Old posts showing in your Instagram feed? Order, pinned posts and filters

The short answer

Social Feed shows your posts in the order Instagram returns them, which is normally newest first, and it doesn’t re-sort them. It fills the number of posts you set, applying your filters along the way. Old posts appear when you haven’t posted enough recently to fill that number, when a filter makes the widget look further back to find matching posts, or, on the Free plan, when the list on your site hasn’t been refreshed yet. The quickest fix for most people is the Date range filter, which leaves out anything older than 30 days, 90 days or a year.

Start here: which kind of “old” are you seeing?

How the widget picks posts

Understanding this makes every cause below easier to follow. Each time your feed is built, Social Feed does the following:

1. It asks Instagram for your posts, page by page, starting from the most recent. Meta’s reference for the media endpoint says it returns a maximum of 10K of the most recently created media, and that Stories aren’t included.
2. It checks each post against your settings: Include video posts, the Reels option, Include carousel posts, Date range and Caption keywords. A post that doesn’t pass is skipped.
3. It keeps going until the feed is full, meaning it has the number of posts you set, or until it has looked through a few hundred of your most recent posts.
4. It shows the posts it kept, in the order Instagram returned them. There is no sorting step, no ranking by likes and no shuffle.

Meta’s reference pages for the media endpoint and for individual posts don’t spell out a sort order. In everyday use, posts come back newest first, which is why a feed normally matches the chronological part of your Instagram profile. Social Feed simply keeps that order; it doesn’t reorder posts, and there is no setting to arrange them by hand.

Cause 1: The feed is longer than your recent posting

If the feed is in date order and still looks old, the number of posts is usually the reason. The widget always tries to fill the number you set, up to 16 posts on the Free plan, 30 on Light and 50 on Standard. If you post less often than that number suggests, the last tiles reach back a long way.

A little arithmetic shows how quickly this adds up:

These are simple calculations, not measurements, but the pattern holds: the fewer posts you publish, the fewer the widget should show. Two fixes work well together. Lower the number of posts to a whole number of rows you can keep fresh, for example 4 or 8 with 4 columns. Then add a Date range so anything past its use-by date drops off on its own. Choosing a window that won’t leave the feed empty is covered in detail in how to show only recent Instagram posts.

Cause 2: A filter makes the widget reach further back

This is the cause people least expect. Filters don’t just remove posts; because the widget keeps looking until the feed is full, they also pull in older posts that do match. The stricter the filter, the further back the widget goes.

For example, a keyword filter for a word you used in three posts last year and one post this week will show this week’s post next to last year’s three. If that isn’t what you want, combine the filter with a Date range. The two work together: a post has to pass every filter to appear. See filtering an Instagram feed by keyword for how matching works.

Filters also explain a common mismatch between the dashboard and your site. The preview in Settings & preview looks at your 50 most recent posts, while the live widget keeps looking further back until it has enough. With a strict filter, the preview may show only a few posts while the live site fills up with older matches. When you use filters, check the live page after saving, not just the preview.

Cause 3: Pinned posts

Instagram’s Help Center says you can pin up to three posts to the top of your profile. If you pinned an older post, your profile shows it first, ahead of your newest posts. It’s natural to wonder whether your website feed does the same.

Here is the honest answer: we can’t confirm how pinned posts are handled by the API. Meta’s reference for the media endpoint and for individual posts doesn’t mention pinning, doesn’t list a field that says whether a post is pinned, and doesn’t state the order in which posts are returned. So we don’t know from Meta’s documentation whether a pinned post comes back first, in its date position, or differently in some cases.

What we can say for certain is how Social Feed behaves: it doesn’t know whether a post is pinned, and it can’t promote or demote a post because of it. Whatever position Instagram returns the post in is the position it gets in your feed.

How to check your own account:

1. Open your Instagram profile and note which posts are pinned and their dates.
2. Open the widget’s Settings & preview in the Social Feed dashboard, with the Date range set to Any time and no other filters, and look at the first few tiles.
3. If a pinned post appears first in the preview even though it isn’t your newest, it is coming back from Instagram in that position.

If a pinned post is showing where you don’t want it, the reliable fixes are the ones that don’t depend on pin behavior:

1. Use a Date range. A pinned post older than the window is left out, because the filter uses the post’s publish date.
2. Exclude it by keyword. Add a word to its caption and use Caption keywords with Exclude matching posts.
3. Unpin it on Instagram, if the pin is no longer needed. Check the preview afterwards to see the effect, since we can’t promise what the API does with a post that was pinned.

Cause 4: The Free plan refreshes once a day

On the Free plan, the list of posts on your site is reused for up to 24 hours. That has two visible effects:

1. New posts arrive later. A post you published this morning may not be on your site until the list is refreshed, so the feed can look a day behind your profile.
2. Removed posts linger. A post you deleted or archived can stay on your site until the next refresh. Meta’s platform overview says Instagram’s CDN URLs won’t return the media when the content has been deleted or has expired, so a deleted post’s image may also fail to load in the meantime.

Both resolve on their own at the next refresh. If you can’t wait, changing a setting that affects which posts are shown, such as the number of posts or a filter, makes the widget fetch a fresh list right away. On the Light and Standard plans, the widget asks Instagram for your posts each time the page loads, so new and removed posts are reflected immediately.

