Choosing a social sharing plugin from the WordPress repository is not an easy task. Most of the time, we are spoilt with choices, lack of time and had no idea which review to count on.
Now, hear me out.
This is the only review you need. Yup, I consider myself a WordPress (and social media) junkie who is constantly finding the best plugin for my website is the utmost important thing to do. Perhaps I should say that it is the most logical thing to do.
In this article, I’ll share social sharing plugins that I had used before and my personal review on them. You have been warned, some of these world class plugins are so great that it is hard to decide which to use.
And when that happens, just stick to the one that provides the best design 🙂
6 Social Sharing Plugins You Need For 2015
1. SumoMe
I am attract to SumoMe because it is extremely easy to use, great analytics and tons of features such as custom layouts, different sets of sharing icons depending on desktop or mobile view and the ability to down the sharing report.
If you are wondering, yes I love analytics reports.
SumoMe Pro costs money ($100 a month) but there is a free version of it. In terms of installing, you doesn’t need to worry much as you can either download the plugin or manually adding the code in the heading section of your website.
Besides social sharing, SumoMe also have content analytics, heatmaps and a few more features under the hood.
If you are looking for a plugin that does all of the above, you don’t have to look far. This is the right one for you!
2. Easy Social Share Plugin For WordPress
If you are looking for a fully custom social sharing plugin, you got to use this – trust me.
Among all the social sharing plugins I had used, this is probably the most comprehensive in terms of design and custom settings. Easy Social Share Plugin also comes with inbuilt cache system to ensure that the loading of social counts doesn’t affect the website loading speed.
Easy Social Share Plugin also comes with inbuilt cache system to ensure that the loading of social counts doesn’t affect the website loading speed.
Two of the most popular layouts are the Mashable and CopyBlogger designs. All you need is to click on the selection and importing the designs. Press save and walaa ~ you are all done!
This plugin is sold in CodeCanyon for $14 and trust me, this is probably the best $14 you have ever spend. The support level for this plugin is also awesome. Once purchased, you’ll be given a specific login ID to participate in their private forum.
If you have issues trying to get it work properly, their support team would be delighted to login to your WordPress back-end and fix it for you (which is really good!).
3. WordPress sharing icons
Don’t hate me! It’s the truth. If you are always having serious concerns of website loading speed, the default WordPress sharing icons (setup through the JetPack plugin) is more than plan awesome.
Icons and layouts could be selected from the Settings tab and the social sharing icons will go live within seconds.
Want more good stuff? It doesn’t cost you a dime!
With some coding knowledge, you can easily customize the layout of the icons. If you are using Genesis Framework like me, you can refer to this post on CopyBlogger on ways to customize your Jetpack sharing buttons.
4. Flare
I used Flare in some of my websites and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good social sharing plugin.
This plugin is really simple to use and it comes with the floating sharing bar feature. It has both the free and paid versions of the plugin where paid ones would provide more analytics reports and features.
Flare allows you to setup various points for showing the sharing buttons. For example, you can have before or after posts and even floating sharing icons too.
5. Digg Digg
Build by the Buffer team, this is one of my all-time favorite plugin for social sharing. And if my memory serves me right, this is one of those first few plugins that offers social floating bar.
Don’t worry if WordPress repository is showing that it has not been updated for quite some time. Trust me, it is still working flawlessly.
Until date, Digg Digg is still popular and really light weight. Of course, the only downside using this plugin is that it doesn’t have analytics for your reference.
6. Shareaholic
Shareaholic is a popular social sharing plugin. Until date, this plugin is downloaded over 100,000 times from the WordPress repository.
What I really love about Shareaholic is the ability to generate analytics reports for you. While this plugin does exactly (and slightly above of most of the plugins stated above), it has one positive/negative feature that you need to know.
It has affiliate links (which is good if you want to make a little money) feature which works like Infolinks. The only thing I dislike about this feature is that it is enabled automatically when you sign up or activate the plugin.
The only way to remove the affiliate link feature is by heading over to their website and disable it.
Putting that all aside, I still recommend this social sharing plugin to anyone who is serious in finding a good plugin to get the job done.
So, how about you?
I’m curious to know the type of social sharing plugin that you use for your blog. Leave a comment below and tell me what you think!
See also: Top 10 SEO Tools You Should Be Using In 2015
