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What is Facebook Instant Articles?

People share a lot of articles on Facebook, particularly on its mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.

Instant Articles introduces a suite of interactive features that allow publishers to bring their stories to life in new ways. Zoom in and explore high-resolution photos by tilting your phone. Watch auto-play videos come alive as you scroll through stories. Explore interactive maps, listen to audio captions, and even like and comment on individual parts of an article in-line.

Instant Articles was designed to give publishers control over their stories, brand experience, and monetization opportunities. Publishers can sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue, or they can choose to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory. Publishers will also have the ability to track data and traffic through comScore and other analytics tools.

Facebook Instant Article WordPress Plugin

Facebook has partnered with Automattic, which owns WordPress.com, to create a free plugin for Instant Articles, which simplifies the process of publishing Instant Articles from WordPress.

Upon activation, the plugin ensures that you will have a compliant feed of posts, wrapping your core content in the markup Facebook requires.

According to Facebook, the plugin will preserve the formatting of the publisher’s site. It also has a review process where they verify that all Instant Articles generated from your website are properly formatted and adhere to their community standards and content policies before you’ll be able to start pushing content to the platform.

Publishers that use standard WordPress templates can activate the plugin out-of-the-box to create Instant Articles. You can find the plugin here

Instant Articles is part of a larger trend about getting content to readers, mobile in particular, faster than before. There are other projects like Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) or Apple News also cut load times.