Do you, as a content publisher, or site owner, or developer, need AMP to power your WordPress site? The simple and very short answer is: no; you don’t need AMP just for the sake of AMP itself. Instead, what we all need is to be able to succeed sustainably as content creators.
What does it take to succeed as a WordPress publisher? #
An answer to this question encompasses many factors, which we refer to as Success Factors:
- Deep knowledge of our audience
- An ongoing creative flow yielding timely and engaging content
- Effective discoverability via outstanding SEO and strategic amplification of our content
- Consistently high-performance, as UX is directly related to the performance, and our content must be served with consistently high-performance to all our users, everywhere, on every device, under challenging network conditions, all (or almost all) the time.
- Measuring the behavior and the performance of our content as perceived by users in the wild
- Sustainable monetization strategies. Without revenue the other goals are virtually unattainable
Phew! That’s a lot. And that is just a subset of the hurdles every content creator in the web must overcome.
How much does all this cost? #
Achieving all these goals costs quite a bit of money. There is a full economy thriving on satisfying the needs of users on each of the above topics:
- There are folks and companies that specialize in doing user and market research (related to aspect #1)
- Content creators, be at companies/organization or individuals, invest quite a bit of resources on creating awesome content (#2)
- There are companies and an army of individual entrepreneurs that specialize on the area of discoverability via SEO and marketing (#3)
- Highly-skilled (and expensive) Software Engineers offer their services to squeeze performance out of sites (#4)
- There are lots of products for addressing the need of measuring the performance of content via analytics solutions (#5)
- There are what it seems as zillions of monetization options, Ad types, ad networks, ad exchanges, etc. (#6)
Thus, achieving the requirements for our success as publishers, we have two options. We can either: hire help on some or all these dimensions, or do the work ourselves.
How do we go about achieving all success factors? #
The first option requires capital. Depending on our site characteristic and goals, the investment level may be significant. If we don’t have the money to invest, the situation is kind of difficult since we cannot monetize our site yet because we need to have all the above elements going our way to get the needed revenue. We may be able to cover the costs for some of the aspects (e.g. getting an awesome SEO plugin), but some tasks are left for us to tackle them. We are left with one option, achieve the goals above ourselves.
Most content creators are in this category of having great content to share and products for the market, but limited resources for investing and executing on the required pillars of success. But this is the open web, and it would be unfortunate if only the folks with lots of resources or skills could have a fair shot at success.
The answer is this: we need to take advantage of all the web has to offer in a cost-effective way. And since there are so many aspects to cover, the option we have is to do our best on the aspects we control, and use the best tools available to us to achieve all the remaining success factors.
AMP and WordPress #
When it comes to building user-first sites, AMP is a powerful and cost-effective tool to make it way easier for us to get there, reducing the level of technical expertise, as well as the time and resources required to succeed at that goal. And the official AMP plugin for WordPress is the core technology making it easier to publish AMP-powered content in WordPress.
Asking the question of what does it take to succeed in the web as a content creator is a great part of getting to the answer. And remember, it is never to use any technology for the sake of the technology itself. The goal is to achieve success we need to make our enterprise sustainable. Let’s make it happen!