Can I safely remove AMP from a website without ranking or traffic drop?

Hello @wppit

Yes, AMP is no longer required to appear on Google Top Stories, it will be competing alongside other sites.

However, it won’t be easy to create high-performing pages without investing a lot of resources.

the AMP framework and AMP plugin create a high performing pages with just a few clicks that being said if you believe that you can perform without AMP you can remove the AMP plugin safely as follows:

Following are steps to safe ways to remove the AMP without affecting your site performance or losing traffic.

Standard mode users, If your site is using Standard mode you don’t need to perform any actions simply delete the AMP plugin and Watch for a decreasing trendline on the “indexed AMP pages” graph.

Transitional and Reader Mode You will have to perform the following actions to remove AMP from your site.

• Remove AMP from your website.
• Remove AMP URLs from Google Search Central & Redirect your AMP pages to non-AMP pages.

Remove AMP from your website

The first step is easy to deactivate the AMP plugin and delete it from your WordPress site

Login to your WordPress site as Admin
Goto Dashboard -> Plugins -> Installed Plugins

Look for the AMP plugin and deactivate it, once deactivated you can delete the plugin, make sure to opt-in for deleting plugin data in case you completely remove the AMP plugin.

Remove AMP URLs from Google Search Central & Redirect your AMP pages to non-AMP pages.

Once you delete the AMP plugin the amp version of your pages will no longer exist, which means your non-AMP pages will no longer have <link rel="amphtml"> tag

If an AMP page is requested from Google Search or a request is made from other platforms where AMP cache exits they will land on a 404 page not found, we will have to redirect that traffic to non-AMP pages.

You can use the mini plugins such as Redirection to create a redirection or use this mini plugin to which can redirect users from AMP to non-AMP pages, you can also ask your hosting provider to add a redirect rule to your server configuration.

You can learn more about removing AMP content by following the Ofiicial How-to guide by Google Search Central.

I hope this helps!

@wppit As we didn’t receive a response I’ll mark this as resolved. Feel free to open a new support topic if you require any further assistance.

@milindmore22 So, I had the Reader mode on, so I deactivated the AMP plugin and added the redirect code to the htaccess to remove AMP from the site.
Would this be enough to comply with the remove of AMP? I don’t want to remove the plugin just in case I need it back for troubleshooting, or is it completely necessary to delete the plugin?

Also, the next day the Google Search Console started complaining and received the “Referenced AMP URL is not an AMP.” is this normal even though the redirects seem to be working correctly?

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by wpmhweb.