Remove AMP from WordPress website in 3 minutes

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s a technology introduced by Google in 2015 to provide fast page load on mobile devices. Fast forward nine years later, the AMP technology is considered deprecated and even undesirable. Therefore, it’s recommended to remove it from your WordPress website. In this article, we go through the necessary steps you need to take to remove AMP from your WordPress website in 3 minutes without losing any traffic and conversion.

Why should you remove AMP

The whole technology was problematic to begin with. Although mobile users could benefit from fast access to pages, they lost the versatility to interact with pages since AMP removes many HTML elements, CSS, and even JavaScript. That was a trade-off that one must have bore to have a fast-loading page. Not to mention the maintenance cost of running two website versions and keeping all the themes and designs in sync.

Despite all the AMP limitations, many decided to take advantage of it. Even in Geeky Hacker, we adopted AMP to provide a more seamless mobile experience. However, the main AMP adopters were news websites in which users do not need to interact with the page that much.

With technological advancements since 2015, many mobile issues are irrelevant, thanks to better hardware and software. That makes AMP a redundancy. Even major news websites already moved away from AMP and keeping a website AMP version damages conversion and user experience in this competitive market. Additionally, AMP is no longer a metric in SEO ranking. Therefore, there is zero benefit and justification for its maintenance.

Removing AMP is tricky

Unfortunately removing AMP from a WordPress website is not as simple as installing it. One must refine from simply deactivating the AMP WordPress plugin as it causes all your AMP pages already ranked by search engines to return 404, page not found error. Consequently, you will lose traffic and your website rank will be impacted. Hence, it is necessary to be very careful about the process.

The safe way to remove AMP

In the following section, we demonstrate how to remove AMP safely and quickly in only two steps that will not take more than three minutes of your time.

Step one: remove AMP WordPress plugin

First, you need to deactivate the AMP WordPress plugin. If you don’t know your website’s AMP URL pattern, usually AMP pages end with /amp, find the pattern before deactivating the plugin.

Step two: redirect AMP pages with Redirection plugin

After deactivating the plugin, all your AMP pages will be removed. Attempting to access them will result in a 404 error. To tackle that issue, you need to redirect AMP pages to normal pages. For that, the easiest approach is to install the Redirection plugin by John Godley. After that, add a Regex redirection rule as follows:

Finally to check whether the redirection is working, open an AMP. It should redirect to the normal version of the website.

You can also check the HTTP status code using the curl command as follows,

$ curl -I https://www.example.com/page/amp

It should return 301 similar to below indicating the /page/amp is redirecting to /page:

HTTP/2 301 
date: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 19:43:07 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
expires: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 20:43:07 GMT
cache-control: max-age=3600
x-redirect-by: redirection
location: /page
cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC

Conclusion

Accelerated Mobile Pages technology has lost its glory and is gradually becoming history. It was a technology with many controversies aimed at improving page speed on mobile devices targetting Chrome-based browsers. As the popularity of AMP is diminishing, it’s important to move away from AMP pages. However, precautionary steps must be taken to avoid facing 404 issues. With the use of the Redirection plugin, one can safely avoid such a problem and safely redirect the traffic to the normal version of the site.