The Best 5+ Social Media Sharing WordPress Plugins
As we are sure you are well aware, basically every WordPress website has at least a couple of social media sharing buttons lying somewhere at the bottom (or perhaps the top, or the side) of the page. That is because no website can survive without social media in this day and age. It’s a simple truth we all have to get accustomed to. If you have a WordPress website but still haven’t figured out how to share your content (rudimentary methods like copy-pasting the links manually don’t count!), you’re in a lot of trouble. Fortunately, besides practical social icons widgets and amazing social media WordPress themes there also are some amazing plugins you can turn to. Here is our selection of the best social media sharing WordPress plugins on the market:
Qi Addons for Elementor is an amazing collection of Elementor widgets you can use to supercharge your Elementor experience and make creating web pages even faster and easier. Offering more than a hundred custom widgets across the free and the premium version, this plugin will let you create and deploy elements that include data tables, WooCommerce elements, FAQs, and, of course, different kinds of buttons. The one we’re interested in the most is the Social Share Buttons, a premium widget that lets you choose among several different social media sharing button styles.
Whether you want to use recognizable icons to let people know they can share your content, or you want to handle it with text, or even a single icon that will produce a sharing menu on hover, Qi Addons for Elementor will allow you to do it. Adding the widget shouldn’t be a problem even for people who aren’t too familiar with Elementor and styling it shouldn’t take up too much of your time, even though you’ll be able to style it to the finest of detail. If you want a tried and tested solution for a WordPress social media sharing plugin, Qi Addons for Elementor with its Social Share Buttons widget is a solid choice.
Social Warfare is a very popular social media sharing plugin for WordPress that comes in both free and paid versions. While the free version does give you all the basic functionalities required for successful social sharing, we have to be completely fair and say that it is in the premium version that this plugin really shines.
What you get with the free version is support for all major social networks, nicely designed social buttons, decent choice of button placement options (including floating buttons) and share counts.
The premium version, on the other hand, offers some pretty amazing and definitely handy features. We particularly like the Pinterest-specific images option. As you probably know, Pinterest prefers tall images, ideally in 2:3 ratio. What Social Warfare does, it asks you to pick a specific image that will be used on Pinterest alone, fitting its visual standards, instead of just throwing the designated social sharing image that won’t really look good on Pinterest.
Another amazing feature is the Minimum Social Proof option. You know how sites have the little counter displaying the number of shares? That’s a terrific feature for popular websites with tons of shares. But if you are only just starting and your shares are still in the one or two-digit numbers, you don’t really want that to show, do you? With Social Warfare, you can set the minimum share count that has to be met before it is displayed. While we’re at sharing, this plugin also helps you recover your old shares after moving to a new domain.
On top of that, you get extremely wide customization options, analytics and event tracking to gain valuable insight into how your social sharing is helping your traffic. Finally, you can enable automatic link shortening thanks to the Bitly integration.
Grow by Mediavine is an amazing social media WP plugin for both WordPress beginners and experts since it’s one of the easiest to use social sharing plugins on the market. With it, anyone can add highly customizable social share buttons that will surely upgrade a user’s experience. In other words, thanks to this functionality, your customers can share your content via social media channels and boost your traffic. Grow by Mediavine comes with four of the biggest social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Linkedin. The best part is you can customize social share button for each platform so it perfectly fits your branding and website’s design. Also, you can share your social sharing buttons before and after the post content. On top of this, your social share buttons can follow your content as you scroll in a form of a floating sidebar.
Are you ready for engagement growth? ShareThis Share Buttons plugin is ready to assist you! This amazing tool allows you to embed share buttons on your site within minutes. Depending on your branding and visual style, you can customize social share buttons to meet your needs and blend in with your website design. Choose different colors, labels, or logo dimensions. On top of this, buttons are mobile optimized which means your visitors will be able to share your content from any device type. This plugin covers all of the most popular social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, and many more. Apart from the most famous social platforms in the western world, this plugin is a great choice if you operate in Russia or China as it supports the biggest social networks in the eastern market. Let’s just mention Baidu, Douban, WeChat, Odnoklassniki, etc. Finally, the plugin allows you to choose between inline share buttons and sticky share buttons, all depending on your needs.
Ultimate Blocks is a very powerful Gutenberg blocks plugin with over 40,000 active users. The plugin features 18 awesome Gutenberg blocks that can take your content to the next level.
One such block featured in this plugin is the Social Share Buttons block that lets you insert sharing buttons anywhere in your content.
The block comes with a lot of customization options allowing you to style it however you want.
You can change the share button sizes, change the button shape, select which platforms you want to display, and include captions along with the buttons.
Besides that, Ultimate Blocks also lets you change the color of the share buttons to match your brand’s visual identity.
The share buttons are fully responsive so that they look great on devices of all screen sizes.
The best part about using this plugin is that it’s Gutenberg-based and is completely free.
This means you won’t have to insert share buttons using any code and you won’t have to spend any money just to display social sharing buttons on your website.
This is a social media sharing plugin that does things a bit differently, at least when it comes to the style. In fact, the unique button styles are what makes this plugin stand out among so many others in the same niche. That, and the fact that it is free. Well, not 100% free, as there are some add-ons that you will need to pay a few bucks for, if you want, but most of its best functionalities are free.
