AMP It Up: Accelerated Mobile Pages Traffic Growing Fast

Warning: this content is older than 365 days. It may be out of date and no longer relevant.

At the beginning of 2016, I advised everyone to climb aboard the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) train and implement AMP, Google’s specification for mobile-friendly content. For much of 2016, not much happened on this front; compliance was encouraged, but I saw very little impact from implementing AMP.

In October, I started to see AMP pages begin to receive traffic from Google in greater volume.

Right around December 1, something significantly changed for my website:

Suddenly, the number of AMP pages showing up in search results and receiving traffic has spiked. AMP implementation no longer appears to be optional – Google is sending traffic to those pages.

When I look at the source of the traffic, it’s unquestionably Google:

If you haven’t implemented AMP already on your website, now is the time to do it. We know Google will be implementing a mobile-specific index next year that’s separate from the desktop index. It’s a tiny stretch of imagination to believe that Google will give preference in mobile ranking to sites which fully implement AMP. If any portion of your business relies on the mobile audience (which is virtually everyone with a website), you must do it right now.

If your website runs on WordPress, implementing AMP is as simple as installing two plugins: