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 attributeblocks 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
|
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 |
| 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 |
| 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-srcattribute 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-srcattribute is at least 96×96 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
- Web Stories:
Resources on making Web Stories from the AMP Project. - Enable Web Stories on Google Search:
Developer-oriented guide on building Web Stories that meet the technical guidelines required
to appear on Google Search. - AMP stories website: Developer-focused
Web Stories format capabilities. - Web accessibility: Tips to help ensure
your Web Story is accessible to all users. - Structured data guidelines: Details on
adding structured data to help Google Search understand your content.
Alien Road
How we apply this
Web Story quality guidelines are mostly editorial: pacing, image quality, text length per frame. We brief the client’s design team on them directly, since the constraints are unfamiliar to people used to article layouts.
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