Impressions

After enabling Google AMP we did see a higher number of impressions.

Google AMP Clicks

After enabling Google AMP we saw a slight increase in total clicks.

So for us, there was good and bad in the data above. However, the most important part was looking at the data in Google Analytics for the time AMP was enabled:

• Our mobile leads dropped by 59.09%.
• Our newsletter email sign-ups from mobile dropped by 16.67%.
• Our account creations from mobile devices dropped 10.53%.

Because of this, we decided that Google AMP was not working for our business model. So why did we not see good results, when others do? Well, probably one of the biggest reasons is that our site is already pretty fast on mobile. So we didn’t see a huge increase in speed, as some other ad-heavy sites might have. According to Google, 70% of cellular network connections globally will occur at 3G or slower speeds through 2020. So while it is super important to optimize for mobile, those that already have a well-optimized site probably won’t notice huge differences.

Another reason is that we don’t publish news. A lot of big publications are using AMP and taking advantage of the carousel in SERPs. A lot of big companies like The Washington Post, Gizmodo, and Wired all saw big improvements with Google AMP, but these are all news-oriented and ad-heavy content sites. We, of course, publish a lot of content, but our primary focus is still on generating leads and signing up customers.

Could we have done more conversion rate optimization to our AMP install? Probably yes. There are ways to add CTAs, newsletter signups, etc. We did optimize for some of this. But after seeing the conversion data above it wasn’t worth managing Google AMP separately, which can be a pain, just to have a slightly faster mobile site. Also, a lot of our traffic and audience to the Host SEO blog is not from mobile to begin with, so we decided to disable Google AMP.

Also, currently there are no SEO benefits from AMP yet unless you are a news site trying to score the carousel in SERPs. We analyzed our mobile rankings and after AMP was fully removed, our rankings actually went up. Again, this could just be from natural progress. But we saw no increases in SERPs from running AMP. If your site is slow to begin with though you might, so we always advise testing on your own site.

Other brands have also seen no harmful impact from removing AMP, and like us, actually saw improvements. Outside Magazine increased pageviews per visit 13 percent after ditching Google AMP.

How to Disable Google AMP

There are a couple different ways you disable Google AMP. Google has their official documentation on how to remove AMP from Google Search. A big problem with this though is that it usually requires a developer and their instructions are not very WordPress friendly. Their very first step is to remove the rel=”amphtml” link from the canonical non-AMP page, while still leaving the AMP page in place. Thankfully though there are a few different ways to approach this without harming your SEO. You don’t want to simply disable the Google AMP plugin as this will result in 404 pages.

Option 1 – Search and Replace (Regex)

The first option involves using a search and replace plugin to remove the rel=”amphtml” code while no-indexing the AMP pages.  We can thank Gulshan Kumar who originally posted this strategy. This assumes you are utilizing the free AMP for WP plugin.

Step 1

First, you will need to download and install the free WordPress Real-Time Find and Replace plugin. One of the great things about this plugin is that it doesn’t modify your database or site, so it is very safe to