How to remove the plugin without losing the SEO and with proper Redirections

If you are looking for a perfect and safe way to uninstall an AMP from your site then follow the below steps.

Setup NOINDEX for AMP

This is an important step where we’re preventing Google to Index our pages.

We’ll include a line of Code in the SEO Option of the AMP Settings.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>

First, go to the WordPress Admin Area -> AMP option panel -> Settings -> SEO -> Enter code in Head Section.

In a week or two, you’ll be seeing the reduction in indexing.

Once they are down we’ll go to the next step i.e., Deactivate and Delete the plugin.

Deactivate & Delete the AMP Plugin

first, deactivate the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Plugin from Plugins Panel.

After deactivating the plugin delete it completely.

This will remove the AMP from your site.

Set up a Proper Redirection

How can you fix the 404 / page not found errors when you deactivate the AMP plugin.

Step 1: Download the free plugin called Redirection By John Godley

Step 2: After Activating go to WordPress Dashboard -> Tools -> Redirection and Setup new redirection.

To setup new redirection, we need to setup 2 things Source URL and Target URL
So in the source URL paste this regex code.  /(.*)\/amp
This code will make sure all your post URL ending with /AMP are taken as Source URL and will be redirected.

In the target, URL paste this https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 and make sure you enable the checkbox “Regular Expression”.

Your redirection should look like this.

Step 3: Hit Add Redirection and test it.
I suggest you to please check multiple amp pages and make sure they are working as expected.

I hope this will help you handling 404 pages generated after deactivating the AMP plugin, and I’m sure after some time Google will update its data in search console and /amp pages will be deindexed slowly.

That’s it for this tutorial!

We hope it helped you. If you have any feedback or questions, then please share them in the comments section below.