Showing Instagram videos and Reels on your website: what to expect

The short answer

With Social Feed by grip space, your Instagram videos and Reels appear in the feed as still tiles showing the video’s cover image, with a round play mark in the middle. Nothing moves on the page by itself. When a visitor clicks a video tile, the video opens in a lightbox on your page and starts playing right away, with the sound off and the usual video controls. The visitor can turn the sound on, pause, scrub through the video or close it.

Whether videos appear at all is up to you. Each widget has an Include video posts setting, so you can show videos on one page and keep another page photos-only. A few videos may appear as still images without a play mark. That happens when Instagram doesn’t provide the video file, and it is explained in detail below.

Which kinds of Instagram video can appear

Instagram has several kinds of posts that contain video. Here is how each one appears in a Social Feed widget:

Instagram’s API reports Reels and feed videos with the same media type, VIDEO. Social Feed treats them the same way for display. If you want to show only Reels, or leave Reels out, there is a separate Reels filter in the widget settings that uses the field Instagram provides to tell them apart.

All of the videos come from the Instagram account you connect. Social Feed doesn’t show videos from other accounts or from hashtags.

What visitors see, step by step

Here is the whole experience from a visitor’s point of view, assuming the widget’s On click setting is Open lightbox:

1. The page loads. Video posts appear as square tiles with the video’s cover image. A round, semi-transparent play mark sits in the middle of each tile that can be played. No video is downloaded at this point.
2. The visitor hovers over a tile (on a computer). If the hover icon is turned on, the tile darkens and shows an Instagram icon with the like and comment counts. Phones don’t have hover, so this step doesn’t happen there.
3. The visitor clicks or taps the tile. A lightbox opens over the page. At the top is your Instagram username; below it, the video, shown in full without cropping.
4. The video starts playing, muted. The cover image shows briefly while the first part of the video loads, then playback starts on its own. The browser’s video controls are visible.
5. The visitor turns the sound on with the volume button in the controls, if they want to hear it. They can also pause, jump to another point, or switch to full screen if their browser offers it.
6. Below the video, the like count and the caption appear if you have turned them on, followed by a “View on Instagram” link that opens the post on Instagram in a new tab.
7. The visitor closes the lightbox with the × button in the top corner, or by clicking or tapping the dark area around it. Closing removes the video from the page, so it stops playing.

The video plays once. When it reaches the end, it stops rather than starting over, and the visitor can press play to watch it again.

Why videos don’t play inside the grid

Some feed tools make tiles play silently in the grid. Social Feed doesn’t, on purpose, and there is no setting to change this. There are good reasons for that:

1. Page speed. A tile only needs a cover image, which is small. A video is many times larger. A grid of 12 autoplaying videos would make every visitor download all 12 just by opening the page, including visitors who came for your opening hours and never look at the feed.
2. Mobile data. Visitors on phones pay for data. Loading video only when someone asks for it is the polite default.
3. Calm pages. Several clips moving at once pull attention away from your headline and your call to action. Still tiles let the feed support the page instead of competing with it.

The same applies to the slider layout: it shows cover images and only moves when visitors swipe, scroll or use the arrows. For more on the two layouts, see grid or slider.

Why the video starts muted

When the lightbox opens, the video starts playing without sound. This isn’t a style choice you need to fix; it is how browsers handle automatic playback. MDN, the Mozilla developer documentation, explains that you can assume media will be allowed to play automatically only if at least one of a few conditions is true, and the first one listed is that the audio is muted. Video with sound that starts on its own is generally blocked.

Social Feed follows the approach MDN recommends for video that should start by itself: the video element is set to autoplay, muted, with controls, and to play inline. Starting muted means the video reliably starts moving the moment the lightbox opens, in every major browser. Without it, many visitors would see a frozen first frame and might think the video was broken.

The controls are always shown, so turning the sound on is one tap away. MDN describes the controls attribute as offering controls for volume, seeking and pause/resume.

