Meks
Do you know you can try any of our premium WordPress themes for free?Show me the themes
Easily setup Facebook instant articles for your WordPress website (plus tips & tricks )

Easily setup Facebook instant articles for your WordPress website (plus tips & tricks )

1Shares

Wondering how to set up Facebook Instant Articles for your WordPress site? Just follow our step-by-step guide and you’ll do it in no time! But, before we go there, let us quickly go over what Facebook Instant Articles are and why you should have them.

What are Facebook Instant Articles?

Although they were introduced to us back in 2015, there is still quite a number of blogs and sites that aren’t using Facebook Instant Articles. One of the main reasons is they think it’s not so simple to set it all up. And we know that because it one of the questions we get regularly, which is why we’re making this guide. Back to the core.

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-sign-up

Top WP Hosting recommended by Meks

Facebook Instant Articles are Facebook’s way to create fast, more interesting, interactive stories on Facebook. Basically, it’s an HTML5 file that is optimized for mobile and has enhanced features to bring your content more appealing. It gives better user experience for anyone who uses mobile to go through Facebook and websites. Knowing that more than 50% of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile, Facebook Instant Articles are a must.

With this feature, your articles are hosted on Facebook which improves the load time and delivery significantly.

Facebook Instant Articles benefits

One of the main Facebook Instant Articles is speed hence lower bounce rate, bigger traffic, more SEO love. If people can access your content quickly, they are more likely to stay longer on your blog or site. By setting up this feature, your articles will load up to 10x faster than standard ones. Facebook Instant Articles help you reach a wider audience since speed improvement means people tend to share your content more. Not to mention you get access to flexible monetization options:

Now, it all sounds a bit too much to be true, but it really is. Still, just to keep us fair and objective, there are a few small downsides of having Facebook Instant Articles. The service limits the use of photos and videos as well as ad blocks. Also, it can’t show your whole blog or site, just the article itself, and just the stuff that is directly connected to that article. That means any non-related CTA, email form or widgets won’t be visible to the readers. And finally, you need to get manually approved by Facebook. To make sure that you’re ready, go over Facebook’s Submission Checklist and see how to get approved.

Just imagine this powerful Facebook’s tool combined with our fast and well-coded premium WordPress themes. It’s like a match made from heaven 🙂

So, how do start publishing Facebook Instant Articles on WordPress? Follow this guide and find out!

How to set up Facebook Instant Articles on your WordPress blog or site?

Step One

The very first thing is to sign up for Instant Articles. Once you set up the account and get access to publishing tools, these are the steps to take:

  1. Select the Facebook Page that you’d like to use to manage your Instant Articles.
  2. Agree to the Instant Articles Terms, which contain our content and advertising policies.
  3. To access the tools, click on Publishing Tools on your Facebook Page, and go to Instant Articles in the left navigation bar.

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-sign-up-steps

Step Two

Once you do all this, it’s time to develop and submit your articles and start publishing. And you start that once you claim your URL, like this:

Instant Articles – Configuration – Tools – Connect Your Site

which will open a piece of code to put within your blog/site code OR, in our case, you’ll select the Page ID to copy and paste on Facebook Instant Articles WordPress plugin.

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-sign-up-steps1

Step Three

Choose the right WordPress plugin for Instant Articles and finish the configuration. There are several plugins and we’ll go over the most popular ones

Instant Articles for WP

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-instant-articles-for-wp

This is the official Facebook’s Instant Articles plugin, made in collaboration with Automattic and Dekode. Install it and paste the Page ID into the Instant Articles Settings. Afterward, you need to go back to the Publishing tools to add your site’s URL and click on Claim URL button. Once you’re approved, you can start publishing Facebook Instant Articles for your WordPress site. When you activate all, the plugin will generate an Instant Article RSS automatically. Just add the /feed/facebook-instant-articles/ extension after your URL and you’ll be able to access it and share it on Facebook (set up the Production RSS Feed):

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-sign-up-steps2

as well as on other networks.

WP Native Articles

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-wp-native-articles-plugin

A freemium plugin that helps you activate Facebook Instant Articles for WordPress blogs and websites. Once activated, WP Native Articles auto generates an instant article version for each of your WordPress articles. It comes with Google Analytics integration, as well as a few other analytics plugins. Furthermore, you can even enable and control ads in Instant Articles, all from within the plugin.

The premium version comes with more features like:

  • API sync
  • Manage Articles
  • Live and individual sync
  • Article status
  • Premium support

and more. The price starts at $49/year for a single site.

Facebook Instant Articles & Google AMP Pages

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-plugin

This plugin manages both Instant Articles and Google AMP Pages right from its dashboard on your WordPress site or blog. Furthermore, it helps you with content optimization as it automatically takes your existing content and optimizes the page structure to fit the needed requirements.

facebook-instant-articles-wordpress-plugin1

It comes with Google Analytics integration, as well as Chartbeat, Parse.ly and more.

How to tell which of your articles on Facebook Feed are Instant and which are regular? Easy! Instant Articles will have a lightning icon in the top right corner of the post.

What if I can’t get Facebook Instant Articles approved?

Now, you might get the „This Page is ineligible for Instant Articles.“ notification next to the Facebook Page you want to use for Instant Articles. If that’s the case, here are the reasons to check and see how to resolve them:

  • You don’t have an admin role on the Page.
  • Another admin set up Instant Articles previously. Check your Page’s publishing tools to see if you already have access to Instant Articles.
  • Your Page violates the Monetization Eligibility Standards. Review the standards to learn how to make your Page eligible for Instant Articles.
  • Your Page doesn’t meet our standards for having an established presence on Facebook.

Be sure to go over the standards and modify your Facebook page accordingly and try out again. If things don’t change, the best is to contact Facebook Support for more details and ways to improve your Page.

Facebook Instant Articles tips and tricks

1. Brand your Instant Articles, always.

You want Facebook users to remember you, so make sure your Instant Articles are aligned with your brand color palette. You can easily create and customize the style of Instant Articles with no help of designers. Simply use the Style Editor within the Configuration feature and play with the predefined templates. You can change the colors, heading, the content itself, as well as visuals like logo, background, footer, captions and much more!

2. Track your Instant Articles efforts

Another great feature that comes with Instant Articles is analytics. You can track your articles engagement through data that Facebook provides. Moreover, if you use Google Analytics, you can embed the same tracking tags as part of your Instant Articles to include this data within your existing analytics tools.

3. Always check for errors

Download the Facebook Page Manager to monitor, preview and check your Instant Articles before publishing. With it, you can see if it’s all your web content transformative to Instant Articles correctly and completely. It’s advisable to always double-check before posting because sometimes mistakes do happen and when it does, the Article doesn’t get published properly. You can resolve those errors through Publishing Tools or within the original content on your site.

Wrapping up

As you see, Facebook Instant Articles are a great way to further improve your WordPress’s site traffic and engagement. And it’s not that hard to set it up as you might have thought 🙂 Thanks to the plugin and this guide, hopefully.

How to set up Facebook Instant Articles for your WordPress blog

Feel free to share this guide if you find it helpful and share with us your thoughts on having Instant Articles on your WordPress blog. And if there’s anything left unsaid, go to the Facebook’s Instant Articles FAQ.

1Shares

Tags: , ,

Ivana Cirkovic

Ivana is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over nine years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and an active member of WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7. In love with Twitter, WP, photography and NYC.

Try theme now for free!
  • Access to a copy of the demo website
  • Full access to the theme options
  • No credit card required

* We will send you an occasional newsletter with special offers, news & theme updates but you can unsubscribe at any time.

Meks