Lightbox or link to Instagram? Choosing what happens when visitors click a post

The short answer

In Social Feed, every widget has an On click setting with three choices: Open lightbox, Open Instagram and Do nothing. Open lightbox is the default and the best fit for most websites, because visitors see the post larger, with its caption, without leaving your page. Open Instagram makes sense when your main goal is to gain followers. Do nothing turns the feed into a decorative gallery.

You can change the setting at any time in Settings & preview. The change appears on your site without new embed code, so it is easy to try one option for a few weeks and switch if it doesn’t suit you.

Start with the goal of the page

The right click behavior depends less on taste and more on what the page is for. Ask what you want a curious visitor to do after looking at a post:

1. Keep reading, booking or buying on your site. Choose Open lightbox. Visitors satisfy their curiosity, read the caption, and close the lightbox right where they were. This suits homepages, product pages, booking pages and anything with a call to action.
2. Follow you on Instagram. Choose Open Instagram. Each click lands the visitor on the post itself, one tap away from your profile and the Follow button. This suits pages built to promote your Instagram, or sites where social reach matters more than on-site actions.
3. Simply get a feel for your brand. Choose Do nothing. The feed works like a moving mood board, and nothing pulls visitors away from the page. This suits small decorative strips, footers and pages with a single, focused job.

If the same feed appears on pages with different goals, you can create separate widgets with different click settings. The Free plan includes one widget, the Light plan three and the Standard plan an unlimited number; see the pricing.

Option 1: Open lightbox

A lightbox is a window that opens on top of your page, with the rest of the page dimmed behind it. In Social Feed it is up to about 760 pixels wide and fits within the screen height, so it works the same on a laptop and a phone. From top to bottom, it contains:

Because the image is no longer cropped, the lightbox is where portrait photos, landscape shots and vertical videos are shown properly. In the grid and the slider, tiles are always square.

The lightbox also keeps a door open to Instagram. Every lightbox ends with “View on Instagram”, so visitors who want to like, comment or follow can still get there. They simply have to choose it, rather than being sent there by default.

Choosing what the lightbox shows

When On click is set to Open lightbox, a Show in lightbox setting appears with two check boxes: Caption and Like count. Both are on by default.

About the caption. The lightbox shows the whole caption as you wrote it, with your line breaks kept. If it is long, the text area scrolls inside the lightbox while the image stays in place. The caption is shown as plain text, so hashtags, @mentions and web addresses in it are not clickable links. If you want visitors to act on something in a caption, such as a booking link, put that link on your page as well.

About the like count. With Like count on, the lightbox shows the number of likes and, next to it, the number of comments. If you have hidden like counts on your Instagram posts, Meta’s documentation says the like count is not provided to apps, so the widget can’t show it. Comment counts don’t include comments on individual carousel slides, according to the same documentation.

Should you show numbers at all? If your posts get steady engagement, visible likes act as quiet social proof. If your account is new and many posts have a handful of likes, turning Like count off keeps the focus on the content.

Carousel posts and videos in the lightbox

Two other settings only matter when the lightbox is in use. The Carousel posts setting decides what happens with posts that have several images:

1. First image only: the lightbox shows the first image of the carousel, like a single photo.
2. All images in the lightbox: the lightbox shows arrows on the left and right and a counter. Visitors can move through every image. The arrows loop, so going forward from the last image returns to the first.

Either way, the tile in the grid or slider shows the first image, with a small stacked-squares mark in the corner so visitors know there is more inside.

Videos and Reels play inside the lightbox. They start playing on their own with the sound off, as browsers require, and visitors can turn the sound on with the controls. Some videos have no playable file from Instagram, usually because of copyrighted music, and appear as a still image. In that case visitors can watch it on Instagram through the “View on Instagram” link.

How visitors close the lightbox

There are two ways to close the lightbox:

1. Click or tap the × button in the top corner.
2. Click or tap the dark area outside the lightbox.

Clicks inside the lightbox, on the image, the caption or the carousel arrows, don’t close it. A video that is playing stops when the lightbox closes.

A few things the lightbox does not do, so you know what to expect:

1. The Escape key doesn’t close it. Visitors on a computer use the × button or click outside.
2. The browser’s back button doesn’t close it. Opening the lightbox doesn’t add a step to the browser history, so pressing back leaves your page as it normally would. On phones, where people often use the back gesture, the × button and tapping outside are the ways to close it.
3. It doesn’t move from post to post. The arrows move through the images of one carousel post. To see another post, visitors close the lightbox and click the next tile.

Option 2: Open Instagram

With Open Instagram, a click opens the post on Instagram in a new browser tab. Your page stays open in the original tab, so visitors can switch back when they are done.

The advantage is that visitors land exactly where they can interact: like, comment, share, save and follow. If your website gets a steady stream of visitors who don’t yet follow you, this is the most direct path from your site to your Instagram audience.

The trade-off is attention. Instagram is designed to keep people scrolling, and a visitor who opens a new tab may not come back to finish booking or buying. On pages where an on-site action matters, that cost is real.

Opening a new tab can also surprise people. The W3C’s accessibility guidance includes an advisory technique, G201, recommending that links which open a new window or tab give users advance warning. Its reasoning is that a new tab can be disorienting, and that the back button won’t return visitors to the previous page. A simple way to apply this is a short line of text near the feed, for example “Tap a post to open it on Instagram (opens in a new tab).”

Option 3: Do nothing

With Do nothing, tiles don’t respond to clicks, and the mouse pointer doesn’t change to a hand over them. The feed is purely visual.

