Do you use any social sharing plugin on your website? Do you have a consistent social media traffic coming to your website?
If you said no to those two questions, you’re missing out on your traffic.
Social sharing plugins could help you increase your social shared that in turns would bring more traffic to your site. With so many social sharing plugins out there, it’s not easy to find one that would work best for you.
I tried a couple of different plugins on TypeEighty before settling on a specific plugin and I will share with you at the end of the post what drove me towards choosing that plugin.
In this post, I will share 12 best social sharing plugins that I think it’s the best out there. I’ve tested it out to give you a more detailed opinion. Hopefully, it would help you choose the right plugin for your website.
Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning if you choose to buy them, I will earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Please know that I have experience with all of the following resources and I recommend them because they are great.
Let’s get started!
12 Best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress
Social Warfare – Probably the Best Social Sharing Plugin for WordPress
Probably the best social sharing plugin for WordPress, it’s the social sharing plugin we use at TypeEighty.
What I like about Social Warfare is built with performance in mind, it doesn’t slow down your website.
Social Warfare helps you leverage the power of social proof. You could display your social share counts predominantly to encourage your audience to share your content. You could keep the share count hidden until you hit a minimum number of shares.
In this way, you could avoid “negative social proof”. You set it once and Social Warfare does the rest for you.
“Because this plugin has so many awesome features, additional social sharing button options for various platforms, including the ability to create Click-To-Tweet inside of blog posts, I’ve seen more engagement, more shares and tweets! Far more than I have using any other plugins.”
– Fabrizio Van Marciano, Magnet4Blogging.Net
With Social Warfare, creating tweetable quotes is a breeze with its Click-to-Tweet feature. It makes it easy for your audience to share your content. Just like this one below.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”12 Best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress. @warfareplugins #wordpress #blogging #socialwarfare” quote=”12 Best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress.”]
Social Warfare Pro version allows you to use its advanced Pinterest features. Pinterest favors tall images unlike other social networks and Social Warfare lets you add a custom image and rich description that will show when someone shared your content on Pinterest.
That means no more ugly long images on your post; it distracts your audience from enjoying your content.
Another feature that I found very useful is Frame Buster. Frame Buster prevents people from using apps such as Sniply and Start a Fire to hijack your content and add their own calls-to-action.
Features:
- Well designed Admin UI
- Beautiful social button design
- Over 15 social network to choose from
- Floating share buttons
- Social share count and total share count display
- Popular post widget based on social share counts with customizable design
- Display social buttons anywhere shortcode
Key Features:
- Click to tweet
- [PRO] Advanced Pinterest features: Special Pinterest image, rich pin
- [PRO] Image Hover Pin Button. Make it easy for your audience to share on Pinterest.
- [PRO] Share customization
- [PRO] Minimum count social proof. Set a minimum count for your share count to appear.
- Content protection with Frame Buster
- [PRO] Link shortening
- [PRO] Google Analytics tracking
- [PRO] Share count recovery. Social Warfare helps you recover your social count when switching from HTTP to HTTPS.
Price: FREE. Pro version starts from $29/year.
Monarch – Best Social Media Sharing Plugin for Elegant Themes Community
Monarch is created by Elegant Themes, the one behind the popular Divi 3.0, as part of Elegant Themes.
I would say Monarch is the best social media sharing plugin for Elegant Themes users as they will be able to use this plugin for free. However, if you’ve not joined Elegant Theme, this plugin could be expensive compared to the other plugin. You’ll have to pay $89/year.
Media is arguably the most shared content on the internet.
What I like about Monarch is it makes easy for users to share media content on your site. When users hover over an image or video on your site, the social sharing button will appear.
Another important feature that could increase your traffic is you could display sharing pop-up & fly-in based on user interactions on your site. For example, you could show a sharing pop-up when the user scrolls down the page.
The trigger that I liked the most is to show the sharing pop-ups when users reach the bottom of a post. If a user finishes reading your post, there’s a higher chance they will share your post.
