Instagram Highlights Strategy Guide: How to Use Highlights to Grow Your Account

Table of Contents

• What Are Instagram Highlights and Why They Matter
• How to Create an Instagram Highlight (Step-by-Step)
• How to Organise Highlights Strategically
• Highlight Cover Design Tips
• Content Strategy: What to Save vs What to Leave
• How Many Highlights Should You Have?
• Highlights for Business vs Personal Accounts
• Highlight Naming Best Practices
• How Highlights Affect Profile First Impressions
• Tips for Updating Highlights Regularly
• Conclusion

What Are Instagram Highlights and Why They Matter

Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours — that is by design. But Instagram Highlights give you a way to rescue your best Stories from that expiry and pin them permanently to your profile, directly below your bio. Each Highlight appears as a circular icon, similar to a Story bubble, and visitors can tap it to watch the content at any time.

For growth, Highlights matter more than most creators realise. When a new visitor lands on your profile, they have roughly three seconds to decide whether to follow you. Your grid shows your visual aesthetic, your bio explains who you are, and your Highlights act as a navigation menu — an always-on showcase of everything you offer. A well-organised set of Highlights can answer the questions a new visitor has before they even think to ask them: What does this account post? Is this person an expert? Do they sell products? Are they worth following?

Highlights are also one of the few places on Instagram where content compounds over time. A Story you posted six months ago about your process or product can still be generating profile views and follows today, simply because it sits in a Highlight where visitors keep discovering it.

How to Create an Instagram Highlight (Step-by-Step)

Creating a Highlight takes under a minute once you know where to look. Here is the full process:

1. Post a Story first. Highlights are built from existing Stories. If you want to create a Highlight from content you have not posted yet, post it as a Story first.
2. Go to your profile. Tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner of the app to reach your profile page.
3. Tap the plus icon. Below your bio and above your grid, you will see a row of circular icons. On the far left is a circle with a plus symbol labelled "New". Tap it.
4. Select Stories to include. Instagram displays your Story archive. Tap each Story you want to add to this Highlight. Selected Stories will show a blue tick. You can add multiple Stories at once.
5. Tap Next. You will be prompted to choose a cover image and give the Highlight a name.
6. Set a cover image. You can select a frame from one of the Stories you have added, or upload a custom cover from your camera roll. Custom covers are strongly recommended — see the cover design section below.
7. Name your Highlight. Keep it short (maximum 15 characters visible). Tap Add to confirm.

To add more Stories to an existing Highlight later, press and hold the Highlight icon on your profile and select Edit Highlight. You can also remove Stories from a Highlight the same way.

How to Organise Highlights Strategically

The order and content of your Highlights should reflect how a visitor moves through your profile. Think of them as chapters in your brand story. The most common and effective Highlight categories include:

• About / Start Here — An introduction to who you are, what you do, and who your content is for. This is the first Highlight most profile visitors will tap and is your strongest opportunity to convert a casual viewer into a follower.
• Products / Services — If you sell anything, this Highlight removes the friction of a visitor needing to find your link in bio. Showcase what you offer with clear visuals and pricing if appropriate.
• FAQs — Answers to the questions you get asked most often. This builds trust and saves you repeating yourself in DMs and comments every week.
• Tutorials / How-To — Step-by-step educational content that demonstrates your expertise. Tutorial Highlights are particularly powerful for service providers and educators because they show rather than tell.
• Reviews / Testimonials — Social proof is one of the most powerful conversion signals on Instagram. If you have received strong feedback from customers or followers, save it here.
• Behind the Scenes — The process behind your work, your workspace, your routine. Authenticity content builds connection and keeps followers invested in you as a person, not just in your output.
• Collaborations / Press — Any media mentions, brand partnerships, or collaborations that add credibility to your profile.
• Seasonal or Campaign-Specific — Temporary Highlights for launches, promotions, or events that you can archive or delete when the campaign ends.

Not every account needs all of these. Choose the categories that are most relevant to your niche and audience. The goal is to make it immediately obvious to a new visitor what kind of value your account provides.

