The Best WordPress Social Sharing Plugins in 2021 – The Definitive Guide
What Is a WordPress Social Sharing Plugin?
Before I start to say anything, I’d like to let you know that at the end of this blog post, there is a complete video on the best WordPress social sharing plugin in 2020 that you can go straight down below and start watching. But to be honest, there are also a lot of valuable points stated in this blog post which are not mentioned in the video, so choose which one you are fine with and get started.
You need to make sure which social network you want to provide your visitors with.
A WordPress social sharing plugin is a plugin you can use to add some social sharing buttons to your website. This way, you will allow your users and visitors to share content from your websites all over social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and even LinkedIn and etc..
That being said, there are a lot of factors involved when you want to choose the best social sharing plugin for WordPress. You need to consider the performance, aesthetic aspects, practicality, features, pricing and many other aspects before choosing one.
Among these properties, the performance is the most important one. Most of these WordPress social sharing plugins run extra scripts on your WordPress website, hence decreasing the load speed of your website. Therefore, you should try to find the best choice with having an eye on performance, aesthetics, and pricing.
A lot of people search for the best-selling WordPress plugins when they want to find the best WordPress plugins, however, this is not true at all. There are lot of best-selling plugins for WordPress which are not really good in terms of feature availability and performance, just to make sure, I urge you to click on the hyperlinks above and compare to see if those 2 blog posts of our share any common plugin at all. Prefer not to come up with an example here! 🙂
It’s a very tough choice to choose between about 21 different WordPress social sharing plugins.
Another important point is that, what social networks do you need on your website? You can choose among different WordPress social sharing plugins that offer a lot of different options, but it is very important what social networks do you want to provide your visitors with, and on what social network do you think your content has a greater chance of becoming a hit.
Last but not least is where you want to show the widget. Is it in a sidebar? under a blog post? nest to a text box? top of an image to vote maybe? So, you need to make up your mind on the aesthetics as well. Is the overall design of the plugin and the widget beautiful enough to catch the eye of a visitor. Does it make visitors care enough to click on it? at least for the sake of it being so eye-catching 🙂
Let’s dive deep into this and see what is the best WordPress social sharing plugin for your website.
Social Snap
Social Snap social media plugin is really one of the monsters on the market, however, being rather new.
Social Snap WordPress social sharing plugin is rather new to the market, however, to be honest, It’s the best thing since sliced bread. It gives you everything, from an out-of-the-box design experience to an all-in-one social media plugin for your website.
In terms of design, it is just gorgeous and in terms of features, do get me started on it, it almost takes forever to count them all and the widget on the website, well it looks just awesome.
Although it is packed with features, I am going to present some of the most important ones to you here. But, please keep in mind that not all of them are available in the FREE version on WordPress repository, and you need to get the paid version to have full access to them all.
Let’s start with the very basic options a WordPress social sharing button plugin should provide. It offers 30+ social networks buttons. Besides, the positioning in this plugin is very diverse. You can place the widgets/buttons right under a text or as a floating sidebar next to your article which are the classic placement options for WP social sharing plugins. But it has way more than that to offer.
Some of the placements specific to Social Snap are “share hub” and a “sticky bar” which is awesome.
Here are some of its other options:
- Different options for designing your buttons (various shapes, sizes, colors, etc)
- Total and individual share counts
- Offers the ability to set the minimum share counts
- Recover your old share counts in case you changed your domain
Also, you can customize the metadata of your social media so you can keep an eye on the way it looks when it is shared on different social networks. Another great point is that it offers a comprehensive analytics dashboard on the number of times your content is being shared, your all-time-best content, and a lot of other important data you will need to keep up the great work with your content.
Social Snap sharing button plugin for WordPress also makes it possible for you to have your Pinterest images placed vertically so you can have more engagements right on your websites with your visitors. To be honest, this can be a great alternative to another WordPress social sharing plugin called “Social Warfare”. Social Snap offers the migration tool as well to migrate from Social Warfare to it right away.
The above are only some of its simple features we put forth, and obviously there are yet much to it to be explored. Here’s a list of its other features:
- Auto-poster: You can configure to automatically share your old posts to social networks
- Tweet boxes: Adds the ability to add these boxes to your content quickly to drive more shares and then traffic.
- Boost your old posts: You can re-share your content to Twitter and LinkedIn for potential business offers.
- Device-specific networks: You can set the buttons to be different in different devices. For example you can allow your users to use a Reddit button on Desktop while you can set it to be a Telegram or WhatsApp for mobile phones.
- Social login ability: Your users can log in to your site using their social media accounts, in case, you are running a website which requires membership.
Pricing
There is a Free version on WordPress which you can download and use. It might not offer all the features in the Pro version, but it is still very practical.
The paid version starts at $33, and if you prefer the one including all the add-ons then the price starts at $99. When thinking about its design and functionality, I believe it is really worth paying for.