Features:
- Monarch dashboard – view your social sharing statistic
- Over 30 social networks to choose from
- Social count display
- Mobile responsive
Key Features:
- Display social buttons anywhere with shortcode
- On Image & Video sharing
- Automatic popup
- 6 unique event triggers for sharing pop-ups & fly-in
Price: $89/year.
Even at this price, Monarch isn’t the most expensive plugin in our list. Keep reading and find out which one!
This plugin currently has the highest rating of all social sharing plugin for WordPress with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars based on over 3 thousand reviews.
With support over 100 social networks, you can configure a custom action for your social icons. For example, you could direct your audience to your Facebook page when they click on the Facebook icon.
You could also display an email icon together with the social sharing buttons. Make it easy for the user to contact you simply by clicking on the email icon.
Features:
- Over 100 social networks supported
- [PRO] Over 20 icon design options to choose from
- [PRO] Over 200 themed design styles
- Floating sidebar
- Sticky social bar
- Social share count
- mobile optimized
Key Features:
- Set custom actions for your media share icon
- Pop-ups social share or social follow
- [PRO] Better social sharing and following features
- [PRO] URL shortener
- [PRO] Share count recovery
Price: FREE. Pro priced at $25/year.
This plugin is currently being sold on CodeCanyon for $20 and it’s packed with tons of features. By far, this plugin does a lot more than what a social sharing plugin would do. At the time of this writing, it has 4.66/5 ratings and more than 24 thousands sales.
This plugin not only makes it easy for users to share your content and media with its on media sharing feature but it helps you to build your user list with its Subscribe module.
If you’ve used OptinMonster to build your list, you’ll be familiar with the Subscribe module. It comes with 8 different designs and integrates nicely with 8 different mailing services.
This plugin also leveraged on social proof to encourage users to share your content. But unlike Social Warfare’s minimum share count, it introduces a feature called “Fake Share Counter”. While it works to avoid negative social proof, I found that Social Warfare uses a better and more ethical approach to this issue.
If you’re running eCommerce sites such as WooCommerce, you gonna love this one. With this plugin, your users could share your product easily on social media.
Personally, I like a plugin that only does a certain thing and great at those things rather than one plugin that does everything. At TypeEighty, we use OptinMonster to grow our list building and find the Subscribe module to be redundant.
Features:
- Lightning fast
- Over 50 social networks
- 50 different social button templates
- 27 different social button display positions
- 35 ready-made styles
- Analytics and tracking
- URL shortener
- Mobile and AMP support
Key Features:
- Personalized Pinterest Image
- Click to Tweet
- On Media Sharing
- Subscribe Module
- Event base triggers: scroll, delayed, exit intent
- After Share Action
- A/B Testing
- Share recovery
- eCommerce Ready
Price: $20
Social Pug: Good Social Sharing Plug-In with Limited Free Features
Social Pug is another popular social sharing plugin for WordPress, it’s similar to Social Warfare up to a certain degree.
While the free version is VERY limited in terms of features, PRO version comes with key features that will boost your social shares dramatically.
Social share count works best by leveraging on social proof to drive up to total counts. Like Social Warfare, you could avoid any negative social proof by setting a shared quota to hit before displaying the share counts.
If your blog relying heavily on Pinterest as your main social traffic driver, you’ll love the custom social share image and description feature. With Social Pug, you could assign a custom long image that Pinterest favors highly to your post so your user will share a more optimized image on Pinterest.
What I like about Social Pug is you could trigger a social sharing pop-up based on how user interacts with your website. Do you want to show a pop-up when user reaches the bottom of your post? Or when the user wants to exit your site? You could do that with Social Pug.
Overall, while Social Pug gives few key features with its Pro version, we will like the Free version is too limited in term of features as compared to other plugins on this list.
