Instagram still has no way to drag your highlights into the order you want, and in a July 2026 Q&A someone asked Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s Head, why. He didn’t defend the gap. He agreed it’s “actually definitely a good idea” and said he’d raise it with the team, which is the closest thing to a commitment the request has ever gotten. Until something ships, here’s how to change the order of highlights on Instagram using the mechanic that already exists.
How the order is decided today
Highlights aren’t in a fixed arrangement and they aren’t alphabetical. Instagram sorts them by most recently updated, newest first, running left to right across your profile. The highlight you touched most recently sits at the far left, right under your bio.
One detail makes the whole workaround possible: only adding counts as an update. Removing a story from a highlight doesn’t move it. So the position is controlled entirely by when you last added something.
The reorder workaround, step by step
Work backwards. The last highlight you update ends up leftmost, so you update in reverse of the order you want.
- Decide your final left-to-right order and write it down.
- Start with the highlight you want to appear last on the right.
- Open your story archive and add any story to that highlight. It jumps to the front.
- Remove that story straight away. The highlight keeps its new position.
- Repeat for each remaining highlight, moving right to left through your list.
- Finish with the highlight you want first. It’ll be sitting at the far left.
If you don’t have archived stories to reuse, post a plain story, add it, then remove it. Editing a highlight covers adding and removing stories and renaming covers if you want to tidy them while you’re in there.
Who this actually matters for
Service businesses, mostly. If your highlights are Pricing, FAQ, Testimonials, Booking and Behind the Scenes, the order is a conversion decision, not a design one. The first two highlights get most of the taps, so whatever answers a new visitor’s first question belongs there.
It matters for seasonal work too. A studio running a summer intake wants Enrollment leftmost in May and Testimonials leftmost in November, and that swap takes about ninety seconds with the method above.
For accounts where highlights are mostly archival, it’s cosmetic and not worth the effort.
What it replaces
Right now it replaces nothing, because there’s no native alternative. That’s the honest framing. If manual reordering does ship, it replaces a fiddly six-step ritual with a long press and a drag, and the main change is that highlight order becomes something teams revisit quarterly instead of never.
It joins a short list of requests Mosseri acknowledged in the same session without promising, alongside custom cover photos for carousels and search inside your saved posts.
Doing it as a team
The practical tip: make highlight order a scheduled review rather than a thing someone notices during a redesign. Once a quarter, open the profile as a stranger would and ask whether the first three highlights answer the first three questions a new follower has. That kind of profile housekeeping sits naturally alongside your monthly content plan rather than in someone’s head.
FAQ
Can you drag to reorder Instagram highlights? No. There’s no manual drag-and-drop for highlights. Order is automatic, based on which one you updated most recently.
How do I move a highlight to the front? Add a story to it. Adding any story pushes that highlight to the leftmost position. You can remove the story afterwards and it stays put.
Does removing a story from a highlight change its position? No. Only adding counts as an update, which is exactly why the add-then-remove workaround works.
Is Instagram adding manual highlight reordering? Unconfirmed. Mosseri called it a good idea in July 2026 and said he’d talk to the team. Nothing has been announced.
