GoHighLevel Instagram Feed: Add It to Your Site (No Code)

The GoHighLevel Instagram feed element is new, and it does what a lot of HighLevel users have been asking for. You connect your Instagram account, drop the element onto a page, and your latest posts show up on your website or funnel. No code, and no third-party widget to set up. It works the same way in your AlphaBlossom CRM or any standard HighLevel (GHL) account.

If you have an active Instagram, this is one of the easiest ways to send website visitors over to your profile and pick up more followers. It also lets people see a little more of your personality and your brand.

In this guide I walk through the full setup: connecting Instagram, adding the feed to a page, and the settings worth knowing. At the end I share what happened when I asked AI Studio to build the same thing for me, because there is a catch.

If you'd rather see this in action before diving into the steps, watch the full video walkthrough here or watch "GoHighLevel Finally Has a Native Instagram Feed (Full Setup, No Code)" on Youtube

What Is the GoHighLevel Instagram Feed Element?

It is a built-in element in the funnel and website builder that shows posts from an Instagram account you have connected to your account. You will find it under Social Widgets when you click the plus button in the builder. You can show it as a slider or a grid, choose what appears on each post, and decide what happens when a visitor clicks one.

It works on funnels, websites, the store, and the new webinars. One limit to know up front: it does not work inside AI Studio. I cover that at the end, along with a workaround.

How Do You Connect Instagram to GoHighLevel First?

Before you add anything to a page, your Instagram account has to be connected. There are two places to do that.

1. Go to Marketing, then Social Planner, and click the Settings gear at the top right. Under Social accounts you will see everything that is already connected. Click Connect Social, choose Instagram, and pick either Instagram with Facebook or Direct Instagram Integration.

2. Or go to Settings, then Integrations, find the Instagram card, and connect or manage it from there.

Only business and creator Instagram accounts can connect, so a personal account will not work. HighLevel's guide on how to connect your Instagram business or creator account walks through both options. If you already schedule content from your CRM, like the Facebook text background posts I covered earlier, you are probably connected already.

How to Add the Instagram Feed to a Funnel or Website Page

Go to Sites, open your funnel or website, and open the page in the builder. Decide where you want the feed. I put mine right above the footer. Then click the plus button. From there you have two ways to add it.

Option 1: Start From a Pre-Styled Template

Click Social Widgets in the left menu, then click Instagram feed. You get a set of templates that are already styled, including a profile widget with a header and grid, a photo grid, a compact two by two widget, a post slider, and a dark profile widget. Drag one onto the page and the background colors and layout are already done for you.

Option 2: Add the Plain Element and Style It Yourself

Add a one column row where you want the feed, click to add an element, and choose Instagram feed from the elements list. This gives you the default styling, and you set it up the way you want.

Either way works. It is really just your preference.

Instagram Feed Settings Worth Knowing

Click the feed on the page and the settings open in the right panel. There are three tabs: General, Styles, and Post.

Name It and Pick Your Account

Give the element a name so it is easy to find later in the side panel, then choose your account from the Instagram account dropdown. Once it is selected, you will see it marked as connected.

Slider or Grid, for Each Device

Under Layout you choose between a slider, which is one row that works like a carousel, and a grid. You can set the layout separately for desktop, tablet, and mobile. Tablet was added recently, and I have been waiting years for it, because it gives you more fine-tuning for how the page looks on each device.

• Slider settings: arrows, drag control, animation speed, and autoplay. Turn autoplay off if you do not want it to scroll on its own, or set how many seconds each slide stays up.

• Grid settings: set the columns and rows to auto or manual. Manual lets you control how many rows show. You can also change the gap between posts. The default was 8, and I set mine to 7.

Header, Feed Title, and Colors

The header is the strip at the top of the feed with your profile picture, name, username, post count, follower count, following count, and a follow button. You can turn the whole header off or hide individual pieces. How much you show really depends on how active your Instagram is. You can also add a feed title, which is a short headline above the posts, and change colors like the header background under the Styles tab.