Highlight Cover Design Tips

The default cover for a Highlight is a still frame taken from one of the Stories inside it. This rarely looks polished. Custom cover images are one of the fastest visual upgrades you can make to your profile.

Here is how to approach cover design effectively:

• Use a consistent colour palette. Your Highlight covers should match your brand colours. If someone visits your profile and sees a row of icons in the same two or three colours, it signals that your content is intentional and professionally presented.
• Use icons, not text. Highlight covers are small — roughly the size of a Story bubble. Text is often unreadable at that size. A simple icon or symbol that represents the category (a camera for Behind the Scenes, a star for Reviews, a question mark for FAQs) communicates instantly.
• Design at the correct dimensions. Instagram Highlights covers are displayed as a circle cropped from a 1080 x 1920 pixel image. Design your covers at that size and keep your icon centred in the middle third of the image to avoid cropping issues.
• Use Canva for fast, consistent results. Canva has free Instagram Highlight cover templates that make it straightforward to produce a full set of matching icons. You can set your brand colours, swap in different icons for each category, and export all covers in a single session.
• Use GramCrop to optimise your cover images. Before uploading your Highlight covers, run them through the GramCrop image tool to ensure they are correctly sized and compressed. Over-compressed or incorrectly sized covers will appear pixelated — which defeats the purpose of custom branding.
• Keep background styles consistent. Whether you prefer a solid colour background, a gradient, or a subtle texture, pick one style and apply it across all covers in a set. Mixing styles within the same Highlight row looks unfinished.

Content Strategy: What to Save to Highlights vs What to Leave in Stories

Not everything you post as a Story deserves to live in a Highlight. The filter you apply here affects the quality signal your profile sends to new visitors.

Save to Highlights if the Story:

• Answers a question your audience asks frequently
• Demonstrates your expertise or process in a way that remains relevant over time
• Introduces you or your brand to someone who has never seen your content before
• Contains social proof — reviews, testimonials, or results
• Promotes a product or service you still actively offer
• Has received strong engagement or lots of DM replies

Leave it in Stories (let it expire) if the Story:

• Is time-sensitive — a countdown, a sale that has ended, a live event that has passed
• Was a casual, in-the-moment update with no lasting relevance
• Features poor image or video quality that would reflect badly in a permanent location
• Is part of a trend or meme that will date quickly
• Contains information that may become inaccurate (prices, availability, dates)

The principle to apply is simple: your Highlights are a permanent shop window. Everything in them should be the version of your content you are happy for a first-time visitor to see today, a year from now.

How Many Highlights Should You Have?

There is no universally correct number, but there is a practical range. Most successful accounts maintain between four and eight Highlights. This is enough to cover the key categories without overwhelming a new visitor or pushing later Highlights off the visible row on most screens.

Instagram displays Highlights in chronological order of creation by default, with the most recently created Highlight appearing first (on the left). You can reorder them by deleting and recreating Highlights in the order you want — a workaround, but an effective one.

If you find yourself building more than eight Highlights, audit the existing ones first. Combine related categories where possible (for example, merge Tutorials and FAQs into a single Education Highlight) rather than adding indefinitely. A shorter, higher-quality row is more effective than a long row that makes visitors scroll horizontally to find the most relevant content.

Equally, avoid having fewer than three Highlights if your account is used for business or brand purposes. Too few Highlights signals either a new account or one that is not actively managed — neither creates confidence in a first-time visitor.

Using Highlights for Business vs Personal Accounts

The strategy differs meaningfully between account types.

For business accounts, Highlights serve as a mini-website. Prioritise Highlights that reduce friction in the purchase or enquiry journey: Products/Services, Reviews, FAQs, and a clear About section. If you run promotions, add a dedicated Offers or Deals Highlight that you refresh regularly. Business accounts should treat the Highlight row as a conversion tool, not just an archive.

