The Mega Guide To Configure Facebook Instant Articles for WordPress

10th Aug, 2018 Harsh Agrawal 104 Comments

Want to drive more traffic from Facebook & earn more money?

If your answer is yes, today seems to be your lucky day.. Read on…

Facebook Instant Articles are not new to users like you who are super net savvy.

As bloggers & webmasters, FB Instant Articles are a boon & a curse. It’s a boon because it will give us more traffic from Facebook, but at the same time it’s bad because you won’t be able to show your widgets or email box like you do right now.

Needless to say, the Facebook Instant Article is here to stay & the sooner you integrate it, the better it will be for you.

I have waited for quite a long time to share this article with you as I wanted to give you all the necessary details & guidelines to configuring FB Instant Articles within your website. Today, I will be sharing the complete tutorial + a video guide to help you set up Facebook Instant Articles for your blog.

If you are not aware of FB Instant Articles, let me quickly give you an overview of what they are & why they matter.

What are Instant Articles?

The Instant Article is a feature by Facebook that solves the problem of slow loading of articles. An Instant Article is an HTML5 document optimized for fast mobile performance, rich storytelling capabilities, branded design, and a customized visual display. Once you have enabled Instant Articles on your website/blog, whenever your articles are shared on Facebook, users surfing on the mobile app will be able to see the Instant Article icon. The icon represents that the article is an Instant Article & it will open within seconds.

The Instant Articles icon looks like this:

I’m sure many of you already have experienced Instant Articles when using the Facebook mobile app on your smartphone. If not, from now on pay attention or check a few posts on the ShoutMeHindi Facebook page using your Facebook mobile app.

There are many pros & cons of using Facebook Instant articles. The pros outweigh the cons in the majority of cases especially since Instant Articles are not too old and there is a great amount of room for improvement & innovation in the coming days. Instant Articles are very crucial for countries like Brazil, India, Philippines & many other countries where low connectivity is an issue.

Check out this video to understand how Instant Articles looks on a smartphone:

I will cover the full pros & cons of Facebook Instant Articles in the coming days, but for now let’s setup Instant Articles for our WordPress blog.

How to Setup Facebook Instant Articles on WordPress platform:

I would suggest you to go through the steps mentioned below & then watch the video guide. While watching the video, start configuring Instant Articles for your WordPress site. It should take about 15 minutes to configure everything & within one day, Instant Articles should be live for your website. So, let’s get started:

Login to your Facebook account
Head over to the Instant Articles signup page & click on “Sign up”

This will lead you to next page where you need to select the Facebook page where you would like to enable the Instant Articles tool.

Select the page & click on “Enable Instant Articles”
After enabling Instant Articles for a page, you can always access the configuration page by going to page settings > Instant Articles

Here we need to do following things:

Claim your URL
Add RSS feed (For other platforms, you can use their API to setup Instant Articles. Here is the guide for the same)
Submit for review

We will also be configuring the official Instant Articles WordPress plugin which I have covered in-depth below. If you feel you will be stuck in between, don’t worry as the video guide will make it easier for you to follow everything. A user with basic computer skills should be able to follow this guide.

So let’s get started:

Claim your URL

Click on “Claim your URL” & that will give you a Meta tag which you need to add to your Website <head> tag. You can do the same by editing your header.php file or if you are using Genesis WordPress theme like me, watch the video below.

Once you have added the Meta tag, clear your WordPress cache.

Now, click on “Claim URL” & you will see a success message (shown below).

The next step is to setup the RSS feed for Instant Articles which will be done with the help of the official WordPress plugin for Facebook Instant Articles.

RSS Feed & Official Facebook Instant Articles plugin

Facebook has partnered with a few publishing and analytics platforms to make it convenient for bloggers to create and post Instant Articles.

Install the Official Facebook Instant Article WordPress plugin. This plugin is developed by Facebook, Automattic & few more developers. Upon activation of the plugin, a new feed will be generated & you can check it by adding /feed/instant-articles to your domain name.

So, in my case it was:

http://shoutmehindi.in/feed/instant-articles

Go back to your Facebook page Instant Articles setting & add this RSS feed into the “Production RSS feed” area (Refer to below screenshot).

Click “Save”.

Now we’ll get the last few things done.

