6 Best Social Share Plugins for your WordPress Blog [Everything is FREE]

Can you show me a blog that does not have social share buttons? I bet You can’t! Because having social share buttons on any WordPress blogs help to drive massive social media traffic that is one of the finest sources of traffic you can’t simply avoid. To have the social share buttons integrated, you need to install the best social share plugin for your WordPress blog.

Undoubtedly brand new blogs and websites take time to get ranking position on top of the search engine results page.

Indeed, traffic from social media sites is an important factor to your new blog during the very initial phase. When your reader’s find catchy social buttons, there are high chances that your contents will get more social signals. The more social shares you get, the more traffic you drive.

There are many numbers of social share plugins for WordPress available on the market (both paid and free). Go for paid plan always a better idea but still, you can get unbelievable features on free social share WordPress plugins.

Having your blog installed on the WordPress content management system is the best-in-class opportunity to add any features you want with the help of WordPress plugins. You can only use these social share plugins on your WordPress blogs as these six plugins are exclusively available for WordPress blogs.

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Okie!! Let’s get started with the details of the six most recommended yet totally FREE best social share plugins for your WordPress blog. These are the list of six plugins, that has been tested with the latest 3 WordPress major releases. This avoids compatibility issues.

1. WordPress Share Button Plugins – AddThis

AddThis is one of the most popular social share plugins for WordPress blog. The AddThis social share plugin is free to install. Once the installation is done, you can register your free account visiting their website. You can even access this plugin without registering an account from your WordPress dashboard. But this does offer only limited features. To gain all the features, it is better to get a free AddThis account.

Note: This is the plugin I currently integrated at TheRichSecrtes

This plugin almost offers you six different tools includes share buttons. You can easily create share buttons from their website. Under the share buttons tool, you will get further 6 tools including floating, in-line, slider, banner, pop-up and image sharing. Accordingly, you can add a new tool. Among the six, floating and in-line tools are the most popular.

AddThis User Ratings

The AddThis plugin social share buttons support almost 200+ social networking and social bookmarking sites as well. The popular networks such as Twitter, Tumblr. Facebook, Reddit etc.. While creating your share buttons tool, you will have more control to customize the buttons.

The coolest thing about the AddThis plugin is they offer its free users to the Analytics dashboard. You can integrate it with your Google Analytics code to monitor your WordPress blog performance.

2. AddToAny Share Buttons

Another most popular social share plugins AddToAny share buttons play a vital role to turn regular your readers into engaged customers. The share buttons from this plugin definitely offer your readers to try a share. AddToAny supports 100+ social media sites and applications.

AddToAny offers you the custom placement of share buttons service, in which you can place the social share buttons anywhere on your pages and blog posts like before the content, after the content or even both before and after the content.

This kind of custom placement of social share buttons helps you increase more traffic to your blog via social media sources.

AddtoAny User Ratings

Likewise AddThis, the AddToAny plugin also offers you Google Analytics integration to check your blog visits and performance. Another good option, this plugin displays share counts on your WordPress blog pages and posts. When you display share counts (number of total shares you received for the particular page or post), it will increase your blog visitors interest to share your content through the social share buttons.

You do not need to sign up for an account to work with this plugin. You can install the plugin straight from your WordPress dashboard and get started to integrate social share buttons easily on your WordPress blog.

3. WordPress Social Sharing Plugin – Social Warfare

Another best WordPress social sharing plugin on my list is Social Warfare. Available on both free and paid versions. Luckily, this plugin offers you best features even on its free users.

They offer two different sharing options (in terms of social media networks and bookmarking sites) one is free and another one is premium. On the free version supports sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin and Mix whereas Reddit, Whatsapp, Email Share features, Buffer, Tumblr etc…can be accessed only by its premium users.

Fortunately, you will have a support of basic social media networks on Social Warfare plugin. This plugin is believed to be designed by a group of social media marketing experts exclusively to offer users a better social share experience.

Social Warfare User Ratings

You will get high control over the placement of social share buttons on your blog. Apart from default placement options. The Social Warfare plugin offers you to place anywhere as your wish manually with the help of shortcodes.

Floating share button is the highly recommended tool in Social Warfare. As you may hear before about this specific button-tool when your visitors scroll your page upside or downside, the floating share buttons will float automatically and this might boost your visitors thinking about sharing it on some social media sites on a definite note.

Social Warfare plugin offers even more features on their paid plan. If you are targeting Pinterest traffic, then this plugin premium version is a must-buy for you. Image hover button is the key here. With a premium subscription, you can enable image hover pin button on top the images from your blog post or page. Enabling such hover buttons creates high chances of getting more shares among visitors.

4. Shareaholic – Social Sharing Buttons

Shareaholic is a most recommended SEO tool kit by WP Engine. I have tried this social share plugin on one of my blogs personally. I wondered how they can offer such amazing features on their free plan. No doubt, Shareaholic well deserved to say “World’s leading suite of Audience Growth & Engagement Tools”.

This one single plugin Shareaholic has offered almost all the other different features that are offered only in particular by several social sharing plugins. All in Pack for those who searching for a best-in-standard WordPress social sharing plugins.

They offer everything free starting from social share buttons on several social networks to customization, designing of buttons, URL shorteners and even more. The question here is, What not? Yes!! This plugin Shareaholic offers everything a social sharing plugin needs.

