‘Too many choices are sometimes just as difficult as too little choices.
If you have recently set up a WordPress website or a blog, the thought of including social media share buttons on your WordPress site will leave you in a quandary. Choosing the right plugin is always a challenging task.
You are not alone! Every WordPress website owner goes through this, and so did I. I have used WordPress as my preferred CMS for 12 years now. Not just for my blogs or websites but hundreds of clients. As a result, I have tested hundreds of plugins, free and premium. Some worked the way I needed, some had wide rooms for improvements, while others only left me frustrated. But never mind, if you are looking for an efficient social sharing plugin for your WordPress blog, I am going to make it easier for you.
Here is a list of some of the best WordPress social sharing plugins which I have used myself on different websites. Hope it helps you make your decision easier.
Here you go –
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Social Snap
Social Snap is a relative newcomer in the social media sharing plugins for WordPress. But it still tops that chart for my personal favourites.
There are reasons for it.
It comes packed with a well-designed interface, great-looking share buttons with a good number of options for their visual appearances.
Apart from the basic sharing functionality, Social Snap lets you access a number of features such as Click to Tweet boxes that helps you quickly make any sentence or quote from your blog post shareable. Social media auto-poster automatically shares your latest posts to your social media profiles, while Boost old posts feature re-shares your older contents to attract a new pool of audiences.
Social login feature allows visitors to log in to your site via social networks. And, Device targeting lets you choose separate settings for each device. It distinguishes between different icons to be displayed on either desktop or only on a mobile device.
Social Snap does have a limited free version. However, most features are exclusive to paid versions. The paid version lets you include buttons for 30+ social networks in a variety of spots on your website. You also get unique options such as “share hub” or “sticky bar” that are beyond classic placement options like inline buttons and a floating sidebar. Social Snap also lets you choose between various button shapes, sizes, and colours. It supports both total and individual share counts. Social Snap lets you set minimum share counts and recover old share counts if you switch domain or move to HTTPS from http or vice-versa.
It also comes with Social Media Follower widget which allows you to boost your social media follower counts and show them beautifully on your website.
Best of all, it’s a lightweight plugin that does not impact your website page speed much. In my experience, it’s the fastest social media sharing button plugin for WordPress.
The existing social media sharing button plugin on this website is Social Snap only, and that’s the premium version.
Summing features of the plugin:
- Supports all popular social networks, 30+ different social networks to choose from
- Add buttons in different locations including floating sidebars
- Option to choose when to display share counts with a threshold of counts in place
- An elegant back-end interface that is easy to understand
- Social Sharing Analytics and option to integrate event clicks to Google Analytics
- Shortcodes and widgets
- Share count threshold
- Share count recovery
- Individual and Combined Follower Counts
- Monitor shares, likes and followers
- Above all, really nice and professional-looking social sharing buttons
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Monarch
Monarch comes from the house of Elegant Themes. You might already have come across their hot-selling Divi theme.
Monarch helps you display social share buttons from over 35 different networks in 5 different locations namely, Above/below post content, Floating sidebar, Automatic popup, Automatic fly-in and Over images or videos.
You can choose how you want to trigger your social share buttons for popups and fly-ins. You can set a threshold for a certain number of shares which once reached the actual share counts will show up with buttons. Yes, very helpful when you do not want to discourage your readers by showing low share counts. Another very useful feature allows you to use social share buttons after someone leaves a comment on your blog.
I have tested Monarch several times. A few years ago what I didn’t like about this plugin was that it made the website slower. But now the team has improved a lot of the speed, it opens just fine now without impacting your website speed much.
Main features of the plugin:
- Supports all popular social networks, 35 different social networks to choose from
- Add buttons in five different locations including floating sidebars
- Option to choose when to display share counts with a threshold of counts in place
- An elegant back-end interface that is easy to understand
- Six different pop-ups and fly-ins automated triggers
- Shortcodes and widgets
- Share count threshold
- Follower Counts
- Monitor shares, likes and followers
- Above all, really cool buttons
Price: $89/year
(With access to all their themes and plugins for unlimited websites) What else can you ask for?
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Social Warfare
Before Social Snap, it was the plugin I used on most of my websites.
Loved the name when I heard it for the first time and could not help putting it to test. I have used it on several different websites. A few months ago they changed the membership thing which required one to use an additional plugin to activate premium version, and I didn’t like that. Now, it’s integrated into one plugin only. So you are looking to use it for the first time, it’s a great plugin.
It’s definitely not just another plugin, it literally goes very close to what it promises. Besides the common social sharing features, Social Warfare does an impressive job at speed.
Like other popular WordPress social media plugin, Social Warfare comes in both free and premium versions. While the free version offers a good number of features for lightweight social share buttons, the premium version offers more prominent features.