Features:
- Over 15 social networks
- 4 default sharing location
- Floating sidebar
- Editable button label
- Social share count and total share counts display
- Place buttons anywhere with [socialpug_share] shortcode
Key Features:
- [PRO] Custom Pinterest share image and description
- [PRO} Click to tweet
- [PRO] Minimum share count
- [PRO] Mobile sticky footer buttons
- [PRO] Pop-up social share buttons
- [PRO] Link shortening with Bitly
- [PRO] social media follow button widgets
- [PRO] Analytics and tracking
- [PRO] Most shared post widget
Price: Free. Pro starts at $29/year.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”12 Best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress in 2018. #wordpress #blogging #warfareplugins #monarch” quote=”12 Best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress in 2018 to increase your social sharing.”]
If you’re visited Mashable before, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that MashShare takes the cue of its design style from Mashable.
MashShare is a free social media sharing plugin that’s highly customizable.
It’s built as a social media ecosystem with its add-ons that you could install to maximize social sharing and optimize your content.
With NO external script dependencies and all code is loaded directly from your website, MashShare ensures yours and your visitors’ privacy is secured. After all, privacy is a huge issue on the internet now, huh!
I like the idea that it tried to build an ecosystem by providing users with tons of free and paid add-ons. However, as of Right now, most of the add-ons are paid add-ons and price starts from $20++. You could get a discounted price for buying the add-ons in a bundle, price starts from $45++.
Features:
- Fast – NO external script dependencies
- Over 20 social network supported
- 3 different share styles
- Social share count including twitter tweet count
- Display social share buttons anywhere with shortcoode
- Most Shared Posts Widget
Key Features:
- URL shortener
- Integrates with All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast.
- Support for AMP (with official WP AMP)
- Multi language support
- Has free and paid tons of add-ons
Price: FREE. Add-ons starts from $20/year. Bundled add-ons starts from $45/year.
WP Social Sharing – Lightweight Sharing Plugin that Does the Job
WP Social Sharing is a simple lightweight social sharing plugin that does one thing well, sharing your content on social media. At the time of writing, this plugin is last updated 8 months ago and it’s been maintained by a solo developer.
There’s nothing much to cover with this plugin. While it’s lightweight, it lacks some key features such as social share count that would help with social proof.
I would prefer to use other free alternatives in this list that comes with more features, better design and maintained by a company or dedicated team as it provides better stability and support to its users.
Features:
- 7 social networks support
- 2 default location supports
- Display social share buttons anywhere with shortcode
Key Features:
- Custom text on the social button
- Mobile responsive social icons with CSS
Price: FREE
AddtoAny – Long Running Social Sharing Plugin That Looks Outdated
AddToAny is the oldest social sharing plugin in the list with over 10 years of development and 8 million downloads on multiple platforms. It currently has over 500 thousands active installations on WordPress sites.
It supports over 100 social networks, that’s a lot of choices for users to share your content.
While this plugin has been around for a long time, we feel that not much work has been done in terms of design and style. Compared to other social sharing plugin, the design looks very outdated and not pretty.
I feel that you should try other free alternatives on the list if you’re looking for a free plugin. Even though AddToAny supports over 100 social networks, it’s important to limit your social network choice to up to 5 social networks. Focus on the social networks that work for your audience, it’s not a number game. Quality over quantity.
Features:
- Over 100 social networks
- 5 display location
- Floating share button
- Display social sharing buttons anywhere with shortcode
- Mobile optimized and retina ready
Key Features:
- URL shortener
- Share count
- Google Analytics integration and links tracking
- WooCommerce support
- Multilingual sites support
- Multisite support
- AMP pages support
Price: FREE
Social Sharing by Danny – Minimalistic Social Sharing Plugin but Limited
Yet the simplest social sharing plugin on WordPress with its minimalistic design. The author of this plugin takes a different approach compared to other plugins in the list. It aims to be simple, lightweight and flexible.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Social Sharing by Danny is a minimalistic approach to sharing buttons. #wordpress #blogging #socialsharing” quote=”Social Sharing by Danny is a minimalistic approach to sharing buttons.”]
Social Sharing by Danny only supports 3 social networks: Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you’re relying on Pinterest as your social traffic driver, this plugin is not for you.
