The Google-backed AMP Project is meant to speed up the web. This time, it's having one major helper to reach that goal.
After more than three years under development, and only a week after the big WordPress 5.0 "Bebo" release, the AMP Project has made the version 1.0 stable plugin freely available to all WordPress users to speed up their web pages on mobile devices.
The version 1.0 release has been extensively tested and is considered production-ready.
The developers of the project said that the release can be seamlessly integrated with standard WordPress content creation workflows, with functions on both the classic editor and the WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg block-based editor.
The plugin essentially makes it a lot easier for any WordPress site owners to build their site entirely using AMP.
According to the blog post announcing the release:
"It is important to note that the plugin is not a completely turn-key solution to ‘AMPlify your site,’ but instead functions as a key enabling technology for a fully AMP compatible WordPress ecosystem."
With this stable release, the AMP Project plans to continue adding new features and support in the future, with the goal of providing "turn-key solutions site owners can leverage to easily provide awesome AMP experiences regardless of their level of savviness."
Besides the Gutenberg support, the plugin has the following features:
- Compatibility Tool: to assist the development of AMP experiences by enabling AMP debugging with detailed information.
- CSS Tree Shaking: to assist in dealing with cases where the defined CSS rules exceed the CSS size limit allowed on single AMP pages.
- Core Theme Support: enabling full AMP validity for four default themes (Twenty Fifteen, Twenty Sixteen, Twenty Seventeen, Twenty Nineteen).
- AMP-first Experiences support: enabling full-site AMP experiences without sacrificing the flexibility of the WordPress.
- Many Optimizations: A myriad of code, performance, and developer experience improvements.
With the official AMP plugin for WordPress finally reaches a stable version, the WordPress ecosystem is provided with the way to build AMP sites experiences without deviating from its standard.