Post Style and Click Action

On the Post tab, choose between the Classic and Card post styles, and set the image aspect ratio to square or a little taller. Then choose what happens when someone clicks a post:

• Open in Popup opens the post in a pop-up right on your page, and visitors can still follow you from there.

• Open on Instagram takes them straight to Instagram.

• None does nothing on click.

I leave mine on the pop-up.

Choose What Each Post and the Pop-Up Show

Under Post Elements you can show or hide the likes count, comments count, and text on each post. Popup Settings has its own list: user, follow button, Instagram link, likes count, text, comments, and date. If it is a newer feed and the numbers are still low, you may not want to show likes and comments yet. Just make sure you know which list you are changing, because the post settings and the pop-up settings are separate.

Why Does the Builder Show Different Posts Than Your Live Site?

This one surprises people. Inside the builder, the feed shows sample posts, not yours. Your real posts show up on the live site. So save the page, open it on the front end, and check it there.

On the live page, clicking a post opens the pop-up, and clicking the Instagram icon opens Instagram in a new tab. I like that, because it does not take people away from your website. And if the page you are adding the feed to is not ready for visitors yet, you can take that one page offline without hurting your SEO while you finish it.

Can AI Studio Add a Live GoHighLevel Instagram Feed?

I tested this, because a lot of people now build their sites in AI Studio. The short answer is not yet. AI Studio cannot use the Instagram feed element, and it cannot pull live posts from your Instagram without a separate setup.

When I asked it to add my feed, it built a nice looking Instagram section for my site. But when I asked whether it could pull in real posts, it told me that would take the Graph API, which means setting up an app in Facebook and jumping through a few more hoops. If you know exactly which posts you want, it can build those for you. If you want a feed that updates on its own, that is not going to happen easily inside AI Studio right now.

So for a live feed, I would go back to the regular funnel and website builder. You can still use AI to help build your pages there, and you get the real element. For the things AI Studio does well, here is how to use the AI Studio Visual Editor in GoHighLevel.

If you need a live feed on an AI Studio site today, one workaround is to embed a third-party widget like Elfsight. It has a free plan, but that plan is limited to about 200 views a month and shows their branding, so most real sites will need a paid plan. At the time of recording, that runs about five dollars a month. HighLevel adds features based on demand, so hopefully we will see the built-in feed come to AI Studio too.

That is the whole setup. If you have an active Instagram, the GoHighLevel Instagram feed is an easy way to turn website visitors into followers.

Related Links

• Facebook Text Background Posts in the GoHighLevel Social Planner

• How To Publish Your AI Studio Site and Set Up SEO in GoHighLevel

• How to Use the AI Studio Visual Editor in GoHighLevel

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Video Transcript

[0:00] HighLevel just added a way to put an Instagram feed right on your websites. No code needed. I'll show you how to set it up, plus stick around to the end, and I'll show you what happened when I asked AI Studio to do it for me instead. Hey you guys and gals, Tony here from AlphaBlossom. I've been using HighLevel for over six years, plus I've been a certified admin for over two years. Let's jump in. So we're inside of our account here. Now, before you do anything, we're gonna need to make sure you have Instagram connected. So let's jump into a couple places we can do it. Let's go into our marketing and we're gonna take a look at the social planner.

[0:39] And if we head over into settings, we can connect our social here. But you can also just click on Instagram here, and you can see I've already got Instagram set up. If you don't have it set up and you need to set it up, you can come in here to Connect Social and add Instagram. So we're gonna do connect Instagram here and Instagram with Facebook, or you can also do a direct Instagram integration. But I just wanted to give you a quick overview to let you know you do have to have it connected, and this is where you can do that. And then I'm gonna show you one other place you can go, which is settings and integrations, and you can see we've got Instagram on this screen as well.

