Definition: Story Highlights are collections of past Instagram Stories saved to your profile, where they stay visible after the usual 24 hours until you remove them.
Also called: Instagram Highlights, highlights
Updated October 11, 2026
Per Instagram’s help centre, photos and videos you share to your story disappear from Feed, your profile and Direct after 24 hours, unless you add them to a highlight. Highlights sit in a row of circles under your bio, each with a name and a cover image, and each one plays like a story when tapped.
Highlights draw on your story archive, so keep story archiving switched on. Instagram notes that deleting a story from your archive also removes it from your highlights. Per Instagram’s launch announcement, you can have as many highlights as you like.
Think of highlights as the menu of your profile. A new visitor sees them before your grid, so name each one for what a visitor wants to find, keep the names short, and use matching covers so the row reads as one set.
Old highlights with past prices, sold-out products or last year’s events make an account look neglected. Review them when anything in your business changes, and remove individual stories that are out of date rather than the whole highlight.
A hair salon keeps five highlights: “Book”, “Prices”, “Colour”, “Reviews” and “Team”. Each time a client agrees to be featured, the salon shares the result as a story and adds it to “Colour”, so the work stays on the profile long after the story expires.
Stories are full-screen, vertical photos and videos that appear at the top of the app and disappear after 24 hours, unless the account saves them to a profile Highlight.
A pinned post is a post you fix to the top of your profile or page so it stays above your newer posts and is the first thing visitors see.
“Link in bio” is a phrase used in a post to send people to the clickable link on the account’s profile, used on apps such as Instagram and TikTok where the profile is the main place a link can go.
Evergreen content is content that stays relevant and useful for months or years after it is published, because it does not depend on news, trends or dates.
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