The official AMP Plugin provides three template modes: Standard, Transitional, and Reader. You can choose one mode based on your site’s characteristics. Specifically:
- Standard Mode is an ideal configuration for your site, which means that your site is fully AMP-compatible and using AMP-compatible themes and plugins. This means that your whole site will be served as AMP and there is no need to maintain two different URLs for AMP and non-AMP pages.
- Transitional Mode maintains two versions of your site – an AMP version and a non-AMP version – but uses the same theme templates for both. This mode is ideal if your site theme is not fully AMP-compatible but the look and feel and/or functional differences are acceptable.
- Reader Mode maintains two versions of your site just like Transitional Mode, but in Reader Mode, two different theme templates are used for the AMP version and the non-AMP version. This mode is recommended when your theme is not AMP-compatible and/or you are using plugins that are not AMP-compatible, and you can’t switch to AMP-compatible ones.
Both Transitional and Reader modes are “paired AMP,” as there are two versions of the site, whileStandard mode is known as “AMP-first”, where there is a single version of your site powered by AMP. In the paired AMP cases, there is a paired URL structure.
The AMP plugin provides settings to change the paired URL structure via a new admin settings section, Paired URL Structure, from version 2.1. In this section, users can choose between four built-in paired URL structures:
- Query parameter, where ?amp=1 is used on all URLs. This is the default for new installs and it is the recommended structure since it does not conflict with any rewrite rules. It also doesn’t result in 404 errors when AMP is deactivated.
- Path suffix, where /amp/ is used on all URLs. This is available due to popular demand (e.g. vanity reasons), although it offers no functional benefits over ?amp.
- Legacy transitional, where ?amp is used on all URLs. When upgrading the plugin from 2.0.x, a site in Transitional mode (or Reader mode with a Reader theme) will default to this structure.
- Legacy reader, where /amp/ is used on all non-hierarchical posts and ?amp is used on everything else. When upgrading the plugin from 2.0.x, a site in Transitional mode will default to this structure. (Note: This is the only structure that continues to support the amp_pre_get_permalink and amp_get_permalink filters.)
