Content is king. No, seriously. You may be tired of the saying but it’s still very much the truth. Engaging, shareable content on your website boosts audience interactions, encourages content sharing, and can help you maintain and grow website visits.
However, creating sleek, engaging content can be time-consuming, especially if you’re a small business owner and don’t have the time to create dynamic content.
Introducing Google Web Stories for WordPress. The plugin, which is currently in beta, allows you to create engaging content from scratch or via their templates. Similar to Canva, you can create visual stories but within your WordPress dashboard, then import them directly into a post or page. Removing the need to create, export, and upload content from another platform — which saves you time.
Continue reading to learn more about Google Web Stories for WordPress and how it may benefit your business.
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Google Web Stories for WordPress
Google Web Stories adds an intuitive WYSIWYG editor and modern content templates to your dashboard to help you create great content easily for your WordPress website. After installing and activating the plugin, it’s a simple process to create a story. You can either click Create New Story in under Stories in the dashboard or choose one of their templates and click Use Template to make it your own.
Hovering over the templated stories shows you all of the page designs that are included in the template. Each template comes with about 5 or more unique page designs per the theme of the template. Giving you even more choices and inspiration for creating content for your website.
To get used to the tool and it’s capabilities, I suggest choosing a template to start. There are many possibilities with this plugin and unless you already have branded material from prior projects, using a template will be the fastest way to create a polished story. Also, as you edit and customize the templates per your business needs, you can duplicate and reuse them for other posts; Speeding up the content creation process even more as your logo, colors, and fonts will already be part of the duplicated edited template.
For this review, we used the fashion template. After selecting a template (or clicking the new story button), you’re taken to the story editor screen. Here you can change images, add shapes and icons, add color blocks, change fonts, and more. These elements are easy to add and additional element customization is initiative, allowing you to change colors and sizes with no prior knowledge needed.
When you’re done making your edits and click Publish, the plugin will ask you if you want to create a new post for your story. You can also add it to an existing page or post by adding the published story link to the new Web Stories block added to the page and post editor for formatting.
Once added to a page or post, depending on how many pages you added to the published story, it will automatically cycle through the story pages. Your website visitors can also pause the slideshow, click through the pages, and share the story via a share link that is added at the top. Right now, probably because it’s in beta, the share option only produces a link. But, as developers continue to build the plugin, I’m sure options for social media platforms will be added.
Google Web Stories can be a useful tool for quickly creating engaging content right from your WordPress dashboard. Utilizing the templates, you can create shareable, dynamic content for a product release, new food item, event recaps, services, and more.
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