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.
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.
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?
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.
- March 8, 2021
- Admin Bar
Wow that’s awesome.
LikeLiked by 20 people
Amazing, I would really love to try out these today.
LikeLiked by 19 people
Ooh, this is exciting. Looking forward to giving it a go!
LikeLiked by 22 people
If you could cross post your story to Instagram and Facebook/Pages that would even better.
LikeLiked by 24 people
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.
LikeLiked by 16 people
Thank you for making this happen!
LikeLiked by 15 people
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!
LikeLiked by 13 people
Good deal❤❤❤❤
LikeLiked by 17 people
It’ll be interesting to be able to create these from the web too!
LikeLiked by 17 people
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!
LikeLiked by 25 people
That is fantastic!
LikeLiked by 19 people
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.
LikeLiked by 18 people
I am looking forward to trying it out. ❤
LikeLiked by 16 people
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 😄
LikeLiked by 13 people
Quite a cool idea. Looking forward to giving this a shot.
LikeLiked by 16 people
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?
LikeLiked by 12 people
It’s being rolled out this week. If you’re not seeing the feature in your app, you can to manually update the WordPress app to the latest version (16.8) in the iOS App Store.
LikeLiked by 14 people
Thanks for the reply. I just looked in the App Store on my phone it is showing 16.7.1 as the latest version of the app. I’ll check again in a couple of days.
LikeLiked by 12 people
Thank you. This helped me so much.
LikeLiked by 14 people
I love this and a nice explanation.
LikeLiked by 19 people
I can’t find this cool new feature in the app, is it not for all users?
LikeLiked by 14 people
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.
LikeLiked by 14 people
Thanks – just utdatert the app manuelle, and I have it! Very cool feature! 🤩
LikeLiked by 9 people
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!
LikeLiked by 13 people
It’s available today in the WordPress mobile apps for self-hosted sites using the Jetpack plugin.
LikeLiked by 12 people
When will this be available?
LikeLiked by 10 people
It’s available today in the WordPress mobile apps for all WordPress.com sites and self-hosted Jetpack sites. If you’re not seeing the Story feature in the WordPress mobile app, you might need to manually update the app to latest version from the Google Play store or Apple App store.
LikeLiked by 11 people
I had updated the app about five days ago and it isn’t there….
LikeLiked by 8 people
Well, the feature is not available and when I go to AppStore it doesn’t suggest that WordPress app should be updated. Just offers the option to open the app, no manual update possible
LikeLiked by 8 people
You should be able to manually update to version 16.8.1 now from the App Store, but if it’s still not showing up as available you may need to check again in a few days as it’s still rolling out.
LikeLiked by 7 people
No problem, thanks.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Wow this so lovely ❤️
LikeLiked by 9 people
Is there any way to edit/crop images in a story via android? And should categories automatically load, as mine don’t seem to?
LikeLiked by 8 people
No edit/crop support yet, but we’re working on it!
Categories should be loading but it seems there might be an issue there – we’ll look into it, thank you for reporting!
LikeLiked by 10 people
Thanks
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 12:47 The WordPress.com Blog wrote:
> Alex Forcier commented: “No edit/crop support yet, but we’re working on > it! Categories should be loading but it seems there might be an issue there > – we’ll look into it, thank you for reporting!” >
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks so much!
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sweet serendipity. This is exactly what I’ve been missing. Thank you for your share.
LikeLiked by 8 people
I’ve seen it and I’ve tried it already. I love it. Lol
LikeLiked by 12 people
So exciting!
LikeLiked by 12 people
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?
LikeLiked by 5 people
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Is it not working for video for everyone else?
LikeLiked by 7 people
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.
LikeLiked by 6 people
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?
LikeLiked by 8 people
Thanks for giving it a try! Sorry to hear about the errors that are happening on your Jetpack sites.
There are a couple of ways to report the errors:
1) Directly from the mobile app. Tap your profile icon from the My Site page, then select Help and Support > Contact Support
2) Using the Jetpack support forum here: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack
3) Or if you’re on a paid Jetpack plan, you can contact support using the form here: https://jetpackme.wordpress.com/contact-support/
LikeLiked by 3 people
Wonderful 🙂
LikeLiked by 6 people
Hi: I had no idea about Stories on WordPress! Thanks for the great info! 🙂
LikeLiked by 5 people
This is very cool!
LikeLiked by 5 people
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.
LikeLiked by 6 people
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.
LikeLiked by 4 people