Web Stories
Web Stories are a visual storytelling format for the open web which immerses your readers in fast-loading, full-screen, and visually rich experiences.
The facts
- Rating
- 4.2★ from 87
- Active installs
- 60k+
- Price
- Free
- Last updated
- 15 May 2025
- Added
- Sep 2020
- Requires WP
- 6.6
- Tested up to
- WP 6.8.8
- Requires PHP
- 7.4
- Downloads
- 2,885,024
Our analysis
AI-assistedWeb Stories is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create visual narratives with engaging animations and interactive elements. It provides a user-friendly editor with drag-and-drop capabilities, enabling you to easily produce and share stories on the open web. This tool is suitable for site owners, content creators, and publishers looking to enhance their content strategy and engage their audience through immersive storytelling.
The plugin features a visually rich dashboard, customizable templates, and direct access to your WordPress media library. Web Stories can be monetised through affiliate links and are designed for fast loading times, ensuring that your audience remains engaged with your content.
Best for: This plugin suits site owners, content creators, and publishers aiming to enhance their storytelling capabilities.
What it does well
- ✓Free to use from the WordPress.org directory
- ✓User-friendly WYSIWYG editor for story creation
- ✓Supports fast loading times for better engagement
- ✓Customizable templates and styles for branding
- ✓Allows sharing and embedding across the open web
Where it falls short
- •Limited information on specific features and capabilities
- •Requires PHP 7.4 and may not be compatible with older setups
Verdict
Web Stories offers a straightforward way to create engaging visual content for the web. It is a useful tool for those looking to improve audience interaction through modern storytelling formats.
From the developer
Google's own description of Web Stories, lightly tidied.
Web Stories are a free, open-web, visual storytelling format for the web, enabling you to easily create visual narratives with engaging animations and tappable interactions, and immerse your readers in great and fast-loading full-screen experiences.
Benefits of Web Stories
The Web Stories format puts features and capabilities at your fingertips to engage with your audience via the power of storytelling on the open web. Specifically, you can:
- Create beautiful and engaging content easily: Web Stories make the production of stories as easy as possible from a technical perspective.
- Enjoy creative flexibility for editorial freedom and branding: The Web Stories format comes with preset but flexible layout templates, standardized UI controls, and components for sharing and adding follow-on content.
- Share and link your stories on the open web: Web Stories are part of the open web and can be shared and embedded across sites and apps without being confined to a single ecosystem.
- Track and measure your stories: Supports analytics and bookend capabilities for viral sharing and monetization.
- Capture the attention of your readers by offering fast loading times to your stories: Web Stories are lightning fast so that your audience stays engaged and entertained.
- Engage with your readers via immersive storytelling: Web Stories are a new and modern way to reach existing readers.
- Monetize effectively the beautiful and engaging stories you create: Web Stories enable monetization capability for publishers using affiliate links. For advertisers, Stories is a way to reach a unique audience within a new storytelling experience.
Web Stories Editor
The Web Stories editor for WordPress brings together a robust set of story creation capabilities in a user-friendly, WYSIWYG creation tool. Some of the key features you can leverage out of the box are:
- A visually rich and intuitive dashboard, allowing you to easily navigate the story creation process
- Beautiful and expressive page templates to you get your story creation process started quickly and smoothly
- Easy drag-and-drop capabilities, making it easy to compose beautiful stories
- Convenient access to WordPress’ media library, enabling you to grab your media assets right from the plugin dashboard as you create your stories
- Customizable color and text style presets, making it easy to tailor the style of your stories to the needs of your content strategy
- And much more!
Using the Web Stories editor for WordPress, you can easily create visual narratives with tappable interactions, and share freely across the web, or embed them on your existing content strategies. The Stories you create are yours in every way, as Web Stories belong to the open web, instead of being confined to any specific closed ecosystem or platform.
Audience: Everyone
Web Stories are for everyone! If you are a site owner, content creator, or publisher on the web, embracing the Web Stories format would be great as a way to enhance the quality of your content strategy, the value you bring to your readers, and consequently your chances of achieving sustainable success.
Terms of Service
By using this plugin, you agree to Google’s Terms of Service. By using third-party imagery and video provided by Unsplash, Coverr and Tenor, you agree to adhere to the respective Terms of Service.