Having well placed social sharing buttons are very important these days, but doing this manually is not a good idea. Doing it manually means delving in the code and spending tons of hours, and then styling them to match the site’s looks. Instead of that, a good idea is to add social sharing buttons to WordPress by using a plugin which would save time and instantly add the sharing functionality to your site.
Using a plugin to add social media sharing buttons is easy, fast and convenient. Once these social media buttons are added, the post can then be shared on many different social networks, some of which are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. So without any further ado, let’s take a look at some of the best free and paid social sharing plugins for WordPress that you should try out in 2016.
Monarch
Monarch is a social sharing plugin from Elegant Themes. The plugin offers over 30 social networks to choose from, and you can add sharing buttons in 5 different locations such as floating sidebar, above & below content, on images & video, automatic pop-up and flyin. It can also display your existing follower count, and the buttons can also be placed inside any widget area or can be displayed in the content with just a shortcode. Monarch is highly customizable, as you can choose button shapes, colors, hovers, social networks, counts and much more. The best part is that Monarch caches all of your share and follow counts for optimized loading throughout your website, which means it won’t much slow down your website. Check out our review of Monarch plugin.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare aims to boost your social sharing without slowing down, while also looking good. The plugin is highly customizable, as the buttons can be matched according to your website, and apart from that, you can also choose over 75 different style/color combinations. With this plugin, you can also create “Click to Tweet” quotes, and you can configure it such that share counts are displayed only after reaching a minimum number of shares. The plugin automatically adds UTM tracking to every shared link so you can track how your social shares are performing.
Ultimate Social Deux
Ultimate Social Deux is a paid social sharing plugin that loads buttons through Javascript and CSS, without using iFrames. Users can select a skin from 8 different skin options, and 6 different placement options such as floating, content top & bottom, floating top, shortcodes, widgets and mobile bar. The plugin also supports integrations with other popular plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, bbPress, Jigoshop, Google Analytics, Visual Composer and more. If English is not your website’s language, then the plugin also supports Danish, German, Spanish, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. There are tons of other options to customize your site with this plugin.
Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress
Easy Social Share is one of the best selling plugin on Code Canyon marketplace. With this plugin, you can not only share but also monitor, analyze and optimize your site for social sharing. The plugin supports sharing posts on more than 40 major social networks and in addition to that, you have Love this button, Send to mail, Comments button, and Print. There are 7 shortcodes that you can use, 19 built-in automated button methods, mobile optimized display methods so that buttons can be displayed properly even on mobile devices, and apart from that it comes with build-in modules for Click log analytics, Google Analytics Tracking and Social Media Metrics.
SumoMe Share
SumoMe is a set of tools to increase web traffic, and this free social sharing plugin named as SumoMe Share enables your website visitors to share your content more easily, and make it viral. It supports sharing of content on more than 16 social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterset, Google+, Reddit, Buffer, Pocket, and more. The plugin automatically adjusts itself to display buttons on desktop and mobile users. To place the buttons on your site, you just need to drag and drop them without any need to fiddle with the code. The Share Pro version claims to get 20% extra pageviews as per the developer. Apart from that, it will also support UTM tracking, and you can download all stats and view them offline also.
Sharify Social Share Buttons
Sharify is a free, simple and fast plugin that lets you add beautiful sharing buttons to your WordPress website. These social sharing buttons are responsive, and the plugin supports Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Pocket, Email and VKontake. Sharify features option to change color of sharing buttons, shows share counts, caches counts for less server load, supports SSL and you can also use shortcode to display the sharing buttons anywhere in the post or page.
WP Social Sharing
WP Social Sharing is a free plugin that adds responsive social sharing buttons to your WordPress posts, pages, or any custom post type. The plugin supports Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Xing, Google+ and Pinterest. As per the developers, this is a very lightweight plugin, and has options to include/disable CSS and JS. You can add custom text in social buttons, reorder icons, add shortcodes and do much more with this plugin.
Genesis Simple Share
If you are using Genesis Framework then you will love this plugin. It is a simple plugin to add social sharing buttons to your Genesis child theme and the setup is also a breeze. Once you enable it, it will automatically add social icons on your posts, but you can also customize the settings if required. You can change the order of the buttons, add an image as the default image if your post doesn’t have any image, change icon size and do much more.
Hey man, you did a great job! I’m using Monarch, too. It’s really helpful and has nice functions like changing the theme. Also I use Blog2Social, cause with this plugin you’re able to post your articles scheduled. So you can choose the best time for each network.
Thanks for sharing. I was expecting to see shareholic amongst the list. Most of these are nice though.