Configuring the FB Instant Article WordPress plugin:

To start using the plugin, you need to input the Facebook App ID and App Secret. For this, you need to create a Facebook app which is pretty easy.
Follow the below-mentioned steps & it will be done within 5 minutes.
Go to this page & click on “Add a New App”

On the pop-up select website as the option.

Click on “Create App ID” & on the next page, enter your website URL without “HTTP://”

Click on “Next” & then click on “Skip quick start guide”. On the next page, you will see your App ID & App Secret.

Also, you need to make your new app live. Click on App Review > Change the toggle to “yes” & this will make your app live.

(I suggest you to watch the video to make it pretty easy for you).

Now, head back to the Facebook Instant Article WordPress plugin settings. Copy the App ID & App Secret to the WordPress plugin.

Facebook Instant article WordPress plugin settings

Click on “Next” & you will see the option to Login with Facebook. Click on it, validate your login & select your Facebook page from the drop-down.

Select Facebok page for Instant Articles

Click on “Next” & that’s it.

The plugin is configured & you can submit articles for review. Now, before we complete the final submit for review step, click on “Styles” & click on “default”:

Here you need to add your website logo (mandatory) that should be sized 690 by 132 Pixels.

Tip: If you don’t have the logo, simply create a blank canvas of the size 690 by 132 in Snagit or any other image editor tool you have & use your blog name as your logo.

Once you have uploaded the logo, click on “save & done”.

Submit for Review:

Now, this is where it gets tricky, as you need to submit 10 posts for review. Here is what you can do:

Go back to your WordPress dashboard
Open 10 already published blog posts in edit mode
Save all of them & this will send those articles to your Facebook Instant Articles RSS feed.

Once that is done, you will be able to submit your articles for review.

Submission approved & enable auto-publishing from RSS feed:

It usually takes about 3-4 days for your submission to get approval.

For one of my blogs I got the following errors:

General Errors: Empty Instant Article: The Instant Article does not have any content.

Error : General Fatals: Sorry, We Couldn’t Parse the Article

For that blog, I deleted all posts from the Instant Article production which were giving errors & resubmitted them for review.

For ShoutMeLoud, I got approved & after approval, the screens looks like this:

One important thing, you should enable auto publishing from the RSS feed.

Update: Here is the guide to make money from Facebook Instant Articles

Video guide:

Here is the video guide that I have mentioned above. This will clear any doubt that you might have for configuring Instant Articles for your WordPress blog:

Facebook Audience Network:

One of the things that most publishers are worried about is monetizing articles served via Facebook Instant Articles. Well, Facebook has opened Facebook Audience Network which lets you earn 100% of revenue generated via it. Here is the official explanation on FB Audience Network:

Publishers can directly sell and deliver banner ads, video ads (click to play or sound off), and animated ads containing HTML5, Javascript or CSS (provided the ads do not expand, collapse or any block content). Publishers can also monetize through the Facebook Audience Network, delivering high value, relevant and engaging ads from over 3 million advertisers on Facebook.
Audience Network provides publishers and developers with engaging, high performing ad units backed by Facebook’s 3 million advertisers. Audience Network extends the reach of Facebook campaigns beyond Facebook, and provides publishers a way to monetize their content with relevant, better-targeted ads and innovative native ad formats.

Once you click on “Get Started”, you will also get the link for the Audience Network dashboard. You can use this resource to configure your payment option. If you don’t update your payment option, Facebook will stop service ads once you have reached $100.

Just to let you know, it takes about 5 minutes for your Audience Network application to get approved. I will do a detailed article on this in the coming days.

Update: Here is the guide to make money from Facebook Instant Articles

Helpful resources:

In the coming days, I will share tips & tricks to get most out of Instant Articles. For now, go ahead & configure it for your blog. Do come back & share your experience with us.

If you have found this guide useful, share it with your friends who have a WordPress blog.

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Authored By Harsh Agrawal

A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

Hi Harsh, great knowhow about FB Instant Article. Harsh I wanted to know can I integrate FB Instant Article on Blogger Platform, if yes what are the steps. Please do write about it as well.

Cheers

Hlw Harsh bhai,

when I was submitted my website URL it was showing that ”the provided URL is not being accepted because the site has a minimal readership, which violates the Instant Article policies. Please provide a different URL.

PLEASE HELP ME OUT BHAI.

