With its community of more than 1 billion active users, Instagram has become a great way for startup geeks, influencers, and entrepreneurs to connect with their target audiences.
On average, Instagram users spend about 30 minutes per day on the platform which means it holds massive potential when integrated with a WordPress website.
In today's post, you'll learn about Instagram plugins that allow you to blend your social media presence into your official WordPress site. Some of these plugins display your images directly on your website while others can source images from popular hashtags on Instagram to find the perfect stream of photos your site visitors will want to see.
Let's check out your best options.
A Comparison Chart of the Top Instagram WordPress Plugins for 2023
With so many WordPress plugins available on the market for this purpose, we’ve compiled the best options into a handy table. Choose the features that are most important to you and narrow down the perfect plugin. You can also read more about each plugin in the section below.
| Plugin | Price | Follow & Like Buttons | Connect multiple instagram accounts | display any posts on instagram | display posts anywhere on your site |
| Spotlight | Free | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 10Web Social Photo Feed | Free | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Smash Balloon | Free | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Feed Them Social | Free | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| WPZOOM Social Feed | Free | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Enjoy Social Feed | Free | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Phototonic Gallery & Lightbox | Free | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| WP Social Ninja | $89/year | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Easy Social Feed | $39/year | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Instagram Feed | $59 | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Instagram Journal | $20 | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Instagram Feed Gallery | $19 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Instagram Theatre | $16 | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Social Stream for WordPress | $39 | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Intagrate | $55/year | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Access Press Instagram Feed | $17 | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
Top Free Instagram WordPress Plugins
The Instagram WordPress plugins below can help you boost your social media followers and increase engagement on your WordPress site — all without costing you a penny.
1. Spotlight
Spotlight is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily display an Instagram feed on your WordPress site. It’s easy to set up, and you have full control over the design your visitors see. You can make your module match your brand by selecting your own colors and styles. Add a “Follow” button to turn website visitors into Instagram followers or include a “Load More” button to give site visitors an entire gallery to browse through.
Other notable features include the ability to connect multiple accounts, create unique feeds to use across different pages, and open posts as a lightbox to keep visitors on your site for longer.
2. 10Web Social Photo Feed
10Web Social Photo Feed is a brilliant plugin by 10 Web that lets you create image galleries on your website by embedding the entire timeline in your posts. This can either be done by using a shortcode or the plugin itself. You can very easily customize the layout of your feed and present it in various pre-built styles. Integrating your Instagram feed with your website in this way can give users a more holistic view of your brand.
10Web Social Photo Feed also lets you display single as well as mixed feeds on your posts and pages. You get to use a feed filter for your mixed feeds. The plugin receives regular updates, and it will automatically notify you the moment the update is available.
3. Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed
With the Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin, you can easily display any posts from a non-private account on single or multiple feeds. This super-responsive plugin looks brilliant on devices of any size. Whether your website is being visited on a mobile phone, a desktop, a laptop, or a tablet, your feed will look stunning.
You can also customize your feed and make changes in the way they appear to your viewers. The "Load More" button makes your website load an infinite feed for your visitors. This can keep them browsing on your site longer.
4. Feed Them Social
Feed Them Social enables you to bring your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube content to your website using a beautiful, customizable layout. With this plugin, you can add your Instagram feed to a sidebar, post, or page depending on how prominently you’d like the photos to appear.
The best part about the Feed Them Social plugin is that it includes two buttons at the top and bottom of the feeds you import to your site, inviting visitors to like and follow your social media profiles. You’ll have the potential to increase time-on-page while growing your social media presence.
5. WPZOOM Social Feed Widget
WPZOOM Social Feed Widget is a free plugin designed to help you translate your brand effortlessly from your social media profile to your website. This plugin allows you to display up to 12 of your favorite Instagram photos in your posts, pages, sidebar, or footer.
If you're just starting your Instagram or don't have many high-quality photos for another reason, don't worry. You can showcase photos from any Instagram account directly to your website to create the look and feel you want for your site visitors.
6. Enjoy Social Feed plugin for WordPress
With the Enjoy Social Feed plugin for WordPress, you can add a carousel or a photo grid from your social media feed to your website. This plugin is simple to use thanks to the shortcode that you can generate directly within the built-in editor.
To display the most relevant images from Instagram on your website, you can source the images from hashtags rather than your personal feed. This is especially helpful if you don’t post often to your Instagram feed but want the images to be fresh for your website visitors.
7. Phototonic Gallery & Lightbox
Photonic is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to create image and video galleries from Instagram. While you're limited to only your own Instagram feed, you can also add images and videos from Flickr, Google Photos, YouTube, Vimeo, and more.
With Photonic, you have the option of using a shortcode or Gutenberg block to add image galleries to your site. You can then choose from multiple display formats, including:
- a grid of square thumbnails
- a grid of circular thumbnails
- a justified grid
- a masonry layout
- a tiled, random mosaic
- a slideshow
What sets Photonic apart from other plugins is its support for a wide range of lightbox scripts, including scripts that run on pure JavaScript.
Top Paid Instagram WordPress Plugins
Like the free alternatives above, premium Instagram WordPress plugins can help you gain more followers and improve the user experience on your website. They'll also typically offer more advanced functionality and customization options than free options.
