Introducing WordPress Stories: A New Way to Engage Your Audience

Interested in a new way to create and publish engaging content on your WordPress site? Today, we’re unveiling our new Stories feature, now available in the WordPress apps.

March 8, 2021

Megs Fulton

Since the early days of Snapchat, which made the format so popular, Stories have become a powerful way to engage audiences on social media. Today, over 500 million Instagram accounts use Stories every day. Now, you can publish Stories on your website — a place where you truly own your own content.

With Stories, you can combine photos, videos, and text to create an engaging, tappable, full-screen slideshow that your visitors will love. You can conveniently publish Stories from your phone, giving you more ways to keep your site fresh and optimized for your increasingly mobile audience.

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Introducing WordPress Stories: A New Way to Engage Your Audience

Stories are the perfect format for: 

  • Step-by-step guides 
  • Recipes and cooking tutorials
  • Updates on your DIY or art projects
  • A behind-the-scenes look at your latest product

The Stories you know, but better

WordPress Stories are different in a few ways. 

Stories are published on your site as a blog post, which means they can be viewed, liked, and commented on by your site visitors, just like any other blog post. Your Stories have a permanent URL that can be shared and linked to from other platforms. And if you’re using the Publicize feature on your WordPress site, your Story can automatically be shared with your social media fans and followers, expanding the reach of your content. 

We know it takes a lot of effort to create great content. Unlike the Stories you’re familiar with on other social platforms, Stories on your WordPress site won’t disappear after 24 hours! This means you can edit or add to your Stories long after you first publish them. 

Ready to try it out? 

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Introducing WordPress Stories: A New Way to Engage Your Audience

All WordPress.com sites and self-hosted Jetpack sites can start using Stories today with the free WordPress mobile app for Android or iOS. The Stories feature will be available in the desktop block editor and on iPad devices later this year. 

For a detailed, step-by-step guide, visit the Story Block support page.

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50 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. alexmorgen Mar 8th at 5:34 pm

    Wow that’s awesome.

    Liked by 20 people

  2. avastzumac Mar 8th at 5:51 pm

    Amazing, I would really love to try out these today.

    Liked by 19 people

  3. Hope found in M.E. Mar 8th at 6:45 pm

    Ooh, this is exciting. Looking forward to giving it a go!

    Liked by 22 people

  4. Blender Fox Mar 8th at 8:01 pm

    If you could cross post your story to Instagram and Facebook/Pages that would even better.

    Liked by 24 people

    • Nitin Mar 8th at 9:17 pm

      Don’t think that’s something that can happen because Insta and FB don’t have open APIs to Stories. Do they? Best that one can do is save a story locally and post it manually. There’s already a big market for that via Canva and other such apps.

      Liked by 16 people

  5. sassygirl614 Mar 8th at 8:11 pm

    Thank you for making this happen!

    Liked by 15 people

  6. Nitin Mar 8th at 9:15 pm

    Awesome! Looking forward to new features though – right out the gate, there’s no way to do text-only posts. I know it’s counter intuitive to have text-only Stories on a text blog. But that’s just feature parity for you!

    Liked by 13 people

  7. mytwosentz Mar 8th at 9:38 pm

    Good deal❤❤❤❤

    Liked by 17 people

  8. Jkund Mar 8th at 10:05 pm

    It’ll be interesting to be able to create these from the web too!

    Liked by 17 people

  9. Helen @ TKC Mar 8th at 10:32 pm

    Awesome! My husband and I are in part a food blog and we share lots of recipes and snack reviews, so it will be really great to share the recipes we cook with a short-text Story version as well. Thank you, WordPress. These will definitely come in handy!

    Liked by 25 people

  10. RJK Mar 8th at 11:33 pm

    That is fantastic!

    Liked by 19 people

  11. nrk Mar 9th at 1:07 am

    I love this feature & have been using it to make title & cover art for my writings. The text feature is wonderful for this. It really has helped to add interest to my blog & just makes the presentation of my work a lot more concept-defined, well-themed & cohesive.

    Liked by 18 people

  12. JanBeek Mar 9th at 4:17 am

    I am looking forward to trying it out. ❤

    Liked by 16 people

  13. Rajeshree blogs Mar 9th at 7:22 am

    Oh My God! I am so excited for the stories…. This would definitely help us to have more engagement ☺
    I tell my experiences in the blog and this update would help me to share some brief thoughts 😄

    Liked by 13 people

  14. Jake Mar 9th at 9:19 am

    Quite a cool idea. Looking forward to giving this a shot.

    Liked by 16 people

  15. David Bennett Mar 9th at 1:19 pm

    When I click on My iPhone, it shows ‘Create New: Blog post and Site page, but no option to create a Story post. Has this been rolled out everywhere?

