Top 3 AMP extensions in Joomla
AMP is no longer a strange technique for any webmaster. It has been widely implemented since 2015 and even more popular nowadays due to the significant shift to mobile usage.
In this article, we will briefly explain AMP and its important to your website. Moreover, we will review the top 3 extensions for creating AMP page in Joomla.
What is AMP?
AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source project aimed at allowing mobile website content to load nearly instantly.
It strips down all the CSS, JS, HTML “style” code and focus only on loading your content as fast as possible. You can see the example below on how different an original page compared with a basic AMP page. There is no logo, menu, module and it doesn’t look like the original design at all.
For more detail, you can read more about AMP here.
Why is AMP important for your website?
As you may know, page speed is an essential factor for the success of any online business.
Not to mention that owning a mobile phone nowadays is as popular as having clothes on your body. Almost everyone has one, and the amount of time we spend on a mobile device every week is astonishing - Average an entire day per week has been spent on mobile activities.
Therefore, search engine and every online publisher put more effort on improving user experience on the mobile device. Among those improvements, loading speed is the number one factor that need to prioritize. So, having AMP might be very crucial for your Joomla SEO effort.
Plus, Google and many other search engines have already supported the implementation of this technique. It means that with better mobile speed, you not only see the significant change in revenue, bounce rate, etc but also in term of search ranking.
Therefore with all the benefit, AMP looks like a thing that needs to be done immediately on your website.
But, do your website really need AMP?
With all the benefit we just list, it seems like a redundant question to ask. However, nothing is perfect. To reach that instant page speed, as we discussed above, AMP puts the ability to read content instantly before anything else. All the code that style your website is removed or simplified.
Relevant to this issue, Moz has experimented a case study to compare the actual impact of a basic AMP website to a hand-crafted AMP website.
The difference between a basic AMP page and a handcrafted one.
The result is predictable when a basic AMP website, with all the navigation (menu, logo) or design has completed been removed, provides a deplorable result with all of the important factor (traffic, bounce rate, sessions, etc,) see a dramatic decrease.
Whereas, a hand-crafted one, which is specially coded based on AMP guideline but remains the design, results in a positive change.
Therefore, if you don’t have enough resources to do it properly, then do not do it at all.
Since its birth, AMP always brings the most benefit for news/ magazine site since people go to these site for their content and prefer to read it in their portable device. If your traffic comes to your site mostly from desktop, you should consider AMP carefully.
Top 3 AMP extension in Joomla
Manually create AMP version of your site is an unbelievable job to do if your coding skill next to zero. It’s both costly and challenging to implement in Joomla even if you have experience and follow the detailed guideline.
However, with these AMP extensions, you will save yourself from hours of searching and learning how to implement AMP in your Joomla site, and deliver a good result.
Therefore, we will give a review on each one to help you find the most suitable for your site.
JAMP 
If you start searching keyword “AMP” on JED, it’s not hard to find out JAMP is the most popular for AMP extension in Joomla community.
Some of its features:
- Automatic conversion: convert automatically your Joomla! contents into the AMP HTML markup
- Automated submission: submit AMP links to Google for indexing through a unique meta tag that relates to the canonical page
- Highly customizable: customize the theme, colours, logo, titles and the integration with third-party extensions.
- Exclusions system: purify HTML using the exclusions system to pass the validation of your AMP pages
- AMP components: take advantage of AMP Web Components such as Menu, Google Analytics, Sidebar, Lightbox, YouTube, Social Media and even for AMP Story.
- Metadata management: JAmp manages JSON-LD metadata for AMP, Schema.org, Open Graph, and Twitter Card
- Google AMP cache: take advantage of the Google AMP Cache, every AMP page will be rendered almost instantly
- Debug mode: test the AMP version of each page quickly to identify and fix issues with the validation
With its extensive features and ease of use, JAMP seems like the best solution for creating an AMP page. You can still make an AMP page look like an original design but still load instantly. The extension still get many helpful updates till today (Feb 2019)
The price of 49 Euro is reasonable if your Joomla website needs to implement AMP.
wbAMP
What we like best about this extension is they offer a community free version for Joomla users. Despite locking many fancy features in this version, wbAMP still works like a charm when it comes to converting only Joomla Default article to AMP version.
However, you must submit those new AMP link by yourself to get indexed by search engine.
One more thing that we love about this extension is the small, but very detail guideline built in-app. Specific and easy to understand, leave no room for confusion.
Compare to other Joomla AMP extensions, the commercial version of wbAMP is robust with all major features appropriately done and easy to use. Take a look at its main features:
- Automatic conversion: Joomla pages are converted on the fly to Accelerated Mobile Pages HTML markup.
- Extensive content handling: popular media or social content such as images, Facebook, Youtube, etc or even AMP carousel are converted.
- Easy page selection: you have the power to decide which pages should have an AMP counterpart.
- Working contact form. Read more: How to create a basic form in Joomla site!
- Manual customization: customize the output with simple tags entered in your articles. Provide additional metadata as needed. Hide or show some content only on AMP pages. Use custom HTML Joomla modules to create header or footer.
- Easy templating: comes with a simple, elegant base template. Override any part of the output using Joomla! JLayouts.
- Joomla Modules: Easily include Joomla modules into your AMP pages.
- Menu and footer: Easily add navigation and footer by selecting a custom Joomla module. Content is also converted to AMP standard, with the amp-sidebar element.
- Social sharing support
- Analytics support
- Ads networks support
The price is $44 for a year subscription. And if you want your AMP page style with a custom theme, you can get it for $69 a year.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
The extension may confuse you when it takes the name identical to AMP. However, as an AMP extension, it delivers a decent result. Like the other 2 competitors, this extension also has enough major features to build a right AMP page:
- Fully customizable, admin can customize header, footer, title, etc.
- Show ads on AMP pages.
- Show cool carousel(Image Slider) on AMP pages( before/after content). Also, provide an option to display image slider preview.
- Display Joomla Menu bar on AMP pages and options to set menubar position is provided.
- Display any number of Joomla custom modules on AMP pages.
- Show Notification message on AMP pages.
- Display social share buttons on AMP pages, example facebook, google+, etc.
- Enable light box for images on AMP pages.
- Show youtube video on AMP pages.
- Enable google analytics is provided. Read more: Install Google Analytics in Joomla site!
- Filter content on the basis of CSS classes and ids is provided.
- Add custom CSS styles and header links are provided.
The minor set back with this extension is the limitation in supporting 3rd party content component when it only compatible with K2 till now. However, it comes at a lower price, just $39 for the whole package.
In summary,
AMP is more and more proved its important to the success of any website. It now becomes the indispensable feature if you want to get a significant increase in mobile traffic and dominate mobile search ranking.
With the review of these 3 Joomla AMP extensions, we hope that you will find the perfect solution to your AMP problem.
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