How to Display Your Instagram Feed on Your WordPress Website

WordPress, Instagram, do the two go together? You betcha, and you have plenty of ways to embed your Instagram pictures on your WordPress site. Most of them are free, but if you don’t mind paying a bit, there are some outstanding options. Who knows, you might even gain more Instagram followers in the process!

By all accounts, there are plenty of free plugins that do a good job harmonizing Instagram with your WordPress blog.

If you have some pretty specific requirements, or if you have business or developer needs and need reliability, support and top-shelf features the free ones might not have, there are fine pro options.

And there’s no need to put up with a kludge, with so many good options out there.

Here are some ways you can embed your Instagram photos on WordPress, for everybody from the technologically illiterate to those who know their way around code.

SnapWidget

Tends towards the easier side of the scale when it comes to installing, customizing and using the widget. You can choose different layouts, sizes, background colors and borders — not all WP widgets let you do all that.

It does require copying and pasting code, but trust us, it’s basic stuff. As long as you don’t inadvertently erase anything during the copy-paste procedure you’ll be fine.

SnapWidget also lets you use hashtags to include pictures about certain themes or topics from others posting photos on Instagram. You can display your photos as slideshow, grid or photo map. Pulls latest photos from Instagram for posting every half an hour — set and forget.

Yakadanda Instagram

An easily-installed plugin that lets users control not only the size of the images that are uploaded from Instagram to their WordPress, but how many are added — from 1 to 120 on one post, or page. It lets you adjust the speed for scrolling images, up or down, and works for WordPress MU as well.

Yakadanda is a development company located in Sydney, Boston and Miami Beach, building and supporting over a thousand WordPress projects around the world (although we must say, they sure do have lots of embarrassingly incomplete and glitchy content on their homepage), and they see their Instagram plugin as one of their “flagship” WP plugins, along with one to integrate Google+ Hangout Events.

Instapress

Hmm, we were going to write about Instapress, heard good things about how customizable it is, but users reported lots of errors and malfunctions — even the five-star reviews say it “needs updating.”

And, well, their site currently has this posted:

As you might have noticed, Instapress isn’t working at the moment. Due to lack of time we’re not able to fix our plugin but we would appreciate your help: This link will take you to the Instpress [sic] GitHub repository. We hope to create a stable version soon.

Poking around a bit more we found unsubstantiated whispers about gremlins, it being an aggregator, and how it crashes sites. Whether or not any of that’s true we don’t know, but we do know there are enough other options out there that do work pretty well to not bother with Instapress.

The Instagram Feed

The Instagram Feed is one of the alternatives that does work well, and is garnering rave reviews. Brought to you by smashballoon, this is a fairly new plugin. Installation’s easy enough through the WordPress plugin directory, or you can upload its files and configure the settings to your heart’s content.

It lets you configure to put pictures from multiple Instagram feeds on one WordPress page or site, and you can embed your Instagram feed in your page template itself, if you want. Set it to view the photos using a pop-up lightbox, display the captions, likes and comments or hide pictures you don’t want on your feed.

As paid options go it’s not cheap, but it sounds like you get value for the money: $39 for a personal license for one site for a year, $79 for a business license supporting five sites and $119 for a developer licensing option, unlimited sites supported. Users can’t say enough good things about the customer service, which is key for business and developer users.