EUKhost-Top-Picks-5-Best-WordPress-Social-Sharing-Plugins

Which social share plugin to use? To narrow down your search, our WordPress hosting team have chosen their top five social sharing plugins for you to take a closer look at.The 5 BestWordPressSocialSharingPluginseUKhost Ltd.

A standard feature on most websites, social sharing buttons are a great way toincrease engagement. They let visitors share their favourite content with theirfriends and followers and in return, you get more traffic and new sales. The stickingpoint, however, is which social share plugin to use; there are so many to choosefrom. To narrow down your search, our WordPress hosting team have chosen theirtop five social sharing plugins for you to take a closer look at.What to look for in a social sharing Plugin?On the surface, there seems to be very little difference between the range ofWordPress social share plugins available. They all provide a selection of buttons,usually with similar designs, which are displayed on your website so that users canclick on them to share your content.However, there are things you might want to look at in more detail. Some socialsharing plugins provide a wider range of buttons than others, some provide floatingbuttons while others are fixed, there are also plugins that let you customise the sizeand colour of the buttons. There are a number of other features you may also wantto consider before choosing.In addition, you may also want to know how a social share plugin impacts the speedof your website. As each plugin requires more data to be sent to a user’s browser,

you’ll be better served by installing a plugin that has a minimal effect on yourloading times; after all, this can affect your Google ranking.When choosing our top picks, we took all those factors into consideration, as wellas the price, in order to come to our final five. We hope you like our choices.Social WarfareAlthough there’s a free version from within WordPress, it’s the much better, $29premium version of Social Warfare that we found so appealing. This powerful socialsharing plugin provides you with attractive looking buttons for the social mediasites that matter and gives you a range of options in how you display them: aboveor below the content, above and below, manual placement and floating buttons.You also have the option to turn sharing off on individual posts or pages if you wish.Other great features of the pro version include responsive design, analyticsintegration, sharable quotes, custom tweets, content protection, Pinterest imagesand more. As for performance, in most tests, it didn’t increase site speed what soever. It’s well worth a closer look.

Easy Social ShareEasy Social Share is a free plugin you can install directly from your WordPressdashboard. It enables you to add buttons for the main social media platforms likeFacebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and even via email.It lets you display buttons in either the header or footer of your posts or,alternatively, provides a short code for placing them within your content. You caneven add buttons to images. There are two other options to choose from, you candisplay the icons with or without the number of shares being shown.One of the reasons we liked this plugin was because it is lightweight. The sharebuttons don’t require users to download images or font icon files and this meansthere is little impact, around 0.11 seconds, on loading times. However, adding theshare count option does require additional JavaScript. Overall, great free plugin.

WP Social SharingWP Social Sharing is another free plugin available from the WordPress repository,providing responsive social share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing,Reddit, Google+ and Pinterest. It enables you to add buttons to posts, pages,images and custom post types.Buttons can be displayed above and below the content or, using a shortcode, canbe placed within it. You can remove unwanted icons, if you wish, and reorder theones you have selected. In order to encourage readers to share, the plugin also letsyou add your own text to the buttons.Once again, this is a lightweight plugin which, rather than use images/API to displayits buttons, uses CSS3. You also have the option of whether to include the plugin’sCSS and JavaScript. Overall, the plugin only increased loading times between 0.1and 0.2 seconds.

MonarchIf you are looking for a social share button with bells and whistles, then Monarch isperhaps the ideal choice. However, to get the plugin you do have become anElegant Themes member, which will cost you $89, though this also lets you usetheir 80+ WordPress themes (including the fantastic Divi theme) and some otherawesome plugins.With regard to features, Monarch lets you add buttons for just about every socialmedia platform worth sharing to, over 40 in total. Each button is customisable, bothin size and design, and can be displayed almost anywhere: on a floating sidebar,above or below the content, on a popup, by fly-in and on any media. You can evencontrol when the social media icons appear, for example, after a specific time oruser action. In addition, the plugin also enables you to track your audience, so youcan monitor how they interact with your site.However, whilst these are obviously great features, providing all this functionalitymeans the plugin isn’t the most lightweight on our list. Although Elegant Themeshave done a reasonable job in keeping its impact on speed low, it still increasesloading times by around 0.4 seconds.

Ultimate SharingWith over 3,500 five-star reviews on WordPress, Ultimate Sharing is a highlypopular plugin that lets users share to over 200 social media sites (not that you’llever need them all) as well as to RSS and email. It also has a wide range of plugindesigns you can choose from, over 16 in total. You can even upload custom shareicons if you don’t like the designs they provide.As for display options, this is one of the few plugins that lets your icons have multi-purpose functionality. For example, you can use your Facebook button to sendvisitors to your Facebook page and let them use it to like your content. There is ahost of other display options, too, including animated, popup and floating buttons,all with or without share counts.Whilst the plugin can have a small impact on loading speed, we like it because it’sprogrammed to load after all other scripts on your site, meaning that a decrease inspeed won’t impact a user’s experience.