How to Fix: AMP for news enabled

AMP for news enabled is an SEO check in the News & Publishing category, flagged as a medium-priority issue. I am going to give you the unfashionable read on this one, because the honest answer in 2026 is not “turn AMP on” — it is “decide, deliberately, whether you still need it at all.”

What this check actually looks at

AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages — is a stripped-down HTML framework Google introduced in 2015 to make mobile pages load near-instantly. For years, having AMP versions of your news articles was effectively the price of admission to the Top Stories carousel on mobile search. This check verifies whether AMP output is enabled and valid for your news content: whether your articles have a corresponding AMP version, whether that version validates, and whether it is correctly linked from the canonical page.

Why it matters — and why less than it used to

The critical context this check does not give you: in June 2021, with the Page Experience update, Google removed the AMP requirement for Top Stories. Any page that meets Core Web Vitals is now eligible, AMP or not. That single change is why AMP has quietly declined across the publishing world ever since. So the real question the check should prompt is not “is AMP on?” but “is my mobile experience fast enough to compete, by whatever means?” If your answer is a well-optimised, genuinely fast responsive site, you can be fully competitive in Top Stories with no AMP at all.

Where AMP still earns its place: very high-volume news operations, publishers who lean heavily on Google’s cache for speed on poor networks, and teams whose entire pipeline is already built around it. Where it costs you: a second version of every article to keep valid, a stripped feature set, ad and analytics workarounds, and a maintenance tax that grows with every plugin you add.

How to check where you stand

• Run your key article templates through Google’s Rich Results / URL Inspection in Search Console and check Core Web Vitals on mobile — that is the metric that actually decides Top Stories eligibility now.
• If AMP is enabled, validate a handful of live AMP URLs and check Search Console’s AMP report for errors; broken AMP is worse than no AMP.
• Compare real user speed (field data, not lab) between your AMP and canonical versions before assuming AMP is the faster path.

How to fix it in WordPress

Difficulty Level: MEDIUM – This fix requires some technical knowledge or familiarity with WordPress settings and plugins.

Estimated Time: 2 hr

You have two legitimate paths. Pick one on purpose:

1. If you are keeping AMP: install the official AMP plugin, choose Reader or Transitional mode to match your theme, and validate your article template until it is error-free. Confirm your analytics (via amp-analytics) and consent/ad setup carry over, because these are where AMP silently breaks.
2. If you are dropping AMP: do it cleanly. Keep the AMP URLs alive with 301 redirects to the canonical article so you lose no equity, then invest the freed time in Core Web Vitals on your responsive pages — image sizing, lazy-loading, a real caching layer, and trimming render-blocking scripts.

What I would actually do

For most publishers I work with today, I would not adopt AMP fresh in 2026. The requirement that justified it is gone, and the maintenance cost is real. I would put the same two hours into making the canonical mobile page genuinely fast, which benefits every reader on every source of traffic, not only the ones arriving through Google’s carousel. The exception is a large newsroom already deeply invested in AMP tooling — there, “keep it valid” beats a risky migration mid-cycle. Either way, the failing check is a prompt to make a decision, not a command to switch AMP on. Decide, document why, and move on.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

• Official AMP plugin – if you commit to AMP, this is the one to run
• Google Search Console – AMP report, Core Web Vitals, and Top Stories performance
• A caching/optimization plugin – to make your canonical pages fast enough that AMP becomes optional
• SEO Roadmap – complete SEO audit and action plan tool

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.