This plugin almost crossed version 9+ and typically good at providing regular updates. On their PRO account, they offer you a unique feature that is Share Count Recovery. There are high possibilities that already shared counts on your blog becomes zero when you change URL’s or even switch to Https. The Shareaholic plugin pro version wisely acts here to recover your previous share counts on this situation.

Shareaholic User Ratings

Another promising and free feature, you can have an image hover button on top of any of your blog page or posts images. Apart from the “pin it” button on the image hover, you can also use Twitter and Facebook button let your visitors easily share your content on their social media profiles. No need to jump PRO version to avail this feature.

According to reports, social sharing buttons placed on contents are receiving less social shares compared to buttons on image hover. So, make use of this free feature from Shareaholic and get more social shares.

5. Social Share Icons & Social Share Buttons

The Social Share Icons & Social Share Buttons offers five special features. It supports tons of social media networks from basic networks such as Facebook, Twitter to not so popular networks like Wechat, Weibo etc…

This plugin offers multiple customisation options in which you can design the social share button icons to change it looks and colours accordion to your favour.  Placement of social media buttons on this plugin can be fixed anywhere accordingly whether below or above the post, middle of the post or with the help of shortcodes, you can place manually.

Social Share Icons & Social Share Buttons User Ratings

This is a huge feature, Social Share Icons & Social Share buttons plugin offers 16 design styles in which you can have control to design the share button icons in 16 different designs. Apart from basic customisation options (colours and shapes), this social sharing plugin has its unique feature that you can design animated button designs without knowing any codes. They offer default animated options to choose from. Sounds Damn Cool, Right?

With the help of the plugin, you can easily rearrange the social share button icons as per your wish. For example, if you want the Facebook icon to be displayed as a first button, you can do so by rearranging it.

The plugin also offers a premium plan there you will get more features. Design, customization and animation works can be done even better with a paid plan. A pop-Up option is one great feature here in a paid plan, you can create pop-ups to show your blog exclusive offers and many more.

6. Social Media Share Buttons | MashShare

The plugin does not depend on any external source of scripts and so its definitely worth the try as it never slows down your website performance in terms of loading time. Yes! If a plugin uses external scripts, that’s an obvious factor it does affect your site speed as well as search engine rankings.

With the availability of 100+ social network sites and bookmarking sites icons, MashShare plugin is a great consideration to improve your blog visibility by means of social share buttons. MashShare offers default short URL integration, in which when visitors share your post or page through MashShare plugin social share buttons, the URL will automatically be shortened while displaying on social media sites. For this, you can avail this feature from the plugin settings page.

MashShare User Ratings

MashShare plugin is absolutely free to use. You do not need to create an account with them as you can access the features straight from their plugin page on your WordPress dashboard. They also offer a paid plan, in which you get extra features that you can check on their website.

Likewise other listed social sharing plugins, MashShare also offers placement of share buttons on your own as you can place it anywhere. This seems to be quite a common free feature on all the plugins. It supports display share counts option, also you can get control over changing the colour of social share display counts.

MashShare too offers shortcode parameters in which you can avail their different shortcode parameters for purposes such as share buttons alignment, only show the share button, to show buttons without share count etc..

Things to Notice before Installing any Free Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress

As said, there are hundreds of both free and premium WordPress social sharing plugins to choose from. But, before choosing, you must be aware of something that does not affect your blog performance.

• Light Weight Plugins – Make sure to check the plugin you are going to install on your WordPress blog is lightweight. If not, other plugins may slow down your website speed and this does heavily affect your rankings and so website traffic.
• Customisation and Design Control – Design and look of the social share button icons matters a lot in order to impress your visitors. So, before installation, ensure whether the plugin gives you control over designing the button icons (in terms of animations, shapes and colours)
• Mobile Sharing Optimization – Few plugins failed when it comes to offering mobile optimized features. So, you must be noted that the plugin can offer you social share buttons that compatible and responsive for mobile and tablet devices as well.
• Customer Support – Check whether they offer fast customer support, in case any issues occur on the plugins, you might need to ask customer support to get the issues cleared asap.
• Only for WordPress Sites – Your blog or website must be installed on WordPress CMS as most of these plugins developed exclusively for WordPress blogs and cannot possible to install it on any other platforms.

How to Download and Install Social Share Plugins

The installation process of any of the above-said plugins is quite simple. You will get two different options. Firstly, straight from your WordPress Dashboard, click ‘Plugins’ and then ‘Add New’ as you will take you to a page where you can search with the plugin name and install and activate the plugin easily. This is the most recommended method and takes less than 2 minutes.

Another method, that you have to visit the particular Plugin official WordPress page to download the file. Once the file (zip format) downloaded, you can then come back to your WordPress dashboard, click ‘plugins’ then ‘Add New’ and there is an option to upload your zip file where you can upload the already downloaded zip file and activate it. This is quite a tough task for newbies compared to first one.

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Conclusion

So far I listed out six social sharing plugins for WordPress blogs which are highly recommended by many experts. If I found any other best plugins on the same category, I will be glad to add it here. Also, if you feel, I missed some plugins here, drop me a comment or connect with me through the contact page. I can add here after reviewing it.

As you may be noticed, I have integrated superb social sharing plugins on this blog. You can use the social share buttons to share this post to your friends, buddies and neighbours.