[1:18] So you can come in here and manage it. If you don't have it already, then you can connect it here as well. Now that we have that, we're gonna jump into the funnel builder and show you how to set up the Instagram widget. So let's go into sites, and I'm gonna go into my demo sites. Gonna go into this demo site here, fashion product launch, and just go straight into the builder. So if you're familiar with HighLevel, you know there's several different ways to add it. We're gonna just add it right above our footer here. So we're gonna go to plus. You can see we've got our elements here, and you can see the Instagram is down here towards the bottom.

[1:55] We can add that directly. But we can also come here to social widgets, and if we click on the Instagram feed here, you see we've got a few different templates that we can use pre-built and pre-styled. So let's just drag this one out here and we're gonna just put it right above our footer. So you can see that's already styled. We've got our background colors and things like that already there. So that's an easy way to do it. Or let's just undo that and then we'll just show you really quickly. You can also come in here and let's say we want to add one column, and then inside of and So then I can just add the Instagram feed here directly, it just gives you the default styling, and then you just come in and style that the way you want to.

[2:35] That's the other way to do it. So it's really just your preference. And an important note this works with funnels, websites, the store, as well as the new webinars. I've got some additional information, as I mentioned at the end of the video, about AI Studio, so make sure you stay tuned to watch that. Now let's continue with how to set this up to make it look good and to get the features you want to show on your site. So, first of all, if we click on the widget, it opens our right panel. We can name this. So I'm just gonna call it SuperGenki, and I'm gonna come down here to select my Instagram account, and I'm gonna select SuperGenki official.

[3:12] So I just like to name things so that it's easier to find when you're viewing in the side panel and things like that. So now we've got it named. And next up is the layout. You can see also we can adjust this for different device sizes. So we can do desktop, tablet, or mobile, and tablet was just added recently, so that's a super cool feature. I've been waiting years for that to come along, honestly. A little geeky, but I love it. Gives you just more fine-tuning in terms of how it's gonna look on different devices. So, yeah, you can do it as a grid, or you can do it as a slider. So if you just want to have one row with like a carousel, you can do it that way, or if you have a grid, then you can set your grid settings in terms of spacing and things like that.

[3:49] So let's just start with the slider. We'll come down next to the header. This is where you can say if you want to show the header or not, and you can see we've also got some styles here, so you can adjust colors. Let's say the background color, you want it to be green. So you can come in and adjust all the colors and all the different settings, and you just take a look in the styles and you can see what those different adjustments are, then also adjust some information on the post Do you want it to show as a card or as just a classic? You want the aspect ratio to be one by one as a square, or do you want it to be a little bit taller?

[4:25] I'm just gonna leave it as a square. Do you want the images to open in a pop-up when somebody clicks on it? Do you want it to open on Instagram or none? So if you say open on Instagram, then it's going to take these folks directly to Instagram. Whereas if you open in a pop-up, it's just gonna open a pop-up directly on the page, and then you can see people can still follow you and things from here. So I'm just going to open it in a pop-up. And then what do you want to show? Do you want to show the likes on here? Let's open that pop-up again. Maybe if you don't have a lot of likes, you don't want to show your likes on here.

[4:56] If you don't have a lot of comments, so maybe if it's a newer feed, maybe you don't want that to show because those numbers are pretty low. And so you can see here when I hover over it shows that. But let's say when I remove this and I hover over it, you don't see that information now. So make sure you know where you're adjusting these. But this is the post element, so this is going to show on the individual post. You can also do the pop-up settings. So for the pop-up, you can say if you want the user to show or not. Do you want to show your follow button? You want to have the Instagram link?

[5:28] Do you want to show the like count? Again, if you don't have a lot of likes, you probably don't want to show that. you want to show the caption, comments, and the date. So you really have a lot of flexibility here. They've done a good job in how they've designed this. And let's go back out to general again. So, again, we've got the header settings, so you can show what's going to show in this main header here. You want the profile picture to show? Do you want to show your post counts? Again, it really just depends on how active and set up your Instagram is. But just play around with these and see what makes sense for you really the goal is to drive more people to your Instagram, but also to let people kind of see a little bit more of your personality, your branding and things like that.