The paid version starts at $39. The paid version with all add-ons starts at $99.
Shared Counts is a Free WordPress social media plugin with a lot to offer.
Shared Counts might not be as feature-rich, modern design and practical as Social Snap, but on the contrary it is the complete opposite and that’s just perfect. Why?!
Shared Counts authors apparently focused on some other aspects of the best WordPress social sharing plugin. These aspects are being light which means a faster website loading speed and also being easy-to-use, which means less features but more ease of use.
I know that this is not a comparison between Shared Counts Vs Social Snap but to give a better picture I’ll try to compare them just in case.
Having said that, the number of social networks it includes is rather limited to Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Yummly, and StumbleUpon. Yeah, not as much as Social Snap, but just the right number of them for making your website loading beat the light speed.
Regarding the design and placement, obviously does not have much to offer as in the previous plugin, however, again it has all the traditional placements and designs for your buttons.
You can choose from the different button styles and also place the widget anywhere on the page by custom CSS codes or its predefined locations like before or after a text. It can also be enabled for custom post-types.
You can set the plugin to show the number of share counts on a particular social network or just show the share counts for all of them.
Pricing
Shared Counts is a completely Free plugin and you can download the Free version on WordPress repository. In order to help the author, you can click here and contribute to its development to perhaps return the favour for their great favour to the world.
Monarch
Monarch is another one the best WordPress social media plugins on the market developed by Elegant Themes.
Monarch is another one of the great products from the very popular team of Elegant Themes. Most probably you heard the name before, but if you didn’t you should know that they are the developers of Divi builder which is one of the best WordPress page builders on the market and can be a potential rival for Elementor.
They also created some other themes and plugins as well, but the most popular one is Divi.
Basically, it is normal that Monarch is the most expensive in the list up to now. Why is it normal?
Elegant Themes is a reputed company which has been working in this field for several years now, and besides it is selling other valuable products as well. Therefore, it is only just for its products to be a tiny bit more expensive. In any case, I’m gonna convince you that this WordPress social media plugin is truly worth paying for.
So let’s dive in and explain about its major features.
This plugin allows you to show your widget or the buttons in 5 different places and also in 35 different social networks. Yeah, it is many of them to count.
These placement locations are On images or videos which is very interesting, as an automatic fly-in or pop-up, a floating sidebar and simply above or below a post. You can select the animation for the buttons, especially for the pop-up. Also, another interesting possibility that Elegant Themes team offers is a set of rules to trigger the fly-ins and pop-ups.
It can really boost your digital marketing campaigns and so if you have a shop, you drive sharing and so traffic to your website more and more using the trigger rules. For example, when a user likes a particular image of a product the sharing button immediately pops-up so they can share it as well with their friends.
Obviously, it has other common features of a WP social media plugin like displaying social share counts, styling and customizing your social sharing buttons and etc. Monarch also offers options to add follow buttons as a widget or shortcode so your visitors can both follow your accounts and share your content over the social networks concurrently.
For getting this amazing plugin you need to purchase a membership from Elegant Themes. It is really worth it since you will have full access to more than only a single plugin. To find out more on their membership terms and conditions click here.
To let you know how great is this plugin I decided to bring in an advice from an old friend, the WinningWp, has to give you on Monarch social sharing plugin:
Monarch Social Sharing plugin, from Elegant Themes, is one of the mainstays of the social media division of WordPress. More than that, many bloggers point to it as one of their top three social media plugins for WordPress
Karol K, as cited in Winningwp website
Pricing
By paying only $89/year, you will have full access to all Elegant Themes products, from its plugins to themes and the famous Divi page builder.
If you are not a pro-annual payment then you can simply pay $249 and enjoy a lifetime full access alongside lifetime updates and support.
Unfortunately, this plugin does not offer a Free version.
The plugin supports 20+ predefined layouts styles. Additionally, a user can showcase social media buttons as beside content, in popup, and after or before content.
This Easy Select And Share Pro WordPress plugin come with detailed documentation with all types of settings and configuration details. It is easy to use, lightweight, and very well compatible with all the major browsers.
Pricing:
The Easy Select And Share Pro plugin is sold in the Envato marketplace and its regular cost is $9. If a user wants extended support from the developer that extra cost is $1.50.
This social sharing plugin also comes with the free version, and it is available in the WordPress repository. In the free version, the plugin has 3 popular social media platforms and 10+ preset layouts.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare is a great WordPress social media plugin that has both a Free and a Pro version
Social Warfare is one of the other best WordPress social sharing plugins on the market. One really great thing about this plugin is that it has 2 versions, just like the Social Snap social media plugin. It has a Free version that can be downloaded on WordPress and a paid version.
The Free version, obviously, has less features than the paid one, however, can cover most of your needs as a powerful social media plugin. In any case, if you want to enjoy all that Social Warfare has to offer, then you should go Pro.
Since the features in the Free version are clearly available in any normal social sharing plugin on the market, i am going to focus on the features available in the paid version for the most part.