    Liked by 12 people

  16. juliashanklesoutlookcom Mar 9th at 2:55 pm

    Thank you. This helped me so much.

    Liked by 14 people

  17. Shenashi Monishiya Mar 9th at 3:27 pm

    I love this and a nice explanation.

    Liked by 19 people

  18. Byråkratfrue Mar 9th at 4:13 pm

    I can’t find this cool new feature in the app, is it not for all users?

    Liked by 14 people

    • Megs Fulton Mar 10th at 1:05 am

      If you’re not seeing the Story feature in the WordPress mobile app, you might need to manually update the app to the latest version in the Google Play store or Apple App store. It’s available to all WordPress.com sites and self-hosted Jetpack sites.

      Liked by 14 people

  19. Jason G. Mar 9th at 6:54 pm

    This sounds very promising for blogs and small business sites. Will this feature eventually be included in the self-hosted version of WordPress (from WordPress.org) or as a plugin? Or will this only be for those using WordPress.com? Thanks for any feedback!

    Liked by 13 people

  20. Coralsblogspot Mar 9th at 11:02 pm

    When will this be available?

    Liked by 10 people

  21. alexmorgen Mar 10th at 10:27 am

    Wow this so lovely ❤️

    Liked by 9 people

  22. Hope found in M.E. Mar 10th at 2:39 pm

    Is there any way to edit/crop images in a story via android? And should categories automatically load, as mine don’t seem to?

    Liked by 8 people

  23. Teacher Lynda Mar 10th at 3:42 pm

    Sweet serendipity. This is exactly what I’ve been missing. Thank you for your share.

    Liked by 8 people

  24. Shuga Mar 10th at 11:43 pm

    I’ve seen it and I’ve tried it already. I love it. Lol

    Liked by 12 people

  25. Lisset Mar 11th at 4:45 am

    So exciting!

    Liked by 12 people

  26. digilab450 Mar 11th at 6:03 am

    When I click on My iPhone, it shows ‘Create New: Blog post and Site page, but no option to create a Story post. Has this been rolled out everywhere?

    Liked by 5 people

    • Alex Forcier Mar 13th at 1:12 am

      As the update is still rolling out on iOS, you might need to manually update the app to latest version (16.8.1) from the App store.

      Liked by 2 people

  27. veronikasimmons Mar 11th at 5:33 pm

    Is it not working for video for everyone else?

    Liked by 7 people

    • Alex Forcier Mar 12th at 5:08 am

      Hi there! We’ve had a couple of reports of video recording not working – there seems to be an issue affecting older iPhones. We’re working on a fix, but as a workaround for now you can record the video using the device’s camera and import it into the Stories creator by pressing the thumbnail button to the left of the camera shutter button.

      Liked by 6 people

  28. danyork Mar 12th at 8:21 am

    This is very cool! Thanks for adding this feature. Is there any trick to getting it to work for self-hosted Jetpack sites? Using the latest IOS app, I can post a story to my WordPress.com site fine. However, when I try to post a story to one of my self-hosted sites (with the latest Jetpack installed), I get errors.

    Related to that, where is the best place to report errors with the Story feature on Jetpack sites? Is it the support forums here? Or somewhere on GitHub?

    Liked by 8 people

  29. deepanilamani Mar 12th at 11:30 am

    Wonderful 🙂

    Liked by 6 people

  30. ZiaBellaz TV Mar 13th at 10:52 pm

    Hi: I had no idea about Stories on WordPress! Thanks for the great info! 🙂

    Liked by 5 people

  31. ramonaonthetrail Mar 14th at 3:21 am

    This is very cool!

    Liked by 5 people

  32. David Thrift 📷 👋 🇺🇸 Mar 15th at 5:26 am

    This is very interesting. I like that the WordPress stories won’t disappear since they are published in blog posts. Will definitely have to give this a try on my test blog as I’m interested to see how this feature could be used to promote my business. Are these stories going to have the ability to post across a blog/website in the same fashion that is done on the social media sites? I’m assuming that would require WordPress to build modules into all of it’s current templates that would work with these stories to display like that? Is that something WordPress has in mind for future updates? I’m currently using the Colinear template on all of my websites. It’s the only one I’ve found with multiple layouts that work beautifully no matter where you put your sidebars. I think that theme could look amazing with a row of stories under the header image across the website.

    Liked by 6 people

    • Megs Fulton Mar 15th at 6:13 pm

      Hi there, thanks for the kind words and ideas on how to improve the appearance of Stories on sites.

      Having a unique display for Stories is a great idea. I’ll pass your feedback along to the team.

      Liked by 4 people

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