For personal creator accounts, Highlights serve a different function — they build connection and demonstrate credibility. Prioritise Behind the Scenes, Tutorials, and a personal About Highlight that shows the person behind the content. Creators who use Highlights to give followers a sense of access and authenticity typically see stronger audience loyalty and higher engagement rates than those who treat Highlights purely as a content archive.

For hybrid accounts (creators who also sell products or services), the first two or three Highlights should serve the audience (education, behind the scenes) and the remaining ones should serve the business (products, reviews, FAQs). Lead with value, follow with conversion.

Highlight Naming Best Practices

Instagram caps Highlight names at 15 characters in the display. Names longer than that are truncated with an ellipsis, which looks sloppy and makes the name harder to read at a glance.

Practical naming rules:

• Keep it under 12 characters to be safe across all device sizes and screen resolutions.
• Use plain, descriptive words — About, Products, Reviews, FAQs, Tutorials. Visitors should understand the Highlight's content without tapping it.
• Capitalise consistently. Either capitalise all names (ABOUT, PRODUCTS) or title-case them (About, Products). Mixing styles (About, PRODUCTS, faqs) looks inconsistent.
• Avoid punctuation and special characters. They add visual noise and can display differently across devices.
• Match the name to the icon. If your cover icon is a camera, name the Highlight "BTS" or "Process", not "My Life". The icon and name should reinforce each other.

How Highlights Affect Profile First Impressions

Research on user behaviour consistently shows that profile visitors make a follow-or-leave decision within seconds. In that window, they are scanning for three things: does this account post content I want to see, does this person seem credible, and is this profile actively maintained?

Your Highlights contribute to all three signals. A well-designed Highlight row with consistent covers, clear naming, and relevant categories immediately signals that the account is intentional and professional. A row of default Story-frame covers with vague or truncated names signals the opposite — that the account owner has not thought carefully about their presence.

The practical implication: even if you have not yet optimised your grid or written a polished bio, spending two hours creating a clean set of Highlight covers and organising your best Stories into relevant categories will have a measurable impact on your follow conversion rate. It is one of the highest-return profile improvements available to any Instagram account at any stage. For a full breakdown of how to build the kind of profile that converts visitors into followers at scale, see the guide to getting famous on Instagram.

Tips for Updating Highlights Regularly

Highlights are permanent, but they should not be static. An account where the most recent Story in a Highlight is from two years ago signals that the account is not active — which erodes the trust a new visitor might otherwise feel.

Practical habits for keeping Highlights current:

• Review your Highlights quarterly. Set a calendar reminder every three months to go through each Highlight and remove outdated content — old pricing, past events, products you no longer offer.
• Add new Stories to Highlights on a rolling basis. When you post a Story that generates strong responses, add it to the relevant Highlight the same day while it is still in your active Stories feed.
• Refresh your About Highlight whenever your bio changes. If you update your bio to reflect a new focus, product, or achievement, update your About Highlight to match.
• Archive or delete Highlights for ended campaigns. A Highlight promoting a product launch or sale that ended six months ago actively misleads new visitors. Remove it or repurpose it.
• Check for broken visual quality. Older Stories saved to Highlights can occasionally appear lower quality than newer ones. If a Highlight contains Stories that look noticeably worse than your current content quality, replace them.

Conclusion

Instagram Highlights are one of the most underused profile features available to creators and brands. Done well, they function as a permanent, always-visible portfolio that works on your behalf every time a new visitor lands on your profile. Done poorly — or not at all — they represent a missed opportunity to convert curious visitors into committed followers.

The strategy is straightforward: create Highlights for the categories your audience genuinely cares about, design covers that match your brand, keep the names clear and short, and update the content regularly. The effort involved in setting this up properly is a few hours — and the benefit compounds every day your profile is live.

If you are ready to design your Highlight covers, use the GramCrop image tool to crop and compress your cover images to the correct Instagram dimensions before uploading. It takes seconds and ensures your covers will look sharp on every device.

For more Instagram growth strategies, see How to Grow Instagram Organically in 2025 and The Best Time to Post on Instagram.