Case Study: WordPress Custom Plugin Development for Viewing Instagram Stories Without Logging In

WP Masters built a custom WordPress plugin for Social Kings that allows their clients to view Instagram Stories without Instagram login or signup. 

Client & Challenge 

Social Kings, a Netherland-based marketing agency that focuses on boosting their customer’s social profiles via likes, views, and following, prompted us to develop an additional feature for their WordPress website via Upwork. 

They wanted us to build the functionality that would allow their users to view other people’s Instagram stories… without Instagram. They gave us a website of a competitor who had comparable functionality to start with. There, people would fill in Instagram usernames to view their stories right on the website. The client wanted Social King’s customers to be able to do the same. 

During our collaboration on the project, the client realized that they wanted not a feature, but a WordPress plugin with the same functionality. So, adding a feature to a WordPress website meant fitting a design for an existing UI, building a plugin meant we had to do a little more design work. 

Backend functionality was the main challenge within the first concept of the project, and it remained an issue when we started to approach the task as plugin development. We didn’t know how to build a backend for the functionality the client wanted — so we began our research. 

First, we wanted to connect the client’s website to Instagram via Instagram’s API. To use Meta for Developers and Instagram APIs, we’ve registered Meta and Instagram accounts, new emails, etc. The idea was to create a user profile that would go to other people’s profiles, view their stories, and send the display data to the Social Kings’ WP. We started studying Meta’s open-source documentation and concluded that their API didn’t allow for our idea.  

Solution

We had to look for other solutions and until we found one that was suitable. 

We decided to connect the client’s WordPress and Instagram via request-response from the website to Instagram and back, but without their API. 

Value 

Our backend developer (WordPress, PHP), frontend developer (HTML, CSS), and a project manager who guided them through communication with the client worked on InstaStories Viewer for about three weeks. 

The server-side part of the solution was ready it was possible to view other people’s Instagram Stories without logging in or registering on social media after activating the plugin. We built the UI of the plugin as well, building it to be easily understandable, accessible, and robust. 

When released, this plugin would boost the client’s projected business value immensely: as far as we know, there’s just one comparable solution on the Internet (within the website the client recommended us to use an example). The client plans to make it into a lure for lead generation.

The plugin we’ve developed would allow Social Kings to control views of their customers’ Instagram stories better, too. Apart from that, it’s an incredibly useful tool for those who don’t want to interact with social media but want to watch people’s stories.