8. WP Social Ninja
WP Social Ninja seamlessly integrates your Instagram feed, allowing you to effortlessly showcase your brand's social media presence. Not only can you embed your Instagram feed, but you can also incorporate your Facebook and YouTube feeds with visually appealing and customizable layouts. This WordPress social media plugin is designed to be user-friendly and feature-rich, giving you the flexibility to choose the number of posts, content types, and specific order to create a feed that perfectly aligns with your brand style. Whether you have a personal or business account, connecting your Instagram is a breeze with WP Social Ninja's easy integration process.
What sets this all-in-one plugin apart is its ability to collaborate with over 29 other social media widgets, offering versatile functions like embedding social reviews and creating chat platforms. With WP Social Ninja, you can elevate your website's social media integration and engage your visitors in new and exciting ways.
9. Easy Social Feed
Easy Social Feed is a premium plugin that enables you to display photos and videos from your Instagram account on your WordPress site. In addition to being responsive and SEO-friendly, this plugin is highly customizable so you can completely match your Instagram feed with the look and feel of your site. You can change the number of columns, colors, and borders of your feeds. You can also create multiple skins so that you can display a feed on a post or page as well as in the footer or sidebar, differently.
Easy Social Feed also allows you to display comments, hearts (or likes), and a Follow button on your feed. This type of social proof can help you attract and engage more visitors.
10. Instagram Feed
Instagram Feed is a highly-rated Instagram plugin for WordPress that offers many customization options. You can choose to display your Instagram feed as a grid or slider, and display each individual photo as a classic Instagram post or tile (shown below). You can even add call-to-action buttons to these posts to encourage visitors to take action — like buy the featured product in the post — as they browse.
Like the Enjoy Social Feed Plugin, Instagram Feed allows you to source images from your own account or from hashtags. However, it also has additional functionality. Thanks to this premium plugin’s filter options, you can exclude any photos you don’t want to display and handpick the ones you do want by URL or hashtag.
11. Instagram Journal
Instagram Journal is designed to fully leverage the power of the Instagram API. With this premium plugin, you can not only display photos from your own account or with a particular hashtag — you can also display photos you’ve liked, photos of a friend’s account, photos from a specific location, and more.
This plugin also allows you to specify the color scheme, gallery size, photo size, photo gutter size, and view mode of your Instagram feed. Classic view, collage carousel, large carousel, and infinity slider are just a few of the available view modes.
12. Instagram Feed Gallery
Instagram Feed Gallery is a premium WordPress plugin for creating galleries and widgets of Instagram posts from multiple accounts and hashtags. You also have a lot of flexibility with this plugin. When designing your custom feeds, you can change the color scheme, re-position elements, choose from four different design layouts, and more.
You also have many lightbox gallery options. So if a visitor clicks on an individual post in the feed, they can see likes, comments, and share options.
13. Instagram Theatre
Instagram Theatre is designed to allow you to easily display photos from your Instagram account on your WordPress website. You have an array of options for customizing your feed, including effect speed, delay interval, and alternate layouts. You also have several different layout and feed options, including:
- Fullscreen Layout: This mode turns your site into a full-screen gallery of your Instagram photos.
- Thumbnail Layout: This mode creates a grid layout for your photos. If a user clicks on an individual photo, a larger version of it expands in a fancybox.
- List Layout: This mode displays your photos in a list format. When a user hovers over a photo, a rollover effect occurs, revealing information about the photo including the photographer, time stamp, caption, and number of likes.
- Tag Instagram Feed: This mode allows you to specify a hashtag to search and pull photos from using the Instagram API.
- User Instagram Feed: This mode allows you to specify a user id to pull photos from a specific user. There’s also a multiuser mode for specifying mutliple user ids.
- Location Instagram Feed: This mode allows you to specify a location to pull photos taken at a given location.
14. Social Stream for WordPress
Social Stream for WordPress is a premium plugin designed to get you more likes and followers on your social media accounts and boost engagement on your WordPress site.
With this unique plugin, you can create a feed that displays content from your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and over 30 other social media accounts. You can also add animations, share buttons, and a search tool to your feeds.
15. Intagrate
Automatically convert Instagram photos and videos to blog posts on your WordPress website with the Integrate plugin. You’ll have the ability to moderate the images that get converted to blog posts so that only the Instagram content you deem valuable to your readers is published.
This plugin offers advanced functionality and flexibility. For example, you can source images from an unlimited number of Instagram accounts and cross-post that content across multiple websites that you manage.
16. AccessPress Instagram Feed Pro
You can completely customize your website with images from your Instagram feed with the AccessPress Instagram Feed Pro plugin.
You can choose from 15 different layouts and six lightbox options to seamlessly blend your Instagram feed with your website. If you’re importing images from your own feed, you can opt to hide username and profile information for a minimalist look and feel that lets the pictures shine by themselves.
Let Your Instagram Page Be the Start of Your WordPress Website
Now that you have a comparison of the top paid and free Instagram plugins for WordPress, you can start displaying your beautiful photos directly to your website. Your visitors can even choose to follow you directly on social media without navigating through link after link to land on your Instagram profile. Connect multiple Instagram accounts using your plugin of choice and display your photos in a blog post, a web page, or the sidebar of your site.
Now that you're engaging visitors with your social channels, capture them as leads with forms, live chat, etc. using the HubSpot WordPress plugin
Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