Playback on phones

On phones, the video plays inside the lightbox instead of jumping straight into the phone’s full-screen video player. The widget marks the video to play inline, which MDN describes as playing within the element’s playback area. MDN’s autoplay guide also notes that this is required for autoplay in Safari, which matters for visitors on iPhones.

Playing inline keeps the caption and the “View on Instagram” link visible under the video, and closing the lightbox brings the visitor straight back to where they were on your page. Visitors who want a bigger picture can still choose full screen from the controls, if their browser offers it.

How the video is sized in the lightbox

Tiles in the grid and the slider are always square, and the cover image is cropped to the center of the square. In the lightbox, the video is shown in its original shape, without cropping:

The lightbox is up to about 760 pixels wide, and the video area is limited to about 60% of the screen height. That leaves room for the like count, the caption and the link below the video, so visitors can read about the video while it plays. If the caption is long, the text area scrolls on its own while the video stays in place.

The Include video posts setting

Each widget has a check box called Include video posts, which is on by default. It decides whether posts that are videos appear in that widget at all.

When you turn the setting off, the widget skips video posts and fills the feed with the next photos and carousels instead, so you still get the number of posts you set if the account has enough of them. When you turn it back on, videos return in their usual place, in the order you posted them.

Because the setting belongs to the widget, you can mix approaches on one site. For example, a homepage widget can include videos while a gallery widget on another page shows photos only. How many widgets you can create depends on your plan: one on Free, three on Light and unlimited on Standard. See the pricing for details.

Videos inside carousel posts

A carousel post can mix photos and video clips. Social Feed treats it as one carousel post, not as a video, so two things are worth knowing:

1. Include video posts doesn’t remove carousels. The setting looks at posts that are videos themselves. A carousel that happens to contain a clip still appears even when the setting is off. If you want to leave carousels out, use the separate carousel setting under Filter posts.
2. Video slides play when you show all images. In the Carousel posts setting, choose All images in the lightbox. Visitors can then move through the carousel with the arrows in the lightbox, and a video slide plays the same way as any other video: muted, with controls. With First image only, the lightbox shows just the first item.

When a visitor moves away from a video slide with the arrows, that video stops. Coming back to it starts it again from the beginning, muted. The arrows loop, so moving forward from the last slide goes back to the first.

Why some videos show as still images

Now and then, a video appears without a play mark, and the lightbox shows a still image instead of playing anything. This happens when Instagram doesn’t include the video file in what it sends to the widget.

Meta’s documentation for Instagram media says the video URL field is omitted if the media contains copyrighted material or has been flagged for a copyright issue. A common example is a Reel that uses a popular song from Instagram’s music library. Instagram plays it in its own app, but doesn’t hand the file to outside websites.

In that case, Social Feed shows the cover image as a normal tile. It deliberately doesn’t add a play mark, because a play mark that does nothing when clicked would feel broken. In the lightbox, the cover appears as a still image, and the “View on Instagram” link lets visitors watch the video on Instagram.

There is no setting in Social Feed that changes this, because the file simply isn’t available. If a particular video matters for your website, the options are:

1. Post it again with your own audio, narration or music you have the rights to use outside Instagram.
2. Leave it as a still. The cover image and caption still tell visitors what it is about, and the link takes them to Instagram.
3. Hide it from the widget: add a word to its caption and use the caption keyword filter with “exclude matching posts”. See filtering your feed by keyword.

What loads, and when

Video is the heaviest thing a feed can show, so it is worth knowing exactly when it is downloaded:

Videos and images load directly from Instagram’s servers, not from your website’s hosting, so playing videos doesn’t use your server’s bandwidth. The widget doesn’t set cookies or use the browser’s local storage.

In short, a feed with videos costs about the same to load as a feed of photos until someone actually decides to watch. For more on where a feed fits on a page, see where to put an Instagram feed on your website.

When the click setting isn’t “Open lightbox”

Video playback on your site happens only in the lightbox. The On click setting decides whether the lightbox is used:

If your feed includes videos, Do nothing is usually a poor fit: the play mark still appears on the tile, so visitors expect something to happen. If you want a purely decorative feed, consider turning Include video posts off, or switching the hover icon off as well, so tiles don’t look clickable.