Sassy Social Share allows for a lot of customization, even with buttons. You can pick between three button styles: rounded, square or rectangle, but that’s not where your options end. Button positioning is also highly customizable. You can opt for fixed buttons at the parts of the page you prefer them to be. Alternatively, you can use sticky floating buttons that follow as you scroll the page, plus there are shortcode and widget options available as well. We also like the fact you can add social buttons to specific post types, or even individual pieces of content. This is very useful, because social sharing should always be thought out and targeted.
This plugin was developed with great attention to mobile. Everything is responsive, and there is an option of enabling or disabling horizontal and vertical buttons for mobile devices.
As for share counts, they are, of course, supported. The user has the choice between total or individual counts, as well as some other options. In addition, thanks to the custom share count cache, you can be sure you’ll get the accurate counts, with no performance drags.
Sassy Social Share supports over 100 social media and bookmarking services (we didn’t even realize there were so many of them!). In addition to sharing buttons, you also get cute little Follow buttons that take visitors directly to your social media profiles.
Finally, Sassy Social Share has terrific customer support, working 24/7 to help you out with your installation, setup and customizing issues.
Here’s a social media sharing WordPress plugin that seems to be doing everything right, at least judging from the fact that, with 500,000+ websites using it, it is the single most popular WP plugin of this kind. To be fair, a lot of that popularity probably stems from the fact it is 100% free, but that’s far from being the only virtue this plugin has.
Despite its rich functionalities, AddToAny is a very light plugin. In fact, it will likely take a far lesser toll on your website performance than any other social sharing plugin on the market. This is something we feel is very important, since you’re probably already using a lot of other plugins and it’s likely slowing your site down a bit.
AddToAny is often dubbed “the universal sharing platform” due to a unique feature: it has a “+” button that acts as a universal button, allowing users to pick the network (or networks) they want to share content to. Of course, the plugin also features a wide selection of dedicated sharing icons for individual social networking platforms. What all this means is that, with AddToAny, you get more than 100 sharing options, handily combined in one sturdy yet intuitive interface.
As for display options, you can place your icons before or after content, in horizontal and/or vertical bars. You can also arrange them manually using shortcodes and widgets, as well as template tags. Of course, floating buttons are available as well, and all this comes with 100% responsive design. Additionally, the SVG icons are pixel-perfect and lightweight. Thanks to this, both mobile and desktop visitors will be able to share your content with great ease.
Finally, AddToAny supports share counts and comes with Google Analytics integration and Google AMP support.
Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar is another great social media sharing plugin. When you want to allow your customers to share your content via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc – this plugin will be your helping hand. Thanks to this tool, your users can share every element from your website, including posts, pages and product pages across the network. All you need to do is to install it with a few clicks and start upgrading your content by making it more interactive and user-friendly. What we also like about this plugin is its large collection of customization features that allow you to adjust your social buttons. Finally, if you want to stand out and offer an innovative approach, position your social share buttons in a floating sidebar.
As its name suggests, MashShare is a plugin that draws a lot of styling inspiration from the digital media titan, Mashable. Although the two are not actually connected, they do have a lot in common in terms of style and solutions. In fact, if you choose this social media sharing WordPress plugin, your social sharing buttons will bear a remarkable resemblance to those seen on Mashable.
But enough about that – let’s see what this plugin packs under the hood. First of all, there are two versions of MashShare: free and paid. With free version, you only get to share your content on two social media platforms (albeit the biggest ones) – Facebook and Twitter. If you need more than that, you’ll have to sign up for the premium version. In that case, you’ll get sharing options for Pinterest, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn and WhatsApp, as well as several smaller networks.
Just like Mashable, MashShare displays your overall share count. The recovery option for shares after moving to HTTPS is available as well. There is an interesting feature here that we don’t see around a lot, if at all, and that is the virtual (=false) share count. Yes, you read that right. If you want, you can display a completely fake number as your share count, to impress your visitors. While this is definitely a questionable thing to do in terms of ethics, we are certain there are a lot of people out there who will be more than thrilled to make use of this feature. Virtual share count works by multiplying the number of characters in your post title to keep the numbers random.
Available add-ons for MashShare include select and share (to share specific parts of content, as on Medium), page views count (like on Mashable), more button placement options, click to tweet feature, as well as Google Analytics event tracking.
Honorable Mentions
Yoast SEO
We are sure you already know about Yoast SEO and we sure do hope you’re using it. This amazing plugin is essential in terms of search engine optimization for everyone who is less than SEO-proficient. It comes with tons of amazing functionalities that optimize the way search engines notice and index your pages, but did you know it can also dub as one of the best social media sharing plugins? Yes, Yoast SEO does have some (basic) sharing functionalities, namely for Twitter and Facebook. You can pick the image you want to use for each of these popular networks, as well as title and description. If this fits your social sharing needs, then Yoast SEO is the ideal choice for you, because it takes care of two of your website’s urgent needs.
Conclusion
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with such a wide selection of great social media sharing WordPress plugins on the market. We tried to narrow the choice down for you, but the final decision is going to have to be your call, and your call alone. Perhaps you need a plugin with plenty of supported networks, or you need a very light and simple one, or maybe a plugin that doesn’t cost a dime. If you’re having a hard time deciding, try to think of what your most urgent social sharing needs are, what you can and can’t do without and what are some of the definitive deal breakers for you, and then revisit this article. In the end, let’s add one important note: having likes on social media is great, but don’t forget to collect them on your site as well. Use professional like button plugins to do this with no effort. Good luck!
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
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