You’ve probably heard of the social media giant Instagram. It is only one of the biggest social media platforms on the web today.

In this article we will show you a number of ways to instantly push your Instagram feed to your website automatically.

Instagram is a social media platform for influencers and consumers and is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Although social media platforms like Instagram are useful in business, they can take a lot of time to utilize. That is why it is a good thing that Instagram has the ability for you to automate interactivity between your Instagram account and website.

Instagram is a platform that allows you to discover new users accounts or interests based on what you already like. Your profile can be discovered from a keyword that you include with your post (a hashtag) or from your location or what your friends recommend.

According to statista, Instagram has grown to over 700 million by the end of 2017 and it is not slowing down.

Social Media Market Share

No matter whether you have a strong Instagram following or not, you will likely want to share you latest Instagram posts to help build your brand and continue with pushing future user engagement back to your site.

Instagram helps keep your audience engaged and is also a way to help continue selling after they leave your website.

We will be showing you 3 ways to get your social media feed to your website. The three ways we will be showing are:

  1. Using an Instagram WordPress plugin to pull the latest posts from your Instagram feed.
  2. Using IFTTT to create a post on your website when you post on Instagram.
  3. Manually creating an Instagram feed using PHP code in your theme.

Method 1: Using an Instagram WordPress plugin on your WordPress website

This is by far the simplest method to adding your Instagram feed to your website.

This way will allow you to simply display your latest Instagram posts using a shortcode or widget on your website. You do not need to create any posts or any additional data on your website, the images will be pulled from your Instagram feed and displayed. Each time a new image is uploaded, it will be displayed in place of another.

Instagram Feed WordPress Plugin
This is what the Instagram Feed plugin looks like when output on your page.

You will need to install an Instagram feed plugin. There are many to choose from on the WordPress plugin directory but for this tutorial, we will be using the most popular one aptly called Instagram feed.

Your site will now be displaying all of your newest Instagram photos automatically. This option should have been the most straightforward way to automatically display Instagram posts on your website.

If you are a little bit tech-savvy and would like to control the output of your feed then you can do so by following method 3 below. We will be coding a custom shortcode to display your Instagram feed anywhere on your site.


IFTTT Homepage
We will be utilizing IFTTT to do the heavy lifting for method 2

Method 2: Creating a new website post when an Instagram post is created

This method is for people who want to automatically create a post on your website whenever an image is posted on your Instagram account. The post will be populated with the same content you post on Instagram.

We will be using the third party app called IF This Then That (IFTTT) to do the heavy lifting for us.

If you successfully linked both your Instagram and WordPress accounts and setup the Applet then your automation is now complete.
Post an image on Instagram to see your newly created post automatically get created on your website.

If you set the post to automatically get published then it should now be published on your site.


Instagram Feed Shortcode
The following plugin that we will be coding will output something similar to this.

Method 3: Manually coding an Instagram feed shortcode

There may be a time when you need to customize the layout of your Instagram feed further than what is available from a plugin or you just want to get your hands dirty.

This option is a completely manual process that we will be custom coding using PHP as a plugin for our website.

Because we control the entire process, the output can be coded to exactly fit our website layout and design.

This will be a very simple plugin to demonstrate how simple it is to retrieve posts from your Instagram feed.
[highlight type=”note”]You an download the complete file to work along with in our downloads section.

[purchase_link id=”1000″ style=”button” color=”inherit” text=”Download Instagram Feed Plugin” direct=”true”][/highlight]

If you want to see the code assembled into a very simple plugin then you can download it from here:

[purchase_link id=”1000″ style=”link” class=”aligncenter” color=”inherit” text=”Download Instagram Feed Plugin” direct=”true”]

That is all that is required to custom display Instagram posts on your website. As you can see, the final method is a lot more complicated than the previous two methods however it allows you to have complete control over the code that you are using.

The initial process of creating the access token is a long process but once you have your token, it is rather straightforward.

Conclusion

Instagram is a social network that is rapidly growing with hundreds of millions of people using it. Don’t leave your customers unable to find and connect with you.
Using the Instagram feed to connect to your website is a perfect way for customers to connect with you when they are browsing your website.

How did you go creating your Instagram feed on your website? Let us know in the comments below.

If you need a hand with any part of the code, let us know in the comments as well.