Apart from some features that stand out, Social Warefare can also handle the basics of WordPress share buttons like supporting all big social networks and giving multiple placement options. It also includes floating share button and provides Share counts. Some of the prominent features are-
It also lets you choose Pinterest-specific images for your post. Since portrait images usually do better on Pinterest unlike many social networks, Social Warfare allows you to add a special image that only shows up when your article is shared on Pinterest.
Main features of the plugin:
- All popular social networks are supported
- Beautiful themes to choose from
- Share count threshold
- Share count recovery
- Lets you display total and individual share counts for the post
- Display share counts only the count threshold is crossed
- Show floating side share buttons
- Click to Tweet boxes to be used anywhere in the content
- Pinterest specific images and description
- UTM tracking codes supported
- Features support for mobiles and smartphones
Price: $ 24/year for one website
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Ultimate Social Deux
What I liked the most about this plugin is it’s really clean and customization styles. And yes, it does not slow your website at all.
Main features of the plugin:
- Completely responsive interface for sharing buttons
- Followers counters
- You can use default/in-built share buttons as well
- Shortcodes, show button anywhere
- Integrates with e-commerce plugins as well
- All major social networks supported
- Placements at multiple locations of the page
- Control where to show button and where not to
Price: $14 (no monthly/yearly fee)
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Easy Social Metric Pro
If you would like to monitor your social media campaigns for their individual performance in terms of extending your blog’s reach, this is the plugin you need. This plugin does this job perfectly for you. It enables you to analyse different platforms very easily. You can see which social media network is generating more shares for you and which are the ones you need to focus more on.
Main features of the plugin:
- All popular social networks supported
- Update manually and re-scan your content for share counts
- Monitor social shares based on a particular time
- Easy to find your most shared posts
- Monitor performance across different social media networks.
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Easy Social Share Buttons
Maintaining a 4.66-star rating out of 5 on over 24,000 sales, Easy Social Share Buttons offer long features lists depending on your specific needs. The fact that plenty of people like its depth of functionality made me include it in the list. Easy Social Share Buttons support more than 50 social networks with more than 28 different positions and 52+ pre-made templates. Along with that it also delivers 25+ animations. How’s that for an intro and we are just getting started.
There’s a whole bunch of advanced features like Customizing Tweets, Open Graph data etc. It also lets you avoid negative social proof through Minimum share counts. Easy Social Share Buttons also offers After share actions that display a custom message after a user has shared your content. Analytics and A/B testing gives you detailed analytics for your buttons’ performance(s) and runs A/B tests to boost your shares while also displaying a list of your most popular posts by social shares.
Share count recovery is another very useful tool that recovers your share counts lost during navigation to HTTPS or changing of domains. Easy Social Share Buttons is not restricted to the features mentioned above but rather moving into areas beyond strictly social share buttons:
- Email opt-ins: It is a built-in subscribe form module that helps you display an ‘email opt-in’ with your share buttons.
- Live chat: It displays a live chat button for Facebook Messenger or Skype Live Chat.
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MashShare
If you have a thing for Mashable-style social sharing buttons, then it’s already a pretty good reason to choose this plugin. MashShare basically helps you add a specific type of social share buttons to your WordPress site. Along with that, MashShare also displays both the actual share counts as well as virtual shares to increase social proof. However, it allows smart caching for share counts to ensure a smooth experience on your site.
The premium features allow even more social networks and multiple options for the placement of social share buttons. It offers ‘Click to tweet, select & share’ options along with Google Analytics Event Tracking. MashShare also provides a neat add-on that lets you ask users to like your page after they share one of your posts. Since they’re already interested in your content, they might end up liking your page which is a great way to boost your chances.
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Social Pug
Social Pug is a social share button plugin that offers beautiful out-of-the-box styles. It is helpful in creating inline and floating social share buttons including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Along with that, it also enables you to display share counts that go along with your buttons for social proof. The premium version has a lot of helpful features:
- Avoiding negative social proof with minimum share counts.
- Share count recovery if you’ve navigated to different URLs.
- Mobile sticky share buttons that stick to the bottom of users’ mobile screens.
- Multiple desktop placement options with custom Open Graph data.
- Automatically add UTM parameters via analytical integration.
- More social networks
- Click-to-tweet
- Popular posts widgets that are based on your share counts.
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Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar
When it comes to the creativity of its name, I believe ‘Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar’ didn’t take much time. As the name suggests, it is indeed a pretty good description of what this plugin does. It basically helps you add a floating share bar to either towards the right or left of your site. Also, it lets you customize your share buttons by adding your own message.
Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar offers you a good amount of targeting options to control different types of share buttons for a particular page or post they appear on. You can also add regular social share buttons before or after you post content despite focusing on floating sidebars in the plugin’s name. Your floating sidebar will not be responsive until you upgrade to the Pro version. So, make sure to check the box to Disable Sidebar for mobile if you use the free version.
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Swifty Bar
Swifty Bar may not be as popular as many of the other social share button plugins but it has a distinguished approach that makes it to this list. The approach, however, might not work for every single site but I would consider it a cool twist on the normal before/after content or floating sidebar.
Swifty Bar displays social share buttons at the bottom bar along with information about the author, estimated reading time, and a next/previous button. Even though its focus is not exclusively on social sharing buttons but it also makes your content user-friendly and keeps the visitors engaged.
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AddToAny
AddToAny lets visitors share to a huge variety of networks by clicking a single universal ‘+’ icon. Known as a universal sharing platform, it includes dedicated icons for your most popular social networks that give you access to over 100 sharing options in a compact interface. You can display these icons before or after your content as well as in both vertical and horizontal bars.
Since most of the things are lightweight to ensure quick page load times, there are other advanced features like Share counts, AMP support, Responsive design, Google Analytics integration and Link shortening integrations. AddToAny is active on more than 500,000 sites making it the most popular social share button plugin.
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Sassy Social Share
Sassy Social Share surely one of the most interesting plugins due to its unique button styles and customization options. You might not necessarily like them but they will definitely look different than the other plugins on this list. Supporting a good list of networks, with over 100 sharing/bookmarking services, Sassy Social Share also supports share counts, including customizable caching to make sure you get accurate share counts without any performance drag.
Since everything is responsive, you can enable or disable both vertical and horizontal floating buttons on mobile devices. It also lets you add both before/after content and floating share bars. You can also target your share buttons to specific post types or individual pieces of content. Sassy Social Share lets you purchase add-ons for things like myCRED integration, analytics, share count recovery, and more. Bottom line is that this is a good option if you want more control over how your buttons actually look.
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TweetDis
It works to create more engagement of your visitors with your content. The best part is its setup. It indeed is very easy to add ‘click to tweet’ button to your contents. Simply highlight the part of your contents and insert TweetDis from your page editor’s toolbar.
One more thing, you can make even your images tweetable.
Main features of the plugin:
- Multiple design layouts to choose from
- Customize your tweet-boxes the way you want
- Highlight texts and add the button
- Add tweet buttons for images
- Add @username in your tweets
- Bitly supported
Price: From $27
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Social Share & Locker Pro
Though it has all the popular features of a social sharing plugin for WordPress, yet it’s different. it allows you to lock your freebies with social shares. It means the content that you lock will be visible only when your visitors actually share your content.
Why not? If you are offering something free you do deserve some social shares in return.
Main features of the plugin:
- Ten different themes to choose from
- Integrates with WooCommerce, BuddyPress and many more.
- Lock your content for social shares
- Supports multiple placement options.
- Shortcodes supported
- Retina ready and responsive layout
- Include share counts with your buttons
- Change button text the way you want
Price: $14
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SumoMe
I have a used the free version of this plugin. The free version comes with all the features of pro version but keeps the branding and a small blue button on your page which when clicked opens a popup for login to SumoMe dashboard.
The buttons look clean yet catchy. It also supports URL shortening feature and can be added to images as well.
Main features of the plugin:
- Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest support
- Buttons designs are clean
- URL shortening option
- Use of images as well
- Button placement options
- Include Twitter username in the tweets
- Comes with a pro version as well
Free, but paid versions available to remove branding
Would like to add more? Do let me know your experience.
Choosing The Right Plugin For Your WordPress Social Sharing
All these 11 different plugins work their magic in their domain. But it is you who has to decide on whether what plugin would most effectively fit your choice of work. You do not need to install all of them because you only need one. If you’re looking to display basic social share buttons for the popular networks, pretty much any of these plugins can get the job done. Here are some suggestions that might help you solve your problem:
- Style of Buttons– Social Snap comes with a huge feature set and some great looking buttons. Social Pug leads the lightweight free plugins category with the best styles in my opinion. MashShare has a unique look that will look great for some sites.
- Button placement options– You must consider the placement options on mobile as well as on the desktop. Social Snap enables users to display WhatsApp icons on mobile, and something else on desktop depending on the device used.
Social Snap, Social Warfare and Easy Social Share Buttons are your best options if you’re a blogger or marketer. All these plugins include extra features that will make a substantial difference to your site’s success but if you’re a member Elegant Themes, Monarch is another good option that can get you access to some of those more “bottom-line-moving” features. Regardless of any plugin you choose, it is usually recommended to play around with the placement of your buttons and the ordering of your social networks to find the combination that gets you as many shares as possible.
