Best practices for creating Web Stories

To keep your readers engaged, follow our best practices for creating Web Stories. We recommend focusing on the critical tasks first. If you have more time, follow the recommended best practices too.

Storytelling

Critical storytelling best practices
Video first Video is more engaging than text or images. Use as much video as possible, and supplement with images and text.

More storytelling best practices

Recommended storytelling best practices
Bring your perspective Go beyond the facts. Share your opinions. Be the protagonist of your own story. Make it relatable.
Have a narrative arc Create suspense in your story from one page to another. Bring the user along in the journey by providing context and narrative. Deliver payoff for sticking with you to the end.

Design

Critical design best practices
Reduce your character count Avoid including multiple pages with walls of text. Consider reducing text to approximately 280 characters per page (the length of a tweet).
Don't block text Make sure text is not blocked by other content on the page. Avoid burned in text; by not using burned in text, you prevent text from being blocked when it gets resized to fit various device sizes.
Keep text within bounds Ensure that all text in your Web Story is visible to the reader. Avoid burned in text; by not using burned in text, you prevent text from overflowing when it gets resized to fit various device sizes.
Use animations mindfully Bring your stories to life with animations. Avoid distracting or repetitive animations which can cause fatigue.

More design best practices

Recommended design best practices
Use Web Stories-specific call to action When re-creating stories that were originally created for a social platform like Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube, be sure to remove any reader call-to-action specific to a certain platform. Make sure that users are able to follow any actions suggested in your Web Story.
Use full bleed videos and images Include full bleed assets in your stories to create a more immersive experience for readers.
Avoid low resolution or distorted images and videos Use high-quality images, and take care when resizing images to portrait.
Add a logo to your cover page Include a high-resolution logo that represents your brand.
Shorten video length We recommend videos that are less than 15 seconds per page, or 60 seconds maximum.
Include audio Use high-quality audio clips that are at least 5 seconds long with balanced volume, and ensure speech is audible.
Consider auto advance for video-only stories Auto-advanced experience for video-based Web Stories could work well for a laid back experience.

SEO

Critical SEO best practices
Provide high-quality content Like any web page, providing high-quality content that is useful and interesting to your readers the most important thing you can do. Include a complete narrative and follow the storytelling best practices to keep your readers engaged.
Keep the title short Keep titles shorter than 90 characters. We recommend using a descriptive title that is shorter than 70 characters.
Make sure Google Search can find your story Don't include a noindex attribute in your story; this attribute blocks Google from indexing the page and prevents it from appearing on Google. Additionally, add your Web Stories to your sitemap. You can check to see if Google can find your Web Stories with the Index Coverage Report and Sitemaps Report in Search Console.
Make the story self-canonical All Web Stories must be canonical. Make sure that each Web Story has a link rel="canonical" to itself. For example: <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/webstory.html">
Attach metadata

Make sure that your Web Stories follow the AMP story metadata guidelines. Include markup that you would normally include on a web page, such as:

More SEO best practices

Recommended SEO best practices
Include structured data We recommend including structured data in your Web Story to help Google Search understand the structure and content of your Web Story.
Include alt text on images We recommend including alt text on your images to improve your story's discoverability.
Integrate stories into your website

We recommend integrating Web Stories into your website, such as linking them from your home page or category pages where applicable. For example, if your Web Story is about a travel destination and you have a page that lists all your travel articles, then also link the Web Stories on that category page. An additional special landing page like www.example.com/stories (which would then be linked from key pages like your home page) might also make sense.

Use AMP story page attachments AMP story page attachments can be used to present additional information alongside your Web Story. This can be useful to provide extra detail, deep dives, or onward journeys for the content presented in your Web Story.
Include subtitles on video Add captions to your video to help readers better understand your story. Avoid captions that are burned into the video to ensure that they don't overlap with other content or flow off the screen.
Optimize video-only stories

We recommend that you use semantic HTML to build your Web Story. However, some Web Story editor tools may instead export a story that formats each slide as a video file that bakes in all the text into the video. In this case, we recommend that you add the precise text displayed inside of the video as a title attribute on the amp-video element. Again, only do this if you can't use semantic markup in your Web Stories.

Add support for landscape displays To enable Web Stories to appear in desktop Google Search results, add support for landscape displays.

Technical

Critical technical best practices
Make the story valid Web Stories must be valid AMP pages. To avoid invalid AMP issues, test your Story using the AMP Validator tool and fix any detected errors.
Don't include text in the poster image Avoid using images that contain burned in text, as this could obstruct the title of your story when users preview your story in Search results. If users are unable to clearly read the title, they may be less likely to continue reading.
Include the right poster image size and aspect ratio Make sure that the image linked to your <amp-story> poster-portrait-src attribute is at least 640x853px and use an aspect ratio of 3:4.
Include the right aspect ratio for the logo Make sure that the logo image linked to your <amp-story> publisher-logo-src attribute is at least 96x96 px and aspect ratio of 1:1.

More technical best practices

Recommended technical best practices
Include og:image We recommend including og:image in your <meta> tags to improve your story's discoverability.

Other resources