Your Instagram feed is broken

By Ilana Davis

I’ve written in the past about why I don’t recommend setting up an Instagram feed to your Shopify site.

There is no reason to take people away from your store. They’ll get on Instagram and become distracted by their friend’s dog acting silly at the park.

It’s been a year since Instagram discontinued their connection to Shopify themes. Yet so many of the Shopify sites I look at still have the Instagram feed on their site.

And they are broken.

If you have Instagram displaying on your website, please go right now and open up your Shopify site.

Do you have gray squares where your Instagram images should be? Yes? That means you have a broken integration.

Screenshot of a Shopify site's Instagram feed. Text on top says Let's Get Social, with four gray boxes underneath instead of the Instagram feed.

Please fix this!

You have two options.

The easy option is to install the Instagram Feed App. Doing this will fix the immediate issue at least. You’ll still be ushering customers away from your store and back to social media. Great for Instagram, bad for you!

Another culprit is that many browsers now have the option to block Facebook tracking. So you may see the images on your feed from Instagram, but your customers may not.

The better option is to optimize your site!

Instead, replace the Instagram feed with images that look like they are from Instagram but aren’t. The images, when selected, will lead to another page on your Shopify site. Ideally a product page.

This keeps them on your site and learning more about your product. Not getting distracted.

After a natural skincare brand on Shopify replaced their feed as part of the Website Rescues, they saw a 19% drop in their exit rate on their homepage.

There is a third option to remove the Instagram style all together, but that is overkill if you ask me.

Take a hint from me and optimize your site right now. Or sign up for your own Website Rescues and take advantage of 150 things I’ll look at to optimize your Shopify site.

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