Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) was proposed last October by Google to reduce pages to their content so that they load nearly instantaneously. Yesterday, they made the project live for mobile search results. You can see if your site is participating through the Google Search Console site. After selecting your property, under the Search Appearance section on the left-hand navigation menu, you can find Accelerated Mobile Pages to see a report of AMP content detected on your site.
If AMP content is recognized on a site, a Google search from a mobile device will direct the visitor to the AMP version of the site, which is a stripped down, content-focused page with only asynchronous scripts and inline style allowed. This greatly improves the mobile experience by reducing load time and data usage. However, as a website owner, you might be concerned about losing control of the viewer’s experience – they won’t see sidebars recommending other content, meaning fewer page views, and it currently does not show ads, reducing revenue.
Despite those limitations, if you would like to improve the performance of your site for your mobile visitors and reduce some of the bloat, you can implement AMP. WordPress.com announced that they have enabled support for all of their pages with no further action required. For self-hosted WordPress sites, it is as simple as installing a plugin.
The free AMP plugin is available on WordPress.org with Automattic as one of the developers. There are a few other plugins available on WordPress.org to enable AMP but the Automattic version has the most active installs.
Upon installing the AMP plugin, you simply activate it and there is nothing else to do or settings to configure. You can test it out by visiting a post and adding /amp/ to the end of the URL such as site.com/2016/post-title/amp/. This will show you the AMP, mobile-optimized rendering of your site which typically strips down external fonts, extra Javascript, sidebars, and other content that is not optimal for mobile browsers. From there, Google will crawl your site, discover the AMP content, and make it available to people visiting your site from Google Search results.