Looking for the best WordPress Instagram plugin?
You can use an Instagram plugin to increase the engagement and average time spent on your site. It’s also easy to get more sales from them because you can embed shoppable ads to your site and redirect your traffic to popular products.
But there are so many options. Which one should you choose? Should you get a paid plugin or a free one? What platforms should a social feed plugin connect to your site?
In this article, we’re going to give you the best WordPress Instagram plugin. And we’ll even tell you why it’s our favorite, talk about some alternatives, and answer all your questions.
Sounds good? Let’s dive in.
What to Look For in a WordPress Instagram Plugin
If you’re going to get a WordPress Instagram plugin, there are a few small things to consider. The vast majority of the plugins in the marketplace are either free or come with a free plan. We don’t recommend using these plugins as your first option. Don’t get fooled by an overwhelming number of features from a free plugin. You need to consider performance as well.
WordPress Instagram plugins usually use Javascript to embed social feeds into your site. And that code can often slow down your site’s loading speed significantly. Now, if you don’t know how to optimize and minimize code, we strongly recommend going with plugins that don’t slow down your site.
Then, there are some plugins that only support a particular channel while others are more general and easily integrate with a wide variety of social media networks.
Of course, it depends entirely on you what platforms are important to grow your business. But we recommend getting a plugin with more general use. The biggest issue with platform-focused plugins is that if you need social feeds from other platforms, then you’ll need to buy another plugin.
You should also look into how customizable a plugin is and whether you need to learn coding to customize it. As we said, most social feed plugins come with a free plan. So, test out the ease of use before buying a plugin.
We went through all these parameters and more to make sure that our top recommendation for a WordPress Instagram plugin really is the best. Now, you don’t have to go through a hundred plugins. Just use our favorite pick!
Best WordPress Instagram Plugin
Now that you understand what a WordPress Instagram plugin can do and what to look for in a plugin, it’s time to check out the list.
#1. Smash Balloon
Smash Balloon is a simple WordPress Instagram plugin that allows you to display your social feeds on your site without using any code at all. You can use Smash Balloon to create custom Instagram feeds for your WordPress site in a few clicks. And you get to integrate Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds together or separately as you wish.
A really cool way to use a plugin like Smash Balloon is to use social media feeds to create a testimonial wall. The best part? It’s incredibly easy to use. Smash Balloon takes barely 5 minutes to set up. And there’s no learning curve at all.
2+ million users trust Smash Balloon to display their social feeds on their websites. To top it off, Smash Balloon has an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars on WordPress.
You can use Smash Balloon to:
- Use your Instagram hashtag feeds on your site as social proof
- Display interactive Twitter feeds to boost website engagement
- Embed your YouTube videos on your site to grow your subscribers
- Add authentic Facebook Business Page reviews to your site to increase conversions
And lots more!
You should also check out our Smash Balloon review for a full look at the features.
#2. Feed Them Social
Feed Them Social is another popular WordPress Instagram plugin. You can use the plugin to create attractive social feeds for Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
It’s super easy to use and you can embed social feeds anywhere on your site. All the designs are mobile-friendly. So, you don’t have to create different versions of your feeds for different devices. And you can insert the feed into your blog posts, sidebars, widgets, and pages without worrying about the design falling to pieces in different screen sizes.
You can also insert like and follow buttons to grow your social media following. This way, you can convert your website traffic into social media followers and stay in touch with them even if they don’t opt for your email newsletters.
#3. EmbedSocial
EmbedSocial is an easy to use Instagram plugin for WordPress. You can use it to display picture albums from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as social feeds.
The best feature about this plugin is its simplicity. All you need to do is paste a shortcode anywhere on your website to display a social feed. And you can insert shortcodes pretty much anywhere in WordPress. This includes sidebars, widgets, footers, and blog posts.
The entire feed is updated dynamically as well. In other words, whenever you upload a new post on your social media profiles, your feed gets updated as well.
You can also customize the look and feel of your feeds to a great extent. The plugin comes with different layout templates that you can easily customize without any coding whatsoever. You can use custom titles, display your feed as grids and slideshows, and even lazyload your images so that your site doesn’t slow down because of the feed.
#4. Walls.io
Walls.io is a free WordPress plugin you can use to create a social media wall. Usually, social media walls are used as testimonial pages for your site. But Walls.io is more than just a WordPress testimonial plugin.
Even though it’s free, the features on this plugin are quite epic.
Of all the plugins on this list, you get the most number of platforms to connect to your site. You have standard options such as creating feeds for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. But if you like, you can also create feeds for Reddit, Tumblr, Vimeo, LinkedIn, and more.
The plugin is super easy to use as well. Just create a social feed, add your source, customize the design, and then embed the feed on your website. You can also set up dynamic or manual updates for the feeds embedded on your site. And if you like, you can also set moderation rules to automatically stop specific posts from showing up on your feed.
#5. Juicer.io
Juicer.io is a social feeds plugin that helps you bring together content from multiple social networks in one spot on your WordPress website.
You can create feeds from:
- YouTube
- Google Plus
- Tumblr
- Tumblr
- Vine
- RSS
- Spotify
- Slack
- Flickr
- Vimeo
- Hashtags
- Yelp
- DeviantArt
That’s a lot of platforms to curate content from! So, naturally, you can also create filters and moderation rules to manage your feeds automatically. If you want, you can even add an infinite scroll to your embedded social feeds. It’s probably not a good fit for all website designs, but if you need it, you’ve got it.
The coolest bit is that you can find out how your visitors are using and interacting with your social feed from a detailed analytics dashboard.
Which One’s the Best WordPress Instagram Plugin?
Hands down, Smash Balloon is the best WordPress Instagram plugin. If you consider the balance between price, performance, and features, there’s really no contest. We recommend that you go ahead and start creating your feeds right away. And how to set up a viral giveaway to supercharge your social media following.
After that, all that’s left is generating traffic to your site so that your social feeds can get to work.
A simple way to do that is to start using push notifications. Sending push notifications is a great way to generate repeat traffic for your site. If that’s something you’re interested in, you should check out these articles as well:
- Push Notification Cost: Is It Really Free? (Pricing Analysis)
- How to Get More Traffic to Your WordPress Blog (9 Easy Ways)
- How to Boost Your Web Push Notification Opt-In Rate (7 Ways)
- How to Add a Web Notifications WordPress Plugin to Your Site
We recommend using PushEngage to send your push notifications. PushEngage is the #1 push notification software in the world. So, if you haven’t already, get started with PushEngage today.
