Facebook Instant Articles WordPress Plugin

instant articles

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced on its official blog that it would be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers during the F8 conference that will be held on April 12th. If you haven’t heard about Instant Articles and what it is about, check out the short information and the video preview below.

We built Instant Articles to solve a specific problem–slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones. This is a problem that impacts publishers of all sizes, especially those with audiences where low connectivity is an issue. With that in mind, our goal from the beginning was to open up Instant Articles to all publishers and we’re excited to be able to do that in a way that makes it fast and easy for all publishers to reach their audiences on Facebook.

Facebook Introduces Instant Articles WordPress Plugin

Now that you have an idea about Instant Articles, I’d like to share some good news with my fellow WordPress publishers. Earlier today, Facebook announced that they have partnered with Automattic in developing a free WordPress plugin which will allow WordPress users to easily generate and publish Instant Articles from their blogs/websites.

Facebook, so we’ve partnered with Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com VIP, to build a free plugin for Instant Articles, which simplifies the process of generating and publishing Instant Articles from WordPress. The open-source WordPress publishing platform now powers more than 25% of sites on the web, so we are excited to help millions of publishers all over the world bring the Instant Articles experience to their readers.

We’ve worked with a small group of publishers on WordPress to beta test the plugin as a seamless way to adapt web content for the Instant Articles format, with a built-in suite of interactive tools that help stories come to life on mobile.

instant articles wordpress plugin

instant articles wordpress plugin

Right now, you can download a copy of the Instant Articles WordPress plugin from GitHub and install it on your WordPress-powered blog/website. The plugin will be made available in the official WordPress plugin directory soon.

Once the Instant Articles program opens up next month, publishers who use regular WordPress templates can activate and start using the Instant Articles plugin out-of-the-box. Those who would want to create a customized experience can modify and extend the plugin options in order to support additional elements. This plugin is open source and the community is encouraged to participate in its development so that it will help all publishers to take full advantage of Instant Article’s capabilities.

This is also very helpful for Facebook users who have limited/poor Internet connectivity and/or only use mobile devices to access Facebook. With Instant Articles and this WordPress plugin, they’ll be able to access more content quickly.

If you want to learn more about the Instant Articles WordPress Plugin, check out the plugin’s documentation and FAQs.

Anyone else excited and looking forward to implementing or trying out the Instant Articles WordPress plugin? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

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4 Comments

    1. The articles, documentation and FAQ don’t specifically mention anything about WordPress.com sites but I’m going to assume that this feature will be automatically implemented just like other previous features that were added to WordPress.com and required a plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites.

      Is your blog hosted on WordPress.com now?

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