How to Disable AMP on WordPress

June 26, 2017 by Alex Kras 22 Comments

Few days ago I disabled AMP support on my site.

To disable AMP support, I took the following steps.

Log in to my WordPress dashboard
Go to Plugins -> Installed Plugins
Find “AMP” plugin
Click “Deactivate” link under the AMP plugin
Click “Delete” link under the AMP plugin

That is all I had to do, and 24 hours later AMP link to my site was gone from Google Search Results.

The only issue I noticed is that old AMP links were now returning a 404 – Page Not Found message.

For example:

https://www.alexkras.com/my-history-with-web-development-or-javascript-fatigue/amp would return 404 since there was no longer a /amp version of the link.

Redirect All 404s to Homepage

To remedy this issue, I’ve downloaded the All 404 Redirect to Homepage

In WordPress dashboard
Go to Plugins -> Add New
In top right corner search for “All 404 Redirect to Homepage”
Click “Install Now” button for the first result
Click “Activate” button for the first result

As the name of plugin suggests, it will redirect all 404 to the home page. I already have a list of all post on my homepage rendered, via Clean My Archives plugin, so it was a decent solution in and of itself.

Redirect All AMP links to non AMP version

I wanted to take it one step further, though, so I modified the plugin to re-write AMP links to non amp version.

The steps to do so were as follows:

In WordPress dashboard
Go to Plugins -> Editor
In top right drop down select “All 404 Redirect to Homepage” and click select
It should open the all-404-redirect-to-homepage/all-404-redirect-to-homepage.php file for editing
In it find if($options['p404_status']=='1' & $options['p404_redirect_to']!=''){ line
Copy paste the following code right bellow it (and indent it one tab extra so it looks readable)
Click “Update File” link right at the top left corner

if (strpos($link, "/amp") !== false) {
    header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
    header ("Location: " . str_replace('/amp', '', $link));
    exit();
}

It should look as the following image:

Finally, test it by navigating to an /amp version of any page on your site (after you’ve disabled AMP) to confirm that the redirect worked.

I am planning to write a proper WordPress plugin and publish it on Github, if there is interest. Please follow me on Twitter if you would like to hear more or DM me if you’d like to participate.

For now I wanted to share this quick hack as a stop-gap solution, until the proper plugin can be developed.

Apixio, Medical Startup I work for is Hiring: https://grnh.se/49e0618a2
Checkout Hired, if Apixio is not for you: https://hired.com/x/YjFDXP
Programming Interviews Exposed or anything else from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2VDTSzC
Linode, where this site is hosted: https://www.linode.com/?r=0c6b1d50096034351b7feb80d175d7e315cc9a96
BlueHost, if you don’t want to manage your own server: https://www.bluehost.com/track/akras14/
Coinbase, if you are into Cryptocurrency https://www.coinbase.com/join/59c3348a22766100f93d9662

Comments