Features:
- Only supports Twitter, Facebook, and Google+
- Simple icon styles with hover effect
- Display the buttons anywhere you want with its shortcode
Key Features:
- Small file size of 600 bytes with no other external scripts dependency
- Multilingual site support
- Configurable filter to set when to display the sharing links
Price: FREE
AddThis – Social Sharing Plugin with Analytics Dashboard
If you’ve used AddToAny before, you might be familiar with AddThis. Not only it has a similar name, but it also looks similar in terms of design and functionality, and they boasted a huge number of social networks supported. AddThis supports over 200 social networks including Messenger, WhatsApp, and many more. That’s 100 more than AddToAny,
To get analytics insights on how well your content is performing, you’ll need to sign up for a free AddThis account and access these analytics data via your AddThis dashboard.
The sharing plugin has pretty limited features compared to others but it has a few other plugins that help you grow and engage your audiences such as follow buttons and related posts.
If you look at other plugins on the list such as Social Warfare, it gives you a widget to display top shared content out of the box without the need to install an additional plugin.
Personally, I like to limit the number of plugins installed on my site. The more plugins you installed, you increase the load time and other risks that might happen.
Features:
- Over 220 social networks
- 20 different styles to choose from
- Floating share button
- Display share button anywhere via [addthis] shortcake
- Mobile Responsive
Key Features:
- Image sharing button
- Analytics via AddThis account
- Tools available: follow button, related post, list building, link promotion
Price: FREE
True to its name, this plugin allows you to add floating social sharing sidebar to your site.
Some of the features that are available on other plugins aren’t available freely in this plugin. If you want to display social share counts or display social sharing button anywhere on your site with shortcode, you have to get the PRO version.
Apart from these key features, the PRO version offers a few other customizations option. It also comes with Lightbox / pop-up contact form, which I don’t think added much value to social sharing.
At a price point of $40/year, this plugin seems too expensive as compared to other PRO social sharing plugins on this list.
Features:
- Lightweight with no external library dependency
- 9 social networks supported
- Floating sidebar
- Custom image or background color of social buttons
- Options to display and hide button on specific post or page
- Options to specify the location of the share button on a specific post or page
Key Features:
- [PRO] Advance feature of Pinterest share buttons
- [PRO] Total social share count
- [PRO] Responsive floating sidebar
- [PRO] Display social buttons anywhere with shortcode
- [PRO] Responsive light box contact form
Price: FREE. Pro version starts at $40.
Founded back in 2009, Shareaholic has quickly grown to the world’s leading suite of social, analytics, monetization, and share button tools.
Apart from social sharing features, Shareaholic makes it easy for you to engage, grow traffic and monetize your audience.
Built to be lightweight without hurting your page load speed, Shareaholic has earned recognition from the best-managed WordPress hosting in the world, WP Engine, as being an Essential Speed Friendly Social Media & SEO Toolkit.
A good thing about Shareaholic, it’s the only plugin that gives on media sharing feature on their free plan.
It’s the official Google Analytics partner and offers automatic integration. Do take note that the free plan only stores 30 days of analytics data storage. This could be crucial if you want to monitor your traffic for more than 30 days.
If you have a huge audience and been finding ways to monetize from your audience, Shareaholic makes it easy to drive targeted traffic and leads with its Native Ads.
With all these features to help you monetize your content and audience, it comes at no surprise that Shareaholic is the most expensive social sharing plugin on the list. The PRO plans start at $8/month (billed annually) or $96/year.
Features:
- Floating sidebar
- Over 30 social networks supported
- Social share count
- URL shortener
- Related content/posts widget
- Promote & advertise content via Related Content Advertising Tools
- Mobile optimized
- Follow buttons
Key Features:
- Automatic & Official integration with Google Analytics
- Automatic integration with “All in One SEO Pack” and “WordPress SEO by Yoast”
- On Media sharing
- [PRO] Share count recovery. Never lose your share counts when you switch to HTTPS.
