Google AMP for WordPress: Should You Still Use It?

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For most WordPress sites, the answer is no: do not add AMP. Google removed the AMP requirement for Top Stories, so the placement that made AMP compulsory for publishers is now open to any page that performs well. Spend the same effort on caching and Core Web Vitals on your ordinary pages and you get the speed without maintaining a second version of your site. AMP is not dead, and there are still situations where it earns its place. This page sets out what changed, when AMP is still worth running, and how to set it up properly if you decide it is.

What changed

AMP began as an open framework for stripped-back mobile pages: a restricted subset of HTML, a controlled JavaScript library, and the Google AMP Cache serving pages from Google’s own infrastructure. Its commercial pull was simpler than any of that. For years, an article could not appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile unless it was an AMP page. If you published news, you built AMP. Google removed that condition. Announcing the timing of the page experience update, it confirmed that “AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page”, with the change taking effect as page experience rolled out in 2021. Eligibility now turns on how the page actually performs rather than on which format it was built in. That single change removed the one reason most publishers had for running AMP at all.

The state of the AMP plugin

Before you commit, look at what you would be installing. The official AMP plugin is led by Weston Ruter with contributions from Google, XWP, rtCamp and Automattic. It has more than 400,000 active installations, which is a real user base. It also sits at 3.8 out of 5 from 367 reviews, the current release is version 2.5.5, and it is only tested up to WordPress 6.8.8, roughly a year after its last release. WordPress.org flags it with the warning that it “hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress”. None of that makes it unusable. It does mean AMP on WordPress is no longer a maintained-by-default part of the stack, and you should treat compatibility as something to test rather than assume.

When AMP is still worth it

There are cases where it holds up:

• You already run AMP, it validates, and your analytics show the AMP pages converting. Ripping out something that works is its own risk.
• An advertising or syndication partner requires AMP pages as a condition of the deal.
• You publish high volumes of short news to a heavily mobile audience and cannot fix the underlying site speed in the near term. AMP is a way of buying speed you cannot otherwise afford.

And the cases where it does not:

• Your site is a business site, a shop, a portfolio or a blog rather than a news operation. Top Stories was never the point for you.
• You rely on forms, interactive elements, custom JavaScript or a page builder. AMP’s restrictions will fight all of it.
• Your ad revenue depends on a stack that AMP limits.
• You are hoping the format itself carries weight in search. Since the Top Stories condition went, eligibility turns on how a page performs, not on which format it was built in.

What to do instead

The target is Google’s Core Web Vitals, measured on real visits at the 75th percentile: Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. Those are the thresholds in Google’s Web Vitals documentation. INP became a stable Core Web Vital in 2024, replacing First Input Delay, so ignore any guide still tuning for FID. Three things move those numbers on WordPress, in order of return:

1. Page caching. LiteSpeed Cache has over 7 million active installations, 4.8 out of 5 from 2,769 reviews, and is tested against WordPress 7.1; its full page caching needs a LiteSpeed server, though the optimisation features work anywhere. WP Super Cache from Automattic runs on any host, has over a million installations and 4.3 out of 5 from 1,345 reviews. Our cache plugin comparison weighs up the rest.
2. Images. On an article, the largest contentful element is nearly always the featured image, so LCP is usually an image problem. Convert to WebP or AVIF, serve it at the size it displays, set width and height, and do not lazy-load the hero. Our image optimiser comparison covers the plugins that do this well.
3. JavaScript and headers. INP is a JavaScript problem: audit what loads on your post template and defer or remove the rest. Then make repeat visits cheap by setting proper cache headers, which our guide to expires headers walks through.

Done properly this gets your normal pages into the same speed bracket AMP delivered, and it applies to every visitor rather than only the ones arriving from a search result.

If you are going to run AMP

Install the official AMP plugin from Plugins > Add New. Because it is behind on WordPress testing, install it on a staging copy first and check your post templates before it touches production. Once active, AMP versions are generated at your post URL with /amp/ appended, so example.com/post/ becomes example.com/post/amp/. Your normal page then advertises it in the head:

<link rel="amphtml" href="https://example.com/post/amp/" />

If AMP URLs return a 404 straight after activation, go to Settings > Permalinks and click Save Changes. That flushes the rewrite rules and is almost always the fix. Validate before you trust it. Run pages through the AMP validator, and expect to iterate: shortcodes, embeds and builder output are the usual sources of validation errors, and any invalid AMP page loses the benefit entirely.

Analytics on AMP pages

By default, Google Analytics treats a visit to the AMP page and a visit to the canonical page as two different sessions, which quietly inflates your numbers. Fixing it by hand means editing tracking code in two places. The MonsterInsights Google AMP addon handles it for you, and stops the double counting. The addon needs the Plus licence or higher, plus the AMP plugin installed. MonsterInsights itself is well maintained: more than 2 million active installations, 4.5 out of 5 from 3,149 reviews, and version 11.1.3 released in August 2026, tested against WordPress 7.1.

The Yoast AMP add-on is gone

Older AMP tutorials told you to install Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP so your SEO metadata carried across to AMP pages. That plugin was permanently closed in the WordPress directory on 31 March 2023 at its author’s request. Do not go looking for it. You do not need a replacement. What it used to glue together is now handled inside Yoast SEO and the AMP plugin themselves, so metadata carries across without a bridge plugin.

The short version

AMP is no longer the price of entry to Top Stories, its WordPress plugin is running behind on compatibility, and the add-on ecosystem around it has thinned out. If you are starting from scratch, put the effort into caching, images and JavaScript on your ordinary pages and hit the Core Web Vitals thresholds there. If you have a specific reason to run AMP, run it deliberately, validate it, and fix your analytics so the numbers you make decisions on are real.