How to Use Google Web Stories WordPress Plugin

After the great impact of “stories” on Facebook and Instagram, Stories are available as AMP pages and Google releases Google Web Stories WordPress Plugin.

AMP powers web stories, but they are tappable pages with full screen. Web stories give you the ability to create visual narratives that are interactive and are also useful for passing across visual information. The stories are usually trackable, shareable, and immersive. If you have a WordPress website, you can now add these web stories to it thanks to the WordPress plugin created by google.

Google web stories offer website owners an avenue to make more traffic for their website. It is easier to participate with the official WordPress plugin for google. With Google web stories, the site can rank high more quickly on Google search engine results pages, not only for searches but also for Google App, Google images, and Discover.

What are Web Stories?

Google web stories are a different form of AMPs (accelerated mobile pages). These are content that they are supposed to consume in very small bits. The web store’s different pages have a max total of 10 words and have a recommended size between 4 and 30 pages. This allows publishers to use affiliate links to monetize Google DV360 (Beta) and Google Ad Manager.

The audience of web stories is mobile users looking to take in the content at one glance. This content is typically described by Google as someone having a launch or waiting on a subway. These web stories are also free and open source.

Web stories formally called AMP stories are pages with the layout of a magazine and a mobile device’s size. The primary content includes 15 seconds portrait mode video with the caption, significant texts with a link to the full content, and images with a caption. They are only compatible with mobile phones and are therefore ideal for creating smaller bites of content.

Benefits of web stories

Publishers are trying to adopt the format of web stories because they feature it in a way that is attractive for mobile users. This makes web stories a vital way for websites to gather traffic on their site. This is because it is desirable and can also very interactive.

The content and design of web stories make it very suitable for posting a blog post on WordPress websites. Once you integrate the plugin with your WordPress website, it becomes easy for you to drive more traffic to your website through web stories. This will help improve your SEO ranking in Google search, Google app, Google Discover, and Google images.

Google Web Stories WordPress Plugin

The reason Google announced this WordPress plugin is to ensure that publishers can use the format of web stories to attract more traffic. According to content writers at college paper writing services, it is worth noting that both the web story program and the WordPress plugin are in the beta stages. The summer of 2020 is when the final version of the web stories WordPress plugin is expected to be out. This plugin version currently available does not have page attachment support, and animation is also missing. But the complete version will include all of the necessary features that are presently absent in the beta version.

Snackable Content

‘Snackable content,” that is what Google calls the main point of this web story. The recommendation for videos is not to be more than 15 seconds and also include subtitles in it. According to Google, the videos should also not be shot in landscape mode but portrait mode. This will make it easy to display the picture in full screen on the mobile device.

We also expect the videos to have captions to allow the users to read along while watching the video. This is because they presume that the users, at some point, might not be in a position where they can hear the video. For instance, they can be somewhere loud or a public place where it is easy for them to divide their attention.

You can add the long-form content as an attachment link. This feature is brilliant as it allows the publisher to sneak in content to the viewers’ attention through a web store. If the article is interesting, you can convert the readers over to read the whole article.

Why You Should Download The Google Web Stories WordPress Plugin?

This plugin is still in its beta stage, and it definitely does not have all its features and might as well contain a few bugs in it. However, you can use it to create a staging site to get familiar with the plugin. This allows you to be ready to use the final version when they release all the full features.

Installing the Google web stories WordPress plugin

The beta version of this plugin is available for free here. The good thing with this beta is that it is in public beta, this means that it already has almost all the features that we are expecting to see in the final version. Some of the features that we expect in the final version are bugs and performance fixes, better stabilization, and other page attachment and animation support.

Because the available version is a beta version, you will need first to download. Afterward, you will need to install it manually. The steps to installing this plugin are,

  • Download the plugin from go to Stories GitHub Page.
  • Go to the WordPress dashboard and type in plugins → Add New.
  • Click on the upload plugin.
  • Choose the zipped file from your laptop or computer device.
  • Click on “Install Now.”
  • After you get the notification that you have successfully installed your plugin, click on Activate Plugin.

Conclusion

If you are one of those website owners that are still doubting whether or not the Google web stories WordPress plugin is for them, the answer in short words is – yes, it’s for you, and it is essential.

There are already about 5.6 billion searches every day, so if web stories have to stand out in SERPs, they’ll have high click-through rates to their websites, which takes just a few minutes.

The “stories” format on different platforms (Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram) is becoming increasingly and undeniably popular. It is such that it is almost becoming a part of content consumption.

This post already contains all the information that you need to know about Google web stories WordPress plugin. If you are more of a risk-taker, you can instantly start using the beta version of the WordPress plugin. Otherwise, if you do not take many risks, then you should wait until the final version is out.