You reached this page because you have purchased or are considering purchasing our MSN Pro plugin. This plugin was developed to help WordPress site owners create MSN Start galleries easier right from inside of their editor. You can now use our plugin to push articles to your MSN Start account!
Important – you need to be using the block editor for this process. This will NOT work on classic editor.
What is MSN Start?
In order to use this plugin, you need an active MSN Start account. You have to be approved for these. If you haven’t been approved, you need to submit your site here – https://www.msn.com/en-us/partnerhub/
MSN Start is a way for you to share your content on the MSN platform. While you can share articles, where most people are getting traffic are through slideshows/galleries.
These typically consist of 10+ slides that are images with a short description and a link.
These typically perform the best on MSN Start and they can easily be created in WordPress with our MSN Pro plugin.
Installing MSN Pro Plugin
To properly configure the MSN Pro plugin, there are a few steps. We will walk through each one here.
- Step 8 – Check your MSN feed. You can click on the box and it will open in a new window. If you don’t see code like below, then you need to follow these steps:
Go to your Settings > Permalinks page in your WordPress dashboard. Click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Do not change any settings. This forces the server to create feed.
Go back to the MSN feed box on the MSN Pro Settings page. Click it and it should look similar to below (this is not a full screenshot).
Using our MSN Pro Plugin
Once the plugin is installed and configured, we will provide you with a new feed URL just for MSN. You will need to create one post to be able to test it with MSN.
MSN checks the feed every 15 minutes, so new slideshows will be pulled in automatically after you post them.
The new category you created can also be set to noindex in Yoast or RankMath so Google isn’t checking on the category archive itself. You don’t want to link to this archive in general unless you think your audience will find it valuable. Setting it to Noindex is not required.
A few examples of simple category names are:
- Slideshows
- Roundups
- Galleries
- Favorites
- Trending
- Best Of
To make this process easier once you start building your new post, we created a simple block pattern that you can use to make sure you follow the layout. It’s important you follow the layout as it’s very specific on how your posts are pushed to MSN and they require specific items.
Here is a quick video on how to insert the block pattern
When you are in the post editor, hit the + sign and then hit “browse all” to open the block menu. Click on Patterns, then click on MSN for your site name. Use the first one as it has 10 already set. There is one more pattern as just one block if you want that which you can then just duplicate.
MSN Pro Settings Page
The settings page has several options on it. It is where you select the default category for the gallery posts along with default options for what happen to your gallery posts.
There is a beta feature for appending tracking code onto your links that direct back to your domain. This is not to be used unless you want to test it and provide feedback. This will append Google analytics tracking onto any links that are pointing back to your site.
There are now two different feed options for you. Gallery and Article. The article feed would just send your normal articles over to MSN. The Gallery feed is specific just for galleries and require the custom post layout.
MSN Pro Plugin Video
New Post Editor Settings
In the 2.3.5.4 (and up) version of our plugin, you now have options in your post editor to manage what goes into your feeds. This is for both galleries and articles.
The “Show in MSN feed” checkbox is REQUIRED now or the post will not show up in the feed. Please check this box if you want to push the post over to MSN.
You can now control what posts go into the feeds by using the MSN Pro Settings box in the post editor.
MSN Post: The checkbox to include the post in the feed can be used (if not using the gallery category option) for both galleries and articles. Once you check this box and hit publish or update, the post will go into the respective feed.
Did You Use AI?: MSN wants to know if you use AI on the post. If you do, you should toggle this to Yes. It default to No.
Post Format: You will pick the correct option for the post. It is either a slideshow or article. If you choose article, the custom slide options will disappear.
First Slide Title: This is if you want to create a custom first slide title other than using the post title
First Slide Custom Image: This is available if you want to use a different image than the featured image you set for the post. Mainly used if you use different image layouts for your posts (landscape vs portrait)
First Slide Image Caption: This is to be used if you set a featured image or custom image and it needs to have a caption that is not your site name. By default, our plugin sets the first image caption as your site name. So if you use a stock image, then you can add the caption here.
MSN Category: These are the default MSN categories so you can select which one it needs to go into. We recommend only choosing one category, though you can choose multiple. This does not affect your site categories, only what is sent to MSN.
MSN Gallery Post Layout
The layout required for this plugin to work is specific. This is because it’s required by MSN.
The first intro paragraph you put in there before the first H2 heading will be your first MSN slide. This uses your featured image you set for your post. Every H2 heading after will be an additional slide. Do not duplicate your featured image in the rest of the slides. MSN can reject the entire gallery/slideshow.
Each “slide” consists of:
- Heading – Required to be a H2 heading and it will be the title of the slide shown on MSN.
- Image (horizontal works best like 1200 x 800)
- Image Caption – you should be giving credit to the site where you got it from (even if your own)
- Post Description – this consists of about 2-3 sentences to describe the post
- Link – this is how you get traffic back to your site and others in the roundups. Link to your posts related to that video/topic or the site where you got the post. A link is not required.