More on timing, including a table of what changes when, is in why your Instagram feed isn’t updating. Plan details are on the pricing section, and what the free plan includes covers the limits in plain terms.

Cause 5: The page shows a different widget

If you have more than one widget, the page may contain the embed code of another one with different settings, for example a widget made for a gallery page that shows 30 posts with no date limit. Each widget has its own code. Compare the code on the page with the code shown for the widget you have been editing, and replace it if they differ.

This also happens after a redesign or a template change: a footer or sidebar may still carry an embed code from an older widget. If you aren’t sure which widget a page is using, temporarily switch one widget to Unpublished in the dashboard and reload the page; the feed that disappears is the one you switched. Switch it back afterwards. See hiding an Instagram feed temporarily.

Cause 6: The post’s date isn’t what you think

Meta describes the timestamp of a post as its creation date. That is the date the widget uses for the Date range filter, and it is what decides a post’s place among your posts. A few consequences:

1. Editing doesn’t make a post new. Changing the caption or the cover, or getting new likes and comments, doesn’t move a post forward or make it count as recent.
2. Reposting does. If you want an older photo to count as recent, publish it again as a new post.
3. The window counts back from now. Last 30 days means posts published within the 30 days before the feed was built. A post close to the edge may stay in for a while yet.

Is your website caching an old copy?

Usually not. The feed is built in the visitor’s browser by the script in your embed code, and that script is sent with instructions not to be stored, so a browser or a page cache doesn’t keep an old version of your posts. Clearing your website’s cache won’t change which posts appear; the Free plan’s daily refresh (Cause 4) is the only built-in delay.

One exception to watch for: some performance tools offer to copy external scripts onto your own server. If such a tool has saved a copy of the widget script, that copy can go stale. If the feed on your site never changes, even after you change a widget setting, check whether the script address on the live page still matches the one in your embed code, and exclude it from that optimization.

Matching the settings to the page

How old is too old depends on where the feed sits. A gallery page can happily show a year of work, while a homepage that greets every visitor should feel current. Because each widget has its own settings, you can treat each placement differently:

How many widgets you can create depends on your plan: one on Free, three on Light and unlimited on Standard. For placement ideas, see where to put an Instagram feed on your website and an Instagram feed in your website footer.

A five-minute monthly check

Old posts tend to creep back in when posting slows down or a campaign ends. A short routine once a month keeps the feed honest:

1. Open each page with a feed on your phone and look at the first row. Is anything there out of date, such as a sold-out product, a past event or an old price?
2. If so, decide whether it should go for good (exclude it by keyword) or whether the whole feed should be shorter (add or tighten the Date range).
3. Check the last row too. If it is much older than the rest, lower the number of posts by one row.
4. If you ran a campaign with its own keyword widget, remove the embed code from the campaign page once it ends, or switch that widget to Unpublished.
5. On the Free plan, do this check a day after any changes on Instagram, so the daily refresh has caught up.

Fixes, from quickest to most thorough

Setting a date range, step by step

1. In the Social Feed dashboard, open the widget and click Settings & preview.
2. Scroll to Filter posts and choose a Date range: Any time, Last 30 days, Last 90 days or Last year.
3. Check the preview. If it looks thin, choose a longer window or lower the number of posts.
4. Click Save settings. The embed code already on your site picks up the change; you don’t need to paste anything again.
5. Open the live page on your phone and computer to confirm.

If you haven’t added the feed yet, our guides cover WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and plain HTML.

Frequently asked questions

Can I sort the feed by most liked, or shuffle it? No. The feed keeps the order Instagram returns, and there is no sorting or shuffle option.

Can I choose exactly which posts appear? Not one by one. The closest option is a caption keyword: add a word to the posts you want and use Only matching posts.

Can the feed show posts from a specific month? No. The Date range counts back from today, so it can show recent posts but not a past period.

Why does the account header show a post count much higher than the feed? The header shows your account’s total post count from Instagram, not the number of posts in the widget.

Do archived posts appear? We haven’t confirmed from Meta’s documentation how archived posts are treated. Check the preview after archiving; on the Free plan, allow up to a day for the change.

Does the slider layout change the order? No. Grid and slider show the same posts in the same order; the slider just puts them in one scrolling row. See grid or slider.

Will a new post push out the oldest one? Yes, once the feed is full. Each new post that passes your filters takes the first place, and the oldest one drops off the end.

Is there a message when the date range leaves nothing to show? No. The widget doesn’t show a “no recent posts” notice, so choose a window you can fill.

Still seeing old posts?

Send us the page address, the widget you expect it to use and the post that shouldn’t be there, at info@grip-space.co.jp. New to Social Feed? Create a free account, connect your Instagram professional account, and set a date range before you publish.

Sources

1. Meta for Developers, “IG User Media” reference: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-platform/instagram-graph-api/reference/ig-user/media
2. Meta for Developers, “IG Media” reference: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-platform/reference/instagram-media
3. Meta for Developers, “Overview of the Instagram API”: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-platform/overview/
4. Instagram Help Center, “Pin a post to the top of your profile on Instagram”: https://help.instagram.com/318456537074409/