The Best Instagram Plugins For WordPress

There are hundreds of WordPress plugins that bring Instagram functionality to your WordPress site, and some are definitely better than others. see now The Best Instagram Plugins For WordPress

Finding the right plugin to display a widget of your latest Instagram photos in your sidebar, a full-blown Instagram-powered gallery in a post or page, provide Instagram badges or counters, or even import your Instagram photos as WordPress posts can be a long and onerous task.

I’ve sorted the good from the not-so-good: Here are 12 Instagram plugins for WordPress that are worth installing.

To put this list together, I installed and tested over 25 different Instagram plugins. Here are my top picks:

1. Best widget plugin – Instagram Slider Widget
2. Top gallery plugin – Alpine PhotoTile For Instagram
3. Best plugin – DsgnWrks Instagram Importer

The Best Instagram Plugins For WordPress

All the plugins came out of the WordPress plugin repository and so are free, but I still discarded more than half of them. Sometimes even free plugins cost too much to be worth installing.

Often, premium options are the way to go if you want to be secure, knowing that a plugin will be updated regularly. You can reach out to the developer if you have any questions or concerns about how it works. If you’re looking for tools to help you integrate with other social networks, you might want to check out our Ultimate Facebook plugin (it lets you add login with Facebook, auto-post, comment mirroring, one-click registration, like and share buttons, open graph, use Facebook avatars, share albums, display recent Facebook activity feed and a heap of widgets), Floating Social (a handy bar that follows users as they scroll through your content so they can easily share your stuff), and Pay With a Like (which lets your visitors exchange a like, +1, tweet or share for access to your articles, videos, ebooks, coupons, and other media).

Any plugin should be designed to be simple and intuitive to use, and where a user might need extra help, it should be provided in the settings screens.

With so much choice, there’s simply no need to struggle with a plugin’s bad or non-existent documentation – having to go back to the plugin repository to find out how a plugin works are as annoying as it is unacceptable – and certainly no need to provide your Instagram username and password, which one plugin required.

The Alpine PhotoTile plugin and particularly the DsnWrks Instagram Importer excelled in making their highly configurable functionality easy to understand and set up. Of all the plugins, DsnWrks’ was by far the easiest to connect with Instagram itself.

Choose A Plugin That Is Fit For Purpose

Whilst you should always choose a plugin that does want you to want, with Instagram, it is vital. For example, if you want to show your latest photos in a sidebar widget, get a plugin that does just that, otherwise you might find that you need to start setting up clients in Instagram, and it all starts to get complicated.

If you do go with a plugin that uses the Instagram API (and outside of the widget plugins, most do), keep in mind Instagram’s API Terms of Use, particularly the limit on the number of photos that can be displayed on a page and even more importantly respecting the rights on photos that you might pull from accounts other than your own.

Okay, to the plugins.

Plugins For Displaying Instagram Photos In Widgets

These plugins all provide widgets that will show your latest Instagram photos in a sidebar widget.

Flow-Flow

Flow-Flow is a no-code, fast, and powerful way to embed automated social media feed into your WordPress website. And it is not only Instagram plugin WordPress, it allows to customize and display a mix of feeds from 10+ sources including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, any RSS, and WordPress feed itself.  The social media wall is a must-have section for bloggers, businesses, and eCommerce websites nowadays. Engage your audience with the best content and increase website conversions!

Plugins That Display Instagram Photos In Galleries. These best WordPress Instagram plugins are for displaying photos in posts and pages. Virtually all come with sidebar widgets as well.

Other Useful Plugins For Integrating Instagram With WordPress. These plugins are useful for displaying badges, follower counts, and for importing Instagram photos into your WordPress blog as their own post.

A Photo Finish

Finally, some great plugins in the above lists cover just about every scenario for integrating WordPress and Instagram that prove that even free plugins can have excellent interfaces and help to make implementing complex functionality very simple. Finally, do you have a favorite Instagram plugin?