Google started recently its alternative to Facebook Instant Articles. It’s named AMP which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a brand new technology which leads to extremely fast website loading, nearly instantly without human noticeable delay. AMP Pages are cached and preloaded on Google server so they are are returned to the user with the highest possible speed no matter where the visitor is located.
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What are AMP Pages?
AMP pages are very basic HTML pages with strict rules and some special AMP properties.
Some requirements for AMP are: AMP sites must not contain any synchronous loading javascript or other blocking internal or external resources like JS or CSS files. CSS is rendered inline for maximum performance. External font styles must not be larger than 50KB.
AMP Pages are loaded by adding a special parameter added to the url,
e.g.: yourwebsite.com/your-page-title/amp or yourwebsite.com/your-page-title/?amp=1
The parameter can be anything, so it is not fixed to a special one.
If you want to get more about the specification of AMP you can read everything
about the project on the AMP Project page on github
Do you like to see Mashshare’s AMP for this site?
https://www.mashshare.net/create-social-media-buttons-on-google-amp/amp
Is there a WordPress AMP plugin?
If you are using WordPress and you are firm about WordPress development or you have a dev guy for your website you are a lucky person because you are able to start with AMP right now:
Download the official AMP WordPress plugin
Be aware: On the WordPress AMP site you will notice several bad ratings for the plugin, but i recommend to give the plugin a try, though.
Most of these ratings are made by user who did not complete understand how AMP is working and some of the ratings are complaining that the AMP HTML syntax is broken when the plugin is used. But this is only half the truth and not caused by the AMP plugin at all.
I do have AMP running here on mashshare.net and its working great as long as all your plugins are loading javascript syncronous and are using the wp_enqueue_script() function for registering styles and scripts. If you do not understand what wp_enqueue_script() does you are probably not a dev person so i recommend that you ask your developer to assist you with integrating Accerlerated Mobile Pages on your WordPress website.
Are social share buttons working on AMP Pages?
Regular Social Media share buttons for facebook, twitter and even google are not working out of the box with AMP Pages. The reasons are the already mentioned external script dependencies which are not loaded asynchronous by default. Actually we do not know any other third party social media plugin which is working on AMP, except Mashshare (Present day 03/07/2016).
Is Mashshare working on AMP?
I am glad to announce that Mashshare 2.5.4 is able to create share buttons automatically on AMP pages which are generated by the official WordPress AMP plugin.
