When it comes to showing up in Google’s search results, only “valid” Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are eligible for display. This is why it’s necessary to validate your pages before you decide to take them live. What’s even more important than this is doing an occasional status check to make sure your pages remain error-free.
Recently, Google provided some tips on how you can both validate pages, and diagnose issues on the pages once they’ve gone live.
Validation
So what are Google’s recommendations for validation of pages and how to identify issues before hitting the web?
Browser Developer Tools
To use Developer Tools for validation:
- Load the AMP page in your browser
- Append “#development=1” to the URL, for example, http://localhost:8000/released.amp.html#development=1.
- Open the Chrome DevTools console and check for validation errors.
AMP Web Validator
You can also validate your pages using a simple, free tool called AMP Web Validator:
- Copy & paste your source code into the web validator.
- Watch as the web validator delivers error messages between the lines of code.
- Edit your code directly in the web validator, which will then be re-validated.
Identifying Issues
It has been recommended by Google that using the MP Browser Extension that’s available for Chrome and Opera. If you browse through your site with the extension turned on, it’ll evaluate the validity of each page. The extension icon will turn different colors based on the status of the page.
- Red: There are errors (the icon will display how many)
- Green: There are no errors
- Blue: You’re not on an AMP page, but an AMP version of the page is available
If you’re curious for more information, you can click on the browser extensions for further details about the errors or warnings found on your site, assuming it finds any.