This is useful when the feed is a supporting element: a strip of photos in a footer, a small band of color on a landing page, or a sidebar on a page with one clear goal. Nothing in the feed competes with the page’s main action.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Turn the hover icon off too. The Icon on hover setting is separate. If it stays on, tiles darken and show an Instagram icon when a mouse is over them, which suggests they can be clicked. Set Icon on hover to None so the feed doesn’t promise something it won’t do.
2. Videos can’t be watched. Video tiles still show a play mark, but they can’t be played. If the feed includes many videos, consider turning Include video posts off for this widget.
3. Keep a path to Instagram if you want followers. The account header above the feed shows your profile picture, username and post count with a Follow button, and the Follow button opens your Instagram profile in a new tab. Turning the header on gives interested visitors a way to find you without making every tile a link.

How hover and the account header fit in

The click setting works together with two other settings. Matching them makes the feed feel consistent:

On computers, the hover overlay shows the Instagram icon together with the post’s like and comment counts. Phones and tablets don’t have hover, so visitors there see the tiles without the overlay, whatever you choose. The Follow button text and color can be changed to match your site.

Writing captions that work in a lightbox

If you show captions in the lightbox, they are read by a different audience than on Instagram. Website visitors often don’t know you yet, and they arrive with a specific question. A few habits make your captions more useful in that setting:

1. Lead with what the post shows. The first line is what most visitors read. “Our new seasonal menu, available from Friday” helps a stranger more than an inside joke for followers.
2. Keep hashtags at the end. In the lightbox, hashtags are plain text and can’t be clicked. A block of them at the start pushes the useful part of the caption down.
3. Don’t rely on “link in bio”. On your website, visitors are already where the link would take them. Put the relevant link on the page next to the feed instead.
4. Avoid dates that go stale. “This weekend only” confuses visitors who open the post weeks later. The date range filter can help keep the feed recent.

Common mistakes

1. Do nothing with the hover icon still on. Tiles look clickable but aren’t. Turn the hover icon off whenever clicks are off.
2. Open Instagram on a product or booking page. Each curious click opens a new tab on Instagram, at the very moment the visitor was close to acting on your site. Use the lightbox there.
3. Captions on, but posts without captions. If most of your posts have no caption, the lightbox shows a large image and little else. That is fine, but consider turning Like count on so the lightbox doesn’t feel empty.
4. Showing only the first image of carousels you rely on. If your carousels tell a story, such as before-and-after or step-by-step, choose all images in the lightbox so visitors can see the whole thing.

Recommendations by page

For more on choosing pages and positions, see where to put an Instagram feed on your website. For shops in particular, Instagram feeds for online stores covers product pages in more depth, and photographers will find portfolio tips in Instagram feeds for photographer websites.

Accessibility: what to know

Be aware of how each option works for people who don’t use a mouse or a touch screen. Tiles open with a mouse click or a tap. They can’t currently be reached with the Tab key, so keyboard-only visitors can’t open the lightbox or follow a tile to Instagram. The lightbox closes with the × button or a click outside, not with the Escape key.

Whichever option you choose, a good rule is to treat the feed as extra, not essential. Put anything visitors need, such as prices, opening hours, booking details and important links, in the text of your page, where everyone can reach it. If you want to point people to Instagram, a regular text link or the Follow button in the account header is a reliable path.

Test your choice like a visitor

1. Open the live page on a computer. Hover over a few tiles and check that the hover icon matches your click setting.
2. Click a photo, a carousel post and a video. In the lightbox, check that the caption and like count show as you intended, that carousel arrows appear if you chose all images, and that videos start playing.
3. Close the lightbox both ways: with the × and by clicking outside.
4. Repeat on a phone. Tap a tile, scroll a long caption, and close the lightbox by tapping outside.
5. If you chose Open Instagram, check that a new tab opens and that your page is still there in the original tab.

The dashboard preview behaves the same way as your site, so you can try all three options there before saving. If the feed works in the preview but not on your page, see Instagram feed not showing on your website.

Troubleshooting

Clicking a tile does nothing. Check that On click isn’t set to Do nothing. If it is set correctly, something on your page, such as a transparent layer from your theme or page builder, may be covering the widget.

The lightbox appears behind part of my site. The lightbox is placed on top of the page with a very high stacking order. If a sticky header or chat button still shows above it, that element uses an even higher stacking order; adjust it in your theme if it gets in the way.

The caption isn’t showing. Check that Caption is ticked under Show in lightbox. Posts without a caption simply show none.

The like count is missing on some posts. If like counts are hidden on those posts on Instagram, the number isn’t available to the widget.

A new tab doesn’t open with Open Instagram. Check whether a browser extension is blocking new tabs, and try another browser to compare.

Frequently asked questions

Which option is the default? Open lightbox, with both the caption and the like count shown.

Can different posts use different click behaviors? No. The setting applies to the whole widget. To use different behaviors on different pages, create a widget for each.

Can a click open my own website page, such as a product page? No. The options are the lightbox, the post on Instagram, or nothing.

Can visitors like or comment from the lightbox? No. Liking and commenting happen on Instagram; the “View on Instagram” link takes visitors there.

Are the click options limited by plan? No. All three options and the lightbox settings are available on every plan, including the free plan.

Does the lightbox change the page address? No. The address stays the same, and there is no separate link to a post in the lightbox.

Get started

Create a free Social Feed account, connect your Instagram professional account (see how to check yours), and try each click option in the preview. For layout choices, read grid or slider, and for adding the code to your site, see the guides for WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and HTML. Questions? Write to us at info@grip-space.co.jp.

Sources

1. W3C, “G201: Giving users advanced warning when opening a new window”: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/general/G201
2. Meta for Developers, “IG Media” reference (like_count, comments_count, caption): https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-platform/reference/instagram-media