- Automatically turn your existing links into affiliate links
- Content promotion and advertising via Shareaholic’s Related Content Advertising Tools
Price: FREE. Pro plans start at $8/month.
Final Thoughts
With so many social sharing plugins available, choosing the best social sharing plugin that works for your website or blog isn’t an easy task. I tried a couple different plugins on TypeEighty, before settling down on Social Warfare.
There’re a few decisions that drove me towards choosing Social Warfare. Firstly, unlike Monarch or Easy social share buttons, I could try Social Warfare free version and see how it looks on my site. If I am an Elegant Theme user, I might give Monarch a try but as I’m not, Monarch is an expensive plugin for me to set up.
Second, I like was looking for a way to select a custom long image for users to share Pinterest without showing it on the post and Social Warfare makes it easy to do that.
Finally, I pay a lot of attention to the security of my site including content security. Frame buster is easily the main driver for me to choose Social Warfare knowing that my content is protected from piracy and optimized for social sharing.
Do I miss any social sharing plugins? What plugin do you use on your blog and why? Let us know in the comment below.
Thanks for sharing social WordPress plugins, great effort
Glad you like it too, Steve.
Very comprehensive look at social plug-ins. I had never heard of some of these plugins but will definitely give them a second look. Thank you.
Thanks, Terrie. Hope it helps you pick the best one for you.
Thank you so much for this! I am a pretty new blogger and have so much to learn but love it when people post things that are so helpful!! I need options to save me time since I also work a full time job!
Thanks, Patty. I agree. Blogging takes time and having a good resource that can save you time is great!
I have really been missing out! I am definitely adding a few of these to my site. Social Warfare for sure. Thank you so much for sharing!
You’re welcome, Danielle. Let me know how it goes for you!
Great resources!
Thanks, Ashley! 🙂
Loving this post! The perfect cheat sheet for new bloggers on social sharing plugins! Definitely bookmarked this to apply any of these later on!! Learned a lot from this, thank you!
Sarah
http://www.sarahmakescents.com
Thanks, Sarah. I hope it helps new bloggers to make better decision on which plugin to get.
This is a very informative post. However, your social share showing on the side & makes me question your authority on the topic :). Just a pointer!
Thanks for your feedback, Laura 🙂
I use a few of these, but I haven’t heard of others, like Mashshare and AddtoAny. There is so much to know and learn about social sharing! Thanks for helping us bloggers keep up.
Thanks, Bryan. There’re many plugins out there. Hope it help you find the right sharing plugin that works for your site.
As a newbie I was so clueless. I don’t have any plug ins for sharing. Talk about dropping the ball! I will be getting one today. This article was so helpful! Very in depth easy to understand explanations which I truly appreciate.
It’s never too late to start, Danielle. But better start early. Let me know which one you go for and if you have any problem with it.
I haven’t started using any social media plugin seriously yet but am considering Social Warfare.
Are you familiar with the differences between Social Warfare and Buffer?
Good post Yuyu!
Thanks, Gaman. What I like about Social Warfare is that as Google favors long-form content, Social Warfare makes it easy for your user to tweet your content with its Click to Tweet feature. As you post a high-quality content, it’s more likely for your users to tweet your post.
Back to your question, Social Warfare helps users to share your content on social media. Whereas Buffer is a social management platform. It makes it easy for YOU to manage and schedule post across multiple social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Thank you so much for sharing. It’s frustrating to go on someone’s blog who has a really great article and have to search for a way to share it. I LOVE the floating Pinterest share feature… everyone should have a plug-in that allows readers an easy way to share.
I agree with you, Michelle. One of the worst things to do in sharing an article is to figure out how to share it. Definitely, don’t let that happen to your blog. Imagine all the shares and loves you’re missing out.
This is a phenomenal resource. I am using social warfare right now on all of my articles but I didn’t know there were so many GOOD options. I’m definitely bookmarking this page,
Thanks Joseph. I tried a few before settling down on Social Warfare. There are many other good options but I think we made the right choice!