The cards above are every guide on this site, newest first. This page is the map rather than the summary: what the four categories are for, what these guides promise and refuse to promise, what they deliberately leave out, and which one to open first depending on the problem that brought you here.
How the library is organised
Four categories, each answering a different shape of question. The distinction is less about topic than about what you are trying to do at the moment you arrive. The chips at the top of this page filter the cards to any one of them; each also sits under a longer pillar guide that carries the full background.
| Category | The question it answers | Where the long version lives |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics | What does this number mean, and is it good? | The Instagram analytics guide |
| Instagram Growth | How long will this take, and what is it worth? | The creator pricing guide |
| Content Creation | Why does my file look wrong after I post it? | The sizes and aspect ratios guide |
| Instagram Help | Something broke, or something looks like a scam. | The safety and scams guide |
Analytics is definitional work: what Instagram measures, where each figure sits, and why a rate survives follower growth when a count does not. Instagram Growth is arithmetic — engagement rates, sponsored-post pricing, follower projections. Content Creation is the craft layer, mostly a story about what happens to a file between your export and someone else’s screen. Instagram Help is the troubleshooting shelf, including the questions whose honest answer is no, that is not possible.
The editorial stance
Three commitments run through every guide here, and they are worth stating plainly because a lot of Instagram writing does not make them.
- Every number is one you can re-derive. Where a figure comes from a calculator on this site, that calculator shows its working — the tier baseline it used, the multiplier it applied, and the arithmetic in between. Nothing here asks you to accept a number because it appeared in a chart.
- Every tool runs in your browser. The calculators and image tools work on your own device. None asks for an Instagram login, and none can see your account. A tool that cannot see your data also cannot leak it — or pretend to know things it does not.
- Unconfirmed claims are labelled as unconfirmed. Instagram publishes very little about how content is ranked, distributed or compressed. Where a guide describes behaviour that creators consistently observe but Meta has never documented, it says so in those words.
The single most misread thing on this site
Almost everything written online about “the Instagram algorithm” is inference. Compression, cropping, ranking and reach behaviour are observed from the outside — people post things, watch what happens, and generalise. Some of those generalisations are well supported; some are folklore repeated until it began to sound like documentation. Treat any confident sentence beginning “the algorithm rewards” as a hypothesis someone formed from a sample you cannot inspect.
What these guides deliberately leave out
There is a whole genre of Instagram advice this site will not write, and the reasons are not squeamishness.
- Buying followers or likes. Not on ethical grounds alone — on arithmetic ones. Engagement rate is a fraction, and purchased followers land in the denominator without ever touching the numerator. The number brands check gets worse the more you buy.
- Engagement pods, follow-unfollow, DM bots and automation. These manufacture interaction from people who are not your audience, which pollutes exactly the signals you would later want to read.
- Anything that needs your password. If a tool needs your Instagram credentials to work, the thing it is really collecting is your credentials.
- Growth hacking framed as a shortcut. Put your real monthly gain into the follower growth calculator and the honest curve is flatter and longer than the one people expect. A guide that pretends otherwise is setting you up to conclude you are failing.
- Hashtag lore. No “banned hashtag list”, no secret sets, no post-count screenshots presented as live data. What hashtags and captions still do — and what they never did — is covered in the captions, bios and hashtags guide.
Benchmarks quoted anywhere on this site are either published industry ranges or transparent models built in the open, with the model printed alongside the result. They are never live Instagram data, because live Instagram data is not available to anyone outside Meta.
Where to start
You are pricing your first brand deal
Start with the creator pricing guide above, which explains why a price is built from a per-follower base rate and a stack of multipliers rather than picked out of the air. Then run your own figures through the influencer rate calculator, which prints the full derivation — base rate, engagement multiplier, deliverable multiplier, usage rights, exclusivity, retainer discount — so you can defend every line in an email. You will need an engagement rate first, and the engagement rate calculator builds one from a handful of recent posts.
Your reach just dropped
Read the analytics guide before you change anything about how you post. Most reported reach drops turn out to be one of three things: a comparison against a count rather than a rate, a comparison against somebody else’s published benchmark rather than your own previous month, or a real change that a single month of data cannot yet distinguish from ordinary variance.
Your images keep getting cropped
Open the sizes and aspect ratios guide from the table above for the feed’s accepted window and what happens to a file that sits outside it. Then drop the offending export into the image and video size checker, which reports how many pixels the crop removes and from which edge, and re-cuts the file to spec around a focal point you choose.