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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:
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.
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.
Enable Web Stories on Google Search:
Developer-oriented guide on building Web Stories that meet the technical guidelines required
to appear on Google Search.
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