[6:07] And we'll go back out here. You got slider settings. So you want to show arrows to control the slider. You want people to be able to drag it. What's the animation speed? And do you want to do autoplay on or off? So if you don't want it to autoplay, you can turn it off. But if you want these to scroll automatically every few seconds, you can adjust that time in terms of how quickly it scrolls there as well. Now if you go to grid, you've got some additional settings here. You want it to be auto or manual. So if you do manual, you can control how many rows will show. So now you can see I've got those.

[6:41] If you want it to be auto, it's gonna just automatically set that up for You can also adjust the gap. So maybe you want a little bit more space between here. You can do that. I'm gonna put that to seven, it was eight by default. Click back out, and then the same with the header, the feed title. You can adjust that as well. So here is my feed title. So you got the option to add a little headline there. Again, more styles and more posts. We've already covered that. Quick note. If you're new to HighLevel, I've got a 30 day free trial plus a free boot camp. Links are below. So I'm going to go back here to slider, and now you'll see if I save this and then I view it on the front end, it's gonna show different posts than what you're seeing in the builder.

[7:25] So when you view it on the front end, it actually shows your live feed inside the builder, it just shows a demo feed here. So now you can see I've got some posts showing, and then if I click on a post, it's gonna bring a pop-up here, and then if I click on the Instagram here, it's gonna open Instagram in a new tab, which is nice because it's not taking people exactly away from your website, but rather in a new tab. So it's very cool the way they've got it set up. As you can see here, these are totally different. So these are not my actual Instagram feed This is just a test feed in the editor.

[7:56] So if you want to see your real feed, you gotta go see it on the front end on the live site. And I've mentioned a couple times that I tested this out in AI Studio. I was wondering if we could do this inside of AI Studio using the widget. So what do you think? Let's head over there and I'll show you what I discovered. So I'm gonna go back out here. I'm gonna go into AI Studio, and I've got a site that I was trying this on here. So let's go to SuperGenki site. And if I scroll down, you can see I've got my Instagram feed here. But if you take a quick look, you'll notice it looks much different than what you saw on the funnel builder.

[8:29] That's because AI Studio cannot use that widget, and it actually cannot embed real Instagram posts live pulling it from your Instagram feed without creating special apps and going through a whole nother process. But you know the beauty for a lot of people with AI Studio is you can just come in here and through chat, you can do things that is very difficult for most people that don't have a developing background, things like that. So here I asked it to do it for me, and so it did add the widgets for me. but then I asked if it was possible to pull in real data, and it said yes, using the graph API, that's one way to do it.

[9:07] But you've got to go through some hoops and do some different things. You've got to set up an app in Facebook in order to use the graph API to pull in that real data, and so it kind of explains the limitations here. But in a nutshell, it will not be able to connect directly to your Instagram feed without using some other apps and things like that. So it's going to take more work to get it to work if you want to pull in real-time data if you know which posts you want and you want to click it can absolutely build those for you but if you want it to be dynamic and pulling real information from your Instagram feed it's not going to happen easily inside of AI Studio so I would go back to the regular funnel builder and you can use AI to build your sites in there as well and hopefully that will work for you and allow you to use the true Instagram widget.

[9:56] We'll probably see it coming here you know HighLevel is always adding features based on demand. So hopefully we'll see it here but for the time being it's not going to be a really easy thing for you to embed your actual Instagram widget on your page Elfsight has a free plan, but it's limited to about 200 views a month, and it shows their branding. So most real sites will need a paid plan. At the time of this recording, that runs about five dollars a month. That's it. If you've got an active Instagram, this is an easy way to get more followers. Are you gonna be adding this to your own site or to your clients' sites?

[10:31] Let me know in the comments. If this helped, give it a like and a subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.