There's a plugin on your website doing nothing at all

A chiropractor in Greenwood emailed me in June. Her appointment form worked fine on a laptop and did nothing at all on a phone.

She sent a screenshot of the page. In the address bar, her website's URL ended in a slash and three letters: /amp/.

That plugin went on her site in 2019. On July 1 of this year, Google switched off the last thing it was doing for her.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Picture a second, stripped-down copy of every page on your website. Google used to keep that copy on its own servers and hand it to searchers the instant they tapped. The price was that the copy could not run your own JavaScript, which is what most contact forms and online ordering buttons run on.

On July 1, 2026, Google stopped serving those copies. A search result now sends people to your website, the way any ordinary link does. Google says "AMP content will continue to rank just like any other webpage."

The speed is gone. The stripped-down copy is still there.

Why is there a plugin called AMP on my website?

Because in 2016 it was a real deal, and because somebody who builds websites for a living told you to install it.

Google announced AMP in October 2015. By February 2016 AMP pages were showing up in mobile search results with a small lightning bolt beside them, and news publishers piled in, because AMP was the price of admission to the Top Stories carousel at the top of the page. Small business sites followed, almost always through a WordPress plugin.

The official one still runs on more than 400,000 WordPress sites. Its most recent release, version 2.5.5, is about a year old. A plugin that has not shipped a release in a year is a plugin nobody is patching.

The pitch made sense then. Phones were slow, your pages were slow, and Google offered to preload a lean copy so it appeared before the tap finished. Publishers running heavy ad stacks saw real gains.

Then Google spent five years walking it back.

When	What Google did
February 2016	AMP pages start appearing in mobile search results with a lightning bolt icon.
June 2021	The page experience update drops AMP as a requirement for the Top Stories carousel.
July 2021	The lightning bolt disappears from mobile results.
July 1, 2026	Google stops serving AMP pages from its cache and links straight to your site.

What changed on July 1?

Before this month, tapping an AMP result did not take you to your website. It took you to a copy of your page hosted on Google's servers, rendered inside a wrapper called the AMP viewer. Google had already fetched and prerendered it. The instant feel came from that prerender.

That copy is what all the restrictions bought you.

Since July 1, Google links to the AMP page on your own domain. Same server, same load time as anything else you host. Google deleted its documentation for the AMP viewer and the AMP cache the same day, and told publishers the change should "reduce maintenance efforts."

Rankings did not move, and Google said so plainly. The prerendered copy went away, and it was the last thing AMP was still giving you.

The speed belonged to Google. They lent it to you in exchange for a stripped copy of your own website, and on July 1 they took it back and left you the copy.

Do I still need AMP?

No.

Turning it off will not make your website faster. It will show you how fast your website already is, which is a different thing, and sometimes a worse one. If your normal mobile pages take four seconds, AMP has been hiding that from part of your traffic. Better to know. The fix is unglamorous: compress the images, and pay for hosting that costs more than four dollars a month.

The restrictions did not go anywhere.

AMP will not run your JavaScript, so third-party widgets do not render. A pizza place in Fishers I looked at this spring had an online ordering button that worked on the desktop site and vanished on the AMP one. The button was JavaScript from the ordering company. AMP does not allow that.

It also caps custom CSS at 75 kilobytes per page, inlined, with no external stylesheets. Go over that ceiling and the plugin's tree-shaker strips out rules that match nothing on the page. If that is not enough, it drops whole stylesheets, the parent theme's first. Your AMP copy ends up looking like a rough draft of the real one.

And if a line on your monthly invoice says AMP maintenance, or mobile speed optimization, you can take that line off.

How to check, in two minutes

The reliable check is the plugin list. Log into WordPress, open Plugins, and look for anything called AMP, AMP for WP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages. One of them active means you have AMP pages.

The fast check is your phone. Open your site, tap into a blog post or a service page, and read the URL. If it ends in /amp/ or carries ?amp=1, you are looking at the stripped copy.

If neither is clear, send one sentence to whoever maintains the site: do our pages still have a rel="amphtml" tag in the head? They will know what you mean.

Nearly all of this lives on WordPress. If your site runs on Wix or Shopify, none of it is yours to worry about.

How to turn it off without losing traffic

Order matters. Get it backwards and you break the site.

Deactivating the plugin first is the mistake. Google has your AMP URLs indexed right now. Kill the plugin and each one starts returning a 404 to anybody who taps an older result, and it stays that way until Google recrawls.

Google's own removal guide gives the sequence:

1. Remove the rel="amphtml" link from your normal pages. That tag is what tells Google an AMP copy exists.
2. Redirect every AMP URL to its normal version with a 301.
3. Deactivate the plugin.

Most AMP plugins have a setting that handles the first two on the way out. If yours does not, this is a thirty-minute job for whoever hosts your site, and nobody should quote you a project price for it.

Then watch Search Console for a couple of weeks. Google says rankings are unchanged, and I believe them. Look anyway. It costs you nothing.

The chiropractor's form works again. Twenty minutes, no invoice. It had been broken since sometime in 2023 and nobody told her, because the man who installed the plugin in 2019 stopped answering email years ago, and the form that quietly stopped working was the one that books appointments.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Google Search Central: Latest documentation updates	The July 1, 2026 change removing AMP viewer, AMP Cache, and signed exchange references from Google's AMP docs.
2	Google Search now sends searchers directly to publisher-hosted AMP pages	Dated the change to July 1, 2026, and Google's line that "AMP content will continue to rank just like any other webpage."
3	Google Ends Cache-Served AMP Pages In Search	That rankings are unchanged and the change should reduce publisher maintenance.
4	Google Search Central: Remove AMP pages from Search	The removal sequence: drop the rel="amphtml" link, then 301 the AMP URLs to their canonical versions.
5	AMP plugin on WordPress.org	400,000+ active installations, version 2.5.5 as the current release.
6	AMP & CSS, official AMP plugin documentation	The 75KB inline CSS cap, the tree-shaking pass, and the plugin dropping whole stylesheets when a theme exceeds it.
7	More details on the page experience update	June 2021: Top Stories stops requiring AMP.