Social media has become an integral part of our lives such that having a website or a blog without share tools doesn’t seem normal. People generally have a natural edge to share content they find helpful and intriguing. With platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest being the dominant source of traffic for most websites it has become important to add social sharing capabilities to every website.
Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t have native sharing tools, however, the abundance of social sharing plugins makes it very easy to add sharing tools to your WordPress site with ease. We get a lot of client requests asking us about which sharing plugin to use.
There are plenty WordPress sharing plugins, choosing the right one can be a daunting task, what do you look out for when choosing the right sharing plugin for your website?
Firstly, you should check to make sure the sharing to not obstructive, the worst thing you can add to your website is to create an impossible situation for people to consume your content. This is a major issue that most websites face with pop-ups flyovers etc. Google announced late last year that it would start penalising websites with pop ups on mobile for this very reason.
Another thing that you should consider when you are selecting a WordPress sharing plugin is how fast the plugin loads because speed is such an important part of the user experience. You don’t want a plugin that will slow down your website or slow down your page loads, especially on mobile devices since most users consume content on cell phones and you could also take an SEO hit as well.
Additionally, one thing that we consider before choosing a plug-in for sharing is how aesthetically pleasing it fits the theme that we are building for our user. The last thing you want is a plugin that is not well designed or is janky looking. You want one that is very beautiful and fits with the theme of your website. A nicer looking experience encourages users to stay longer on website decreasing your bounce rate which is such an important metric.
Finally, one last thing that we consider When selecting a sharing plugin for WordPress is the ease-of-use from the user perspective, ease-of-installation from the webmaster point-of-view, configuration options and how functional the plugin is.
In this post we will cover one of the best sharing plugins that we recommend most of our clients; this plugin is called Social Warfare. This is a free plugin on the WordPress.org plugins website. It offers a premium version which is paid and provides advanced features such as analytics, shortcode among others. Most users go with the free version which is usually more than enough for their needs.
Social Warfare is a lightning-fast WordPress plugin that adds sharing capabilities to your website which allows users to share your content easily without hurting the aesthetic look and feel of your website. It is very easy to install and configure. The plugin has a limited set of options and a clear and concise in what it presents. Below is a screenshot of how the plug-in looks like:
To install the plug-in visit the WordPress plugin repository and download it into your plug in directory of of your website, after downloading a plug-in visit the admin page of your website in the plug-in section and enable a plug-in you will be presented with a configuration screen where you can choose two options of where you want the plug-in to be display.
Just as described in the screenshot above you will notice that you can enable the plugin in the plugin admin section and you have the option to choose which social media platform to enable it. After activating the plugin, you see the options and you can set where the plugin should show up on your website
One cool thing about this plugin is it allows you to see your share count across all social media platforms and give you an aggregate to you of this metric this allows you to see high-performing post on your blog or website.
We hope this post helped you choose a very fast and easy to use WordPress plugin for your current website or even your next project. If you want any help with your website visit WPLobster.com for all your WordPress website support and maintenance needs. If you enjoyed this post all or you have a plugin that you tend to prefer for sharing tools on your website feel free to leave a comment below.