Should you include videos at all?

Videos are on by default, and for most accounts that is the right choice. Still, some pages are better without them. A quick guide:

Since everything is set per widget, you don’t have to decide once for the whole site. Try it in the preview first: the dashboard preview plays videos in a lightbox the same way your site does.

Preparing videos that work well on a website

1. Pick a cover that survives a square crop. The tile shows the center of the cover image. Keep faces, products or titles near the middle, not at the very top or bottom of a vertical frame.
2. Make the first few seconds work without sound. Since playback starts muted, on-screen text or burned-in captions help visitors understand the video before they decide to turn the sound on.
3. Use audio you’re allowed to use elsewhere. Original sound, voice-over or properly licensed music makes it far more likely that Instagram provides the video file, so the video plays on your site.
4. Write a caption that introduces the video. If you show captions in the lightbox, the first line is what visitors read while the video plays. Describe what they are watching.
5. Keep website videos current. A video about a past event can confuse visitors. The date range filter (last 30, 90 or 365 days) lets older posts drop off on their own.

Setting up a widget with videos

1. Create a free account and connect your Instagram professional account. Not sure which kind you have? See Instagram professional accounts.
2. Add a widget and open Settings & preview.
3. Check Include video posts. If you want only Reels, or no Reels, choose that under Filter posts.
4. Set On click to Open lightbox, and under Show in lightbox choose whether to show the caption and the like count.
5. If you post carousels with video clips, set Carousel posts to All images in the lightbox.
6. Click a video tile in the preview to check how it plays, then click Save settings.
7. Copy the embed code and paste it into your site. Platform-specific steps are in our guides for WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and HTML.

Settings changes appear on your site without new embed code.

Troubleshooting

No videos appear in the feed. Check that Include video posts is on, and that the Reels filter isn’t set to a choice that excludes your videos. A short date range or a caption keyword filter can also leave videos out. If the whole feed is missing, see Instagram feed not showing on your website.

A video has no play mark. Instagram didn’t provide the video file, usually because of copyrighted audio. Visitors can watch it through the “View on Instagram” link.

The video plays without sound. That is expected. Playback starts muted, and visitors turn the sound on with the volume control.

Clicking a video does nothing. The On click setting is probably Do nothing. Change it to Open lightbox. If the setting is right, check that nothing on your page, such as a transparent layer from your theme, is sitting on top of the widget.

The lightbox opens but the video doesn’t start. The visitor’s browser may block autoplay. Pressing play in the controls starts it.

A new video isn’t on my site yet. On the Free plan, posts on your site update once a day. Paid plans show new posts right away. See why an Instagram feed isn’t updating.

Frequently asked questions

Can videos play automatically in the grid? No. Tiles always show cover images, and videos play only in the lightbox when a visitor opens them.

Can videos start with the sound on? No. Browsers generally block video with sound from starting on its own, so the widget starts muted and visitors turn the sound on themselves.

Can a video loop? No. A video plays once and stops at the end. Visitors can press play to watch it again.

Do videos count as posts? Yes. Each video or Reel is one post toward the number of posts you set, up to 16 on the Free plan, 30 on Light and 50 on Standard. See what the free plan includes.

Does the widget show view or play counts? No. The lightbox can show the like count and the comment count, plus the caption. If you have hidden like counts on Instagram, Meta’s documentation says the like count isn’t provided, so it won’t appear. In the dashboard, Social Feed counts how often each widget is viewed, not how often videos are played.

Do I need a paid plan for videos? No. Videos, Reels and the lightbox work on every plan, including Free.

Get started

Create a free Social Feed account, connect your Instagram, and click a video in the preview to see exactly what your visitors will get. New to Social Feed? Read what Social Feed by grip space is. Questions about videos? Write to us at info@grip-space.co.jp.

Sources

1. MDN Web Docs, “Autoplay guide for media and Web Audio APIs”: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Autoplay
2. MDN Web Docs, “<video>: The Video Embed element”: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/video
3. Meta for Developers, “IG Media” reference: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-platform/reference/instagram-media