How to convert all your WordPress Posts to Facebook Instant Articles

by Edward on

If you have our plugin installed or are subscribed to our Newsletter you’ll have noticed we released v.1.4.0 last week. This was a big deal for us as it introduced one of our most requested features, a way to quickly Mass Convert all WordPress posts to Instant Articles.

Unlike AMP, it is actually pretty difficult to convert or update all your old posts to Instant Article. The RSS feed method will only do up to 100 posts and will ignore any articles that haven’t been modified within the last 24 hours. The Crawler Ingestion method only works on posts that have never been shared before, which pretty much leaves us only the API method, but previously the only synced one post at a time. Not to be deterred, we wrote a feature that loops over all the posts on your site and uses the API to convert them to Instant Articles, aka our Mass Post syncer

Using the Mass Post Syncer

Mass Post Syncer
Mass sync all posts to Instant Articles

It’s pretty easy to use as there are very few options to configure. Firstly ensure you’ve connected your site to Facebook via the API (it will show an error if you haven’t). Then ensure the Mass Post Syncer is set to Update (this will also create a new Instant Article if the post’s never been converted before) and pick the Environment, probably Production unless you wish to preview your articles first.

The settings at the bottom are entirely optional and allow you to only convert posts that are in a certain Category, by a particular Author or between a certain Date. If you leave them all as their default setting it will covert all the posts on your site.

When you’re ready to go hit Sync Posts, it’ll show you a progress bar with how many posts it’s down and how many are left. Don’t navigate away from the page and just let it run. When it’s finished it will show you a success message.

WordPress posts covered to production Instant Articles

Once it’s done navigate to your Facebook Page -> Settings -> Instant Articles and check that all your converted posts are there. As they’re synced over the API you’ll have full access to any Errors or Analytics from within the WordPress admin dashboard just as you would normally.

We’ve already heard great things from some of our customers who have synced over 5000 posts using it*. We hope you also enjoy this feature and find it useful and, as usual, any issues please just let us know.

*If you’re syncing more than 2000 posts at a time you may run into problems with Facebook’s API rate limiting, we’re hoping to fix this in v.1.4.1.