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WordPress blogs will soon support Facebook's Instant Articles

Whether you're self-hosted or use WordPress VIP, Zuck and co. have you covered.

If you turn to Facebook for your daily news update, you may have come across Instant Articles. A small number of publishers are able to serve up news articles quickly for mobile devices right now, but from April 12th, the technology will be open to anyone --- including bloggers. In a bid to get communities on board, Facebook has teamed up with Automattic, the company behind the popular publishing software WordPress, to make it easy for writers all over the world to serve pages up to 10 times faster than they could before.

The two companies have published a new plugin that comes with a number of built-in tools to prepare blogs ahead of the launch. It comes packed with tools that let bloggers choose to auto-play video or use tap-to-zoom photo galleries to make their posts more interactive.

It's a significant move for Facebook, given that WordPress' open-source software now powers more than a quarter of sites on the web. The company says that all standard templates will support the plugin out of the box, but warns that if site owners have customized their templates, they may need to play with the plugin to get optimal results. Given that it's open-source, there's likely to be plenty of support, which will give Facebook's tech the chance to shine over other mobile-optimized platforms like Google's AMP.