Recently many Twitter plugins at WordPress.org stopped working because Twitter has decided to close their v1 API and migrate to v1.1 which requires OAuth authentication. This basically means things would become difficult for developers as well as for end users to add Twitter feed to WordPress.
For those plugins that work, they require users to create a Twitter application and then copy the details from there and paste it into the plugin’s settings. This for sure, is not a convenient way for adding Twitter feed. That’s why, let’s stop using ANY Twitter plugin and learn the most easiest way to add Twitter Feed to WordPress.
Adding Twitter Timeline to WordPress
For this purpose, we’ll be using the official Twitter widget code that can be got from the Twitter’s website. Let’s learn how to grab the code from Twitter.
Step 1: Login to Twitter, click on the gear icon from the top right and then click on Settings.
Step 2: From the left sidebar, click on Widgets. Alternatively, you can directly open the same page from here.
Step 3: This will open the widgets screen. Click on “Create new” button to create a new widget.
Step 4: Select the User Timeline tab and then configure the options as per your need. If you want to embed the timeline of a different Twitter user, then simply change the value in the username. Also adjust the height, theme, link color and finally click on the “Create widget” button.
Step 5: You’ll now be able to see the code on the same page. Copy the entire code and paste it in any of your theme’s file or an easy way to do this is to paste the code in a text widget and then place it in the sidebar widget area (or any other widgetized area).
Here’s how the Twitter widget will look like when placed in the sidebar area. Your website/blog visitor can see your latest tweets, retweet, reply, favorite, send a tweet to you or follow you right from this widget.
If you’ll use this official method to add Twitter widget to WordPress, then you don’t need to depend on any plugin for the same functionality. Also if you want to grab the widget for any other user (like your client, for example), then you can just change the username and then grab the code.
Hope this method will help you to add Twitter timeline (feed) to WordPress – without using any plugin. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.