Instagram

Like all social networks, Instagram wants people to interact and view content within its "closed garden", where it can track your actions and show you ads.

This means that Instagram (like all social networks) will always fight against you getting people leaving their platform to visit your site.

Goals for food blogs

The goal of a food blog is to keep your users on your own site, not send them off to a third-party site.

Your site is where you control the user experience, and can earn ad revenue.

Your site is where you can prompt them to sign up for your emails.

Images on your site are click-magnets, and the user typically has no idea where the image leads to. Rather than link to Instagram, why not link images directly to your own internal content? If you believe your instagram images are better than the recipe's actual featured image, maybe you should replace the featured image with the instagram image?

Displaying the social icons in your header or footer is fine - your readers want to find and engage with you on other platforms. But you shouldn't dedicate screenspace to sending them off your blog.

Pagespeed

The majority of Instagram embeds are done via javascript, which slows down pagespeed, introduces third party resources that may violate GDPR, and can introduce errors that can interfere with your website functioning properly.

Embedding Instagram content into your site will always have a negative impact on pagespeed.

Alternatives

We do not currently have an alternative for this. Other Instagram widgets add unnecessary javascript, which slows down pagespeed.

Instagram will eventually find these methods, and close them down.

Instagram is not a good source of traffic.

It's time to move on from displaying Instagram widgets on blogs, as it has proved to be less than useful.