Basically a slide is the information between the H2 heading and the next H2 heading. Consider each Heading and what comes before the next heading as one slide. It’s recommended to have at least 10 of these slides on the post.
An example of what is shown in MSN can be seen here. The site that created this is currently using our plugin.
Add Feed to MSN Start Account
Once you publish one post, your feed will be active. It’s always found in the MSN Pro Settings page on your WordPress dashboard
There are two feeds now. One for your gallery posts and one for your article posts. You will need to submit each feed separately.
If you don’t see it when going to that URL, make sure to go to your Settings > Permalinks and just click “Save Changes” to clear the permalink cache. This will not affect your site.
Log into your MSN Start Hub, go to Content Management, then Feeds, and hit Add Feeds
Important – Make sure you are in your brand account and not a personal account or the Content Management option will not show.
For Gallery Posts
Then fill out the document with a feed name (this is your own internal name), the feed URL. Select RSS, then Gallery. Answer the other questions and then hit “Start Validation”
*IMPORTANT – Make sure the Type is set to Gallery for the Gallery/Slideshow posts
For Article Posts
Follow the same steps above, but when adding a new feed, you will select “Article” as the type.
It should validate in a few minutes and once validated, hit “Add feed.” Ignore the percentage results if it says “Ready to add feed”. MSN will check it every 15 minutes for new posts.
If you have another feed in there for your site, make sure you hit the “suspend” option as this will pick up any posts you publish and pull them into MSN as articles. You don’t want this to run anymore automatically. You will want to set up the article feed option if you want to push your articles into MSN.
Using the MSN Start Plugin (from Microsoft)
6/18 Update – With our latest release (2.3.5.4) you do not need to use the Microsoft Start plugin. You can push articles to your MSN account with our plugin. So if you don’t want the MSN Start plugin, you can deactivate it.
Many publishers have the MSN Start Plugin which is often set to push your posts out automatically. This can be turned off (and should be) in the Partner Hub settings in the plugin. You go to MSN Start Partner Hub in your WordPress dashboard, then Settings, then Content. Toggle off the “Automatically publish new posts to Microsoft” option and that will stop any content automatically pushing there. You can still use the Start plugin and manually pick which posts are pushed as an article.
If you don’t turn this off, it will automatically push any posts you publish in as articles. So it’s important to turn off this automatic posting option.
FAQ and Tips
Yes, this plugin is not associated with our plugin. You currently do not have to use it anymore since we have an article option in our plugin. If you want to keep MSN Start, you do want to make sure you disable any automatic posting as it will take your new gallery post and push it in as an article.
Links in your headings is not advised as it confuses MSN’s system and the headings won’t show properly. Don’t add links in your headings
This isn’t advised. it can cause formatting issues. Don’t add links or line breaks in your image captions. Stick with simple “Image Credit: Site Name” as the general format
While it can be as long as you want, the intro paragraph in your post will become the first slide in your MSN gallery slideshow. Keep it simple and concise, but use it to help keep people scrolling through the rest of the slides
Once the plugin is active, both feed URLs will be in the MSN Pro Settings page. There is one for galleries and one for articles.
No, our plugin is to allow you to publish new posts with a specific format built just for MSN. They require specific items and that is hard to achieve with old post formats. Please create a new post specifically in the format outlined in this guide.
Our add-on can only publish as a gallery (once you have added the feed into your account). Check your feeds to make sure you don’t have more than one. if you do, suspend those other feeds. Also check to make sure you are not setting the MSN Start plugin to publish when you are creating the post. it will push the post in as an article.
This is due to the same issue as above. You either have another feed in your account that is pulling off your main RSS feed or you have set your MSN Start Plugin to publish the post automatically after publish. Those should be disabled.
Sometimes the MSN Start plugin does not follow your auto-disable and you have to check when you are editing the post. This is a bug in MSN Start (which isn’t our plugin). Make sure to toggle off the option to publish to MSN (click the MSN icon next to the publish button)
No, our plugin does not give you the ability to bulk publish posts to MSN. It’s based on you publishing posts on your WordPress site in a specific format. If you bulk publish, they will show in the feed, but our plugin does not provide you with tools to bulk publish posts.
Yes, this is possible. All you need to do is edit the post on your WordPress site and hit update. This will update our feed and MSN should pick it up the next time it checks the feed.
Technically, yes. MSN is particular about republishing content. It needs to be older than 30 days on their platform. It’s best to delete it on your MSN partner hub, then you can republish the post in WordPress like you normally would. It will pull back into MSN as new.
At this time, no. This will cause formatting issues and the feed will not work. We are working on some edits to allow this for better ad placement on the posts within your site.
Yes, you can check the plugin changelog at any time by going to the MSN Plugin changelog page.