Harsh Agrawal says:
at
Hello Tapoprovo,
You should first focus on increasing your traffic. Read this post: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/101-ways-to-drive-traffic-to-your-blog.html
Reply

Hi Harsh, I followed the same steps which were in video and i do have 10 posts on website as well however even after updating the posts it is still saying not enough articles

Thank you for guiding us to the route of success. Love you a lot harsh agarwal

Hi Harsh,
Very Informative article. With recent update in facebook instant articles you need not to create app. It gets automatically created in Audience network. When you click on Publishing tools =>Configuration=>Audience network=>dashboard. It will automatically open dashboard of app. Each facebook page with instant article is one facebook app. app id is nothing but your page id. Please update your post.

it is asking privacy url why it asks in audiance network setting

Harsh Agrawal says:
at
@Srk
Many services asks for Privacy policy page and it’s a good idea to create one. You will require it at other places. Its one of the most have pages for a blog/website.
Reply

Hi Harsh,

What an amazing post. Thanks for sharing it. I want to know that what are the quality requirements of Facebook Instant Articles, can we use any type of articles I mean (I am working on a micro niche blog and my post format and 40% content is same on every post/article) so can I use it with Facebook instant articles?

Secondly tell me that can we use Facebook instant articles with blogger ?blog and can we use it with adsense running on our site? Is it safe for our adsense account?

Please do reply..

Thanks.
Aitzaz

I get following error message. waiting for solution

No rules defined for in the context of InstantArticle
No rules defined for in the context of InstantArticle

Hi Harsh,

Great Post !!

Can we use Google Adsense Ads in Facebook Instant Articles ?

Now this plugin doesn’t work/compatible with the latest WP version. Shows 404 error while updating the post.

This is a amizing tutorial. Easy to understand to follow the steps from start to finished. Besides, the video tutorial give mo understandings. I just complete set up Facebook Instant Articles on my website. Yes, it increase my page engagements and traffics. Thanks.

I had tried signing up for facebook instant articles but failed since I didn’t knew that exact process. I will follow these steps and try signing up now.

Hello Harsh,

Its been a while to read any posts on this blog. I guess I have landed on an informative post. I haven’t used facebook instant articles feature and I think i’m gonna surely give it a try.

Thanks

Thanks for this amazing guide. I was able to set up Instant Articles on my Blog finally. Well, I did get caption errors. 🙁 But somehow I read their FAQ and found my way out. One thing I am gonna say is that errors are common, no blog will hardly get approved in the first chance. Anyways, now my blog loads fastest in the facebook network. 🙂

kishor
says:
at
Hi Shreehari,
I need your help your help. I am having problem in Facebook Instant Article WordPress plugin settings. FB Instant article plugin setting- it’s not asking for app id and app secret.In FB instant article plugging setting i can see Facebook Page ID only not app id or app secret.
Reply

Hey Harsh,

Your article is quite informative and I tried configuring instant articles using the same process mentioned. But post submission of articles I am consistently facing errors. For instance, some text elements like kickers and subtitles are missing.

It would be great if you share a detailed information on the error part of the facebook instant articles.

Thanks

Hi Harsh,

Thanks for this information! I’ve been approved now but my articles are not showing as instant articles.

When I view them in pages manager I can view them as beautiful instant articles but as soon as I tap share and put it on my timeline, it’s just a standard link to my site :S

Do you have any advice?

Has anyone else experienced this issue?

Thanks

Dennis

Harsh Agrawal says:
at
@Dennis
Have you done all the steps after “Submit for Review:” section?
Reply

Hi Harsh,
Thank you very much for your support. I had this issue of the Instant Article FB plugin not showing up any setting in the configuration page afer activation. So I installed another plugin, which worked charm (Page Frog).

The problem currently i am facing is even after I uploaded the logo and adjusted and saved it, the issue raised is Missing Logo. I tried several times. but still the situation is the same. Would you let me know what to do, please?

Thank you very much

Thank you Harsh for sharing this wonderful guide. I had set up instant articles for my website Online Rockers Hub by referring this guide. But now, the plugin has been updated. You can even submit your articles for review from the plugins homepage. The plugin looks cool now.

Hi Harsh,

i am trying Instant article and successfully set up my blog but i found out wherever i used html pre tag or code tag , its not appearing in instant article. I tried to manually edit the parsed code but in preview i am not able to see. Have you faced such scenario ?