WordPress Stories - a quick review

The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story!

This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works.

There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots.

There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image.

I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the blog. You can make it go full screen.

This is it:

There's a timer at the bottom, because you can add multiple images and it'll flip between them. You can make it go full screen. That's it.

But it gets worse.

WordPress emails my subscribers whenever I publish something new. It's like a Substack newsletter only cooler.

This is what my subscribers see.

That's just rubbish.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? The WordPress Stories images don't have any alt text - so they're exclusionary.

So, in conclusion, WordPress Stories aren't for me.

Good to see them innovating. But I'm not sure if a low-feature image editor is going to drive people back to blogs.

You can read more about Jetpack's WordPress Story Block on their support site.