Instagram stories are a great way to share moments from your day without the need to keep them on your Instagram profile.
These posts disappear within 24 hours, yet they are an awesome way to increase social engagement. Stories are perfect for giving readers, followers, and clients, a glimpse into your or your company’s day to day life.
With an Instagram stories plugin like Spotlight PRO, you can now display Instagram stories on WordPress at the click of a button! Let’s see how it’s done.
How to display Instagram stories on WordPress
Connect your account
After installing Spotlight PRO, connect your account and authorize the plugin to access your media. In order to be able to show Instagram stories on WordPress, you will need to have a Business account.
Switching from a Personal account to a Business one is free of charge and can be reverted at any time. Business accounts give you access to insights and business features within Instagram itself and also unlock a number of features within Spotlight.
Once you’ve connected your account, your feed will be displayed automatically, thanks to Spotlight’s live preview editor. Select the feeds you want to show and switch to the Design tab to customize your feed.
Display your stories
Designing your feed with Spotlight is easy. The plugin offers over 40 customization options to enable you to create any type of feed. For this example, I’ve opted for a Masonry layout with a central header.
Once you’re happy with your design, scroll down to the Header section. It is important that your profile photo is enabled in order to view stories.
In the Header section, you’ll find 2 design options for stories:
- Include or exclude stories
- Stories interval time
Hit the check box and if you have any stories which are currently live, your profile photo will get an outline indicating that a story is ready to be viewed.
Spotlight also lets you determine the number of seconds you wish to dedicate to each story when displaying multiple posts. The Instagram story will open up in a lightbox or popup box and will be played automatically.
Spotlight displays stories in much the same way as Instagram does. This keeps things familiar between the two platforms which means most users will already know what the outline around your profile photo indicates.
Note: Instagram does not provide re-shared stories from its API. This applies whether you’re resharing someone else’s posts or your own.
If the outline around your profile photo is not showing, and you have a live Instagram story, then you might want to check your Spotlight settings.
Go to Instagram Feeds > Settings and click on Configuration. Spotlight’s default is to check for new data every hour, however, you can adjust this from the drop-down menu. Give your feed some time to sync with Instagram and your Instagram stories will show up.
Embed your feed
All you need to do now is embed your feed using the generated shortcode or the dedicated widget.
Once a website visitor clicks on your profile, the story will automatically show up in a lightbox or popup box. The bar above your image shows a countdown to your next Instagram story.
Conclusion
Displaying your Instagram stories on your WordPress website is a surefire way to get your website visitors engaged with your content. This can not only help you increase your follower count, but can also result in a closer connection with your audience.
Instagram stories have also been proven to work in marketing terms. They are a great way to launch new events, products, and services to your Instagram followers and website visitors.
Have you displayed Instagram stories on your WordPress website? Let us know for a chance to be featured on our website!
