Web Stories

Web Stories are a visual storytelling format for the web, enabling you to easily create visual narratives with engaging animations and tappable interactions, and immerse your readers in great and fast-loading full-screen experiences. On mobile they look and feel similar to Instagram or Facebook stories, but they can be built using a new WordPress plugin developed by Google and they not only work on mobile, but tablet and desktop screen sizes, too.

Examples

Benefits

The Web Stories format puts features and capabilities at your fingertips to engage with your audience via the power of storytelling on the open web. Specifically, you can:

• Create beautiful and engaging content easily: Web Stories make the production of stories as easy as possible from a technical perspective.
• Enjoy creative flexibility for editorial freedom and branding: The Web Stories format comes with preset but flexible layout templates, standardized UI controls, and components for sharing and adding follow-on content.
• Share and link your stories on the open web: Web Stories are part of the open web and can be shared and embedded across sites and apps without being confined to a single ecosystem.
• Track and measure your stories: Supports analytics and bookend capabilities for viral sharing and monetization.
• Capture the attention of your readers by offering fast loading times to your stories: Web Stories are lightning fast so that your audience stays engaged and entertained.
• Engage with your readers via immersive storytelling: Web Stories are a new and modern way to reach existing readers.
• Monetize effectively the beautiful and engaging stories you create: Web Stories enable monetization capability for publishers using affiliate links. For advertisers, Stories is a way to reach a unique audience within a new storytelling experience.

Editor

The Web Stories editor for WordPress brings together a robust set of story creation capabilities in a user-friendly, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) creation tool. Some of the key features you can leverage out of the box are:

• A visually rich and intuitive dashboard, allowing you to easily navigate the story creation process
• Beautiful and expressive page templates to you get your story creation process started quickly and smoothly
• Easy drag-and-drop capabilities, making it easy to compose beautiful stories
• Convenient access to WordPress’ media library, enabling you to grab your media assets right from the plugin dashboard as you create your stories
• Customizable color and text style presets, making it easy to tailor the style of your stories to the needs of your content strategy
• And much more!

Using the Web Stories editor for WordPress, you can easily create visual narratives with tappable interactions, and share freely across the web, or embed them on your existing content strategies. The Stories you create are yours in every way, as Web Stories belong to the open web, instead of being confined to any specific closed ecosystem or platform.

Audience: Everyone

Web Stories are for everyone! If you are a site owner, content creator, or publisher on the web, embracing the Web Stories format would be great as a way to enhance the quality of your content strategy, the value you bring to your readers, and consequently your chances of achieving sustainable success.

Screenshots

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As an early adopter if you find any issues with Web Stories for WordPress, please reach out by visiting the plugin’s support forum to ask any questions or file feature requests. If you need help setting up WordPress with the Web Stories plugin, you can also reach out to Openstream.

Main picture courtesy of Dušan Smetana.