How To Disable WordPress AMP Plugin (Easy Way)

A few days ago I looked into my Google Search Console and I was quite surprised at what I witnessed.

The index stats page showed that my AMP-compatible pages had errors and to make it worse, out of 119 pages, 110 had multiple errors. I personally loved it but it seems like a headache nowadays.

I am certainly not capable to work on each and every page as it’s time-consuming and l like to be productive in my spare time. Of course, I won’t spend a single penny for hiring developers nor I would pay to the AMP for WP plugin service for something I could do all by myself.

So I decided to disable AMP once and for all.

I had two ways to remove AMP pages without any error, one was to follow the “rel=”amphtml” Attribute method or via editing the .htaccess file And the other one was to figure out something easier all by myself.

Guess what?

I chose the latter.

All over the internet, there are a number of articles on this issue but none gave me a sense of being beginner-friendly and I needed a simple, no-stress way.

Today, in this post I will help you to correctly disable the google AMP plugin on your WordPress blog in such a way that It doesn’t affect your SEO or braking your site and your visitors don’t see a page like this:

Without any further delay, let me show you how to do this step by step and in the end, I will share my points and ideology on why I took this decision and so should you.

The first thing we need to do is,

[su_heading size=”19″]Install The 404 Solution Control Plugin[/su_heading]

Head on to your WordPress dashboard and install the 404 redirection solution plugin.

Upon installing the plugin, you need to activate it. We need to do a setup a little bit and After that, we can deactivate and delete the AMP plugin.

Do not delete the plugin before you have successfully installed and activated the 404 solution plugin.

[su_heading size=”19″]Setting Up The Redirection To Target URL[/su_heading]

After activating the 404 solution plugin the initial setup is already done, however, we need to double-check to make sure we don’t lose anything.

Head on to your settings section and click on 404 solution settings and turn the automatic redirections on. Also, make the primary redirected URL to home.

The permalinks, Just In Case…

If your permalinks settings aren’t sent to the post-name type, this method won’t work. Hopefully, most of the beginners nowadays know how important this is for SEO but if you don’t, follow on.

Go to your settings section and click on permalink settings and change it to post name type as shown in the picture above. This is mandatory or else the redirection won’t work.

That’s it.!!

Now you can disable the AMP plugin and you should delete it as you won’t need it in the future.

Go to your smartphone and enter the URL of the webpage you want to check. For example, my blog’s URL is bforbloggers.com and I have a post on best social share plugins that has it’s AMP page URL i.e. https://bforbloggers.com/social-share-plugins-to-increase-engagement/amp

Now when I hit this URL in my browser, it is redirected to its original URL that is without the /amp slug. As simple as that.

This 404 solution plugin is very handy as it works out of the box and the automated redirection to matching slugs works seamlessly.

I wonder why people don’t comment, it’s easier than sending me a message through the contact forms. Well, this update will be answering to the question asked by Caesar,

He asked me “what if Google takes it as two duplicate content under the same domain”?

I knew someone would ask this, so here’s the thing. Look at the source code of the amp indexed page, on the 13th row you can see that the “rel=”canonical” tag is present.

The AMP plugin by Automattic has already inserted the canonical URL and that’s why you don’t have to worry about any issue regarding the content of your posts.

For the same URL, the AMP test shows the results as clear. No AMP pages are there.

Why Do You Need To Do This? 

There are many disadvantages of having AMP pages and the problems increase as your blog pages start to grow higher in numbers.

Some of them are

1. Low Adsense Revenue
2. Higher Bounce Rate
3. Less Engagement and leads
4. More Hassle Of Management
5. Compatibility Issues Arises

In short, there is no need to keep your pages AMP supported. Instead,  you can focus on other important things that can help you grow your blog such as growing your mailing list.  

Summary

All in all, what we did is

1. Installed the 404 solution plugin 
2. Enabled the automated redirection 
3. Removed the AMP plugin 
4. Changed the permalinks setting ( In case of not done before) 

You shouldn’t have faced any problems while following me as there are 3 easy steps that require neither an exceptional knowledge nor any coding skills.

Many top influences who are using AMP have disabled it as they quickly noticed the decrease in their revenue and engagement.

Google AMP was an open-source project lanced back in 2016 and it was speculated that it will help to overcome the problems with slow loading web pages on mobile devices. The project is appreciable but a lot of compatibility issues arise due to conflicts with thousands of plugins available in the WordPress repo.

If you are just a content writer and you ain’t gonna use WordPress plugins like Advanced Ads, Thrive Leads, etc. You can use Google AMP without any hesitation.

This was the easiest way I discovered and used it myself. I was quite skeptical when I first tried this method on my own blog but I am very lucky that it worked perfectly.

Don’t worry, being AMP friendly has nothing to do with SERPs. It is not an official/unofficial ranking factor.

I strongly recommend you do this as soon as possible or you are inviting the pain at your door, not today but someday soon.

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