Our attention spans are reducing at a rapid pace, faster than ever before. The topics that earlier trended for days are now lost within hours. With reducing attention spans, the content creators are also rejigging their content creation strategy and producing more and more content that can be consumed within seconds. Web stories are a kind of such content.

What are Web Stories?

Web stories are like ‘snackable’ content i.e. content that can be consumed in small chunks. They are created to be consumed by mobile users who want to consume content at a glance. Social media platforms like Snapchat popularized this concept and today almost every platform is using it under some name or the other. Whether it is Instagram or Facebook stories or Twitter fleets or the recently launched LinkedIn story.

What a web story looks like
What a web story looks like

The entire concept of platforms like TikTok revolves around creating content that can be viewed in under 30-seconds. The point remains the same, telling the entire story in a quick consumable format without losing the essence of the story.

What are Google Web Stories?

Google Web Stories is a new form of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Web Stories is a way to rank at the top of Google search, Google images, Discover, and Google App. Each page of a Web Story contains a maximum of 10 words. The recommended size of a Web Story is between four and 30 pages. Publishers can monetize Web Stories with affiliate links, Google Ad Manager and Google DV360 (Beta).

If you are using an android device then on the Google News, Google Search and Google App these web stories are now readily visible. Publishers are adopting the web story format because it can be featured in an attractive way for mobile users. Web Stories represents a new way to obtain a significant amount of traffic.

Why to use web stories

Long-form content can be made available as an attachment link. This is a good feature because it allows a publisher to sneak their content to the viewers’ attention via a Web Story and convert them over to read the entire article if it is interesting enough for them.

Google WordPress Web Story Plugin

Google officially published the Web Stories WordPress Plugin in September 2020. They announced that their Web Stories WordPress plugin that was previously available at GitHub as a beta version is now out of beta and available at the WordPress Plugin Repository. This plugin makes it easy for WordPress publishers to create content in the Google Web Stories format, enabling publishers to attract more visitors. For example, the video should be in a vertical format or the minimum font size or the minimum number of characters that can be used in a web story. This plugin helps you automate all of this without worrying about remembering all in detail.

How Web Stories look on Google App
How Web Stories look on Google App

The new plugin features a drag and drop interface and templates to make it easy to create web stories. The WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) interface helps to make full-screen, tappable content that’s synonymous with Instagram and Snapchat. Google has partnered with the likes of Unsplash to provide free stock images and Coverr to provide free stock videos to plugin users. The plugin also includes comprehensive visual editing capabilities, a re-envisioned visual media gallery, image masking, gradient editing, saved colors & styles and many more design features.

Web Stories WordPress Plugin Requirements

Google’s Web Stories WordPress plugin requires a minimum WordPress Version of 5.3.1. It also requires a minimum PHP version of 5.6. These are fairly regular and modest requirements for the current lot of WordPress users and publishers.

The Web Stories WordPress plugin is currently available at the WordPress plugin repository for download. But it can also be more easily installed through your WordPress admin dashboard through the Plugin admin page.

So, if you are someone who consistently create content in formats suitable for web stories and want your content to get more visibility then Google Web Stories is definitely worth giving a go and with the new Google WordPress Web Story plugin, it becomes easier for you to create these web stories for your existing and new content. Since Google has just rolled out this feature, why not cash in on the first movers’ advantage around this concept.

Resource for you.