However, it would not be fair to not mention them here since for the previous plugins we mentioned the key features. So here are the key features in the Free version of Social Warfare:
- A default view for the social share buttons
- Supports most of the popular social networks
- Share counts individual and collectively
- Various possibilities in terms of placement like the floating one which is very popular nowadays.
Now let’s what does the Pro version can offer for the money you want to pay for it.
One of the strangest features, in a nice sense of the word “strange”, is that you can choose a specific image to be displayed form a post when the post is shared to Pinterest. You can either add an image or choose one which makes it a specific image for your Pinterest share.
Another great possibility is that you can set a minimum number of counts for the share counts to be displayed. If your shred counts are, for example, under 50, it won;t display them on your page, but as soon as it reaches 51, Ta-da it will show up on the widget.
You can customize the shared content to Twitter before it gets shared by your visitors. You can add content, graphs, images and etc to it so you can have a more informative post shared to the social media.
An interesting option which is actually common among different social sharing plugins is this one. If you change your domain, just like Social Snap, you can recover all your shred counts you lost due to migration. This is normal that if you change your domain or move to HTTPs you will lost your shred counts, so keep that in mind, just in case.
A great feature helping your digital marketing and SEO is its ability to integrate with Google Analytics and show you how effective your sharing buttons are. It also can use your Bitly account to automatically create shortened links for your posts to be shared which is something I love about it.
Also, You can track your events, for example, how many times a particular sharing button was clicked on a particular page in a particular location, so you can optimize your page based on that data. Somehow it is a kind of A/B testing for you sharing buttons on your website. You can have a look at this article to improve your information on SEO as well and rank up to the 1st link on Google.
Pricing
Social Warfare is actually a limited Free plugin. If you intend to go Pro, the pricing for it starts at $29 for one site.
Here are the other pricing options:
- Up to 5 Sites – $89
- Up to 10 Sites – $139
- Unlimited – $349
Still you can try the Free version first and if you felt like that’s the one, don’t hesitate to go Pro right away.
Easy Social Share Buttons is a plugin developed by the APPSCREO team. It has only a paid version but the pricing is almost flexible. Regarding feature-availability, I can assuredly say that it is the most feature-rich plugin in this area.
Actually, it has so many features that I could not really see them all through. Despite being very handy in terms of features, it can also become a burden. One of these burdens is to monitor your website load speed because since it can be a heavy app for your website it reads more scripts as well.
Having said that, you need to bear in mind that this does not stand true all the time. Most of the time it does not affect your website load speed at all.
This WordPress social sharing plugin is being sold on Envato market and it’s statistics there are amazing. It has a rating score of 4.67 out of 5 (over 1267 votes) and over 29,000+ sales. Certainly, we can agree that this guy has a lot of things to offer, not because of the number of sales but mostly because of the reviews there.
The key features of this plugin are supporting over 50+ social networks, 28+ different positions, 52+ pre-made templates alongside 25+ animations. It’s a bit surprising. These numbers add up even in it regular updates and the previously introduced plugins, yeah, they cannot catch this guy.
Now let’s dive into advance features of this monster.
You can customize your Twitter shares before they are being posted. You can add graphs, images or content to them.
Again, like the Social Warfare this social media plugin for WordPress lets you set a minimum shared counts display limit for your share counts as well.
It also offers great ways to engage with your users as methods of Digital Marketing. It offers email opt-ins, Analytic Dashboard and A/B testings so you can keep up the good work.
It can detect your most shared posts and display them in a list on any page of your liking. Like the other social sharing plugins for WordPress allows you to recover your lost share counts due to a domain change
It is interesting that the developers of Easy Social Share Buttons are going beyond a simple social sharing plugin and making it become a comprehensive tool for Digital Marketing. It offers a subscribe form, a live chat widget which can be connected to Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype or any other live chat platform.
It still has so many other features that I just cannot go on and count them and explain them for you. You better go to their website and read them for yourself or watch the video at the end of this blog post.
Pricing
Since it is sold on Envato, it is sold in 2 packages of “Regular License” and “Extended License”.
The Regular costs $22 and the Extended is $199.
Regular License includes:
- Lifetime Usage License
- Lifetime Plugin Updates
- 6 Months Premium Support
- Social Share Buttons
- 25+ Automatic Share Button Displays
- Share Display Settings Overwrite Global Setup
and many more
Extended License includes:
- Bundle in One Theme/Template/End Product You Sell, Installable on Unlimited Number of Client
- Installations
- Lifetime Usage License
- Lifetime Plugin Updates
- 6 Months Premium Support
- All Social Media Features From the Regular Version Included
Conclusion
Here is a video on Top 7 Best Social Media Plugins For WordPress by Darrel Wilson which can be a great wrap-up on this topic here. You can watch this instead of reading all this blog post. It depends on your taste.
Also here is the short version on Medium as well.
Have Questions?