Top 13 Free Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress in 2016
Over past few years, social media has rapidly grown its popularity and has become an integral part in online marketing for all scale and sizes of businesses. For the majority of the websites, it has become the second highest source of traffic today. With no doubt, search engine is the first source of traffic. Social media is constantly on the rise and people are found most of the time on various social media platforms.
Why should you have a social sharing plugin in your website?
Research shows that more than 75% of internet users are active on social media, which provides online business a great marketing opportunity not to be ignored. If you are a blogger or a website owner, having social sharing plugins in your website can really help your content to be shared all over the internet through these social sharing plugins. If you search social sharing plugins for WordPress in web, then you will get numbers of great free and premium social sharing plugins. And going through all these plugins and picking up the right plugin can be a real hassle.
We have compiled a list of “Top 13 Free WordPress Social Sharing Plugins in 2016” to help you boost your social shares below. These plugins offer a lot of features that fulfill your needs.
Shareaholic
Previously known as Sexy Bookmarks, Shareaholic is more than just a WordPress social sharing plugin. You can also use this plugin as a content management tool. The social sharing buttons of Shareaholic are visually eye catching than other native buttons. In order to access all the features offered by this plugin, all you need to do is register an account.
The only thing that I don’t like about Shareaholic is by default a popover appears after you share saying “thanks for sharing” which includes an advertisement below. The good news is you can turn off the entire popover or just an advertisement. There’s also a revenue sharing program setup, so you can get profits from the ad. Isn’t it great news?
Features:
Multi share functionality
Supports more than 50 networks
Short code placement
Social analytics supportive
Control whether to display share counts or not
Simple Share Buttons Adder
Just like its name, Simple share buttons by Adder simply adds social sharing buttons to all your posts and pages. To use this light weight plugin, all you need to do is choose your location, placement and share text and images.
Features
Very light weight
Responsive buttons
Custom images supportive
Short codes
Share tags
All share buttons are event tracked
Social Sharing by Danny
Social sharing by Danny is the simplest sharing links solutions that you can add to the end of your posts and pages. This simple yet pretty social sharing plugin shares links for Twitter, Facebook and Google+. This plugin has an overridable filter to set the condition for when to display the sharing links. As there is no heavy scripting included in the plugin, the load times are really fast.
Features
Simple and lightweight
Flexible to use
No script dependencies
Simple icon style with a hover effect
A short code and template functionality
Translation ready
SumoMe
SumoMe is a suite of apps for generating traffics. With SumoMe, it is not necessary for you to use all the apps. You can simply pick the app you want to use by creating an account and then, activate your desired apps and start using it. The social sharing buttons that SumoMe allows you to add performs brilliantly and is called “Share”.
Features
Easy-to-use interface
Share smart functionality
Supports 16 supported social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc
Massive number of button placement options for mobile devices
Social sharing options and customisations
Control over how share counts are displayed
Mashshare
MashShare is an easy-to-set-up eye-catching social sharing plugin which helps you to attract an insane amount of traffic to your WordPress site. The free version of MashShare only supports Facebook and Twitter, which displays the total number of views and shares. You can customise the size of the icons according to your requirement.
Features
Supports Facebook, Twitter and email
Customisable share buttons
Offers privacy protection for your users
No external scripts and count data is loaded which improves the performance
High performance caching functionality
Virtual share count
Works well with every theme
AccessPress Social Share
If you own a blogging website then this plugin is perfect for you. This free WordPress social share plugin supports major social media networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Digg. With this plugin, you can easily share your website content and increase your social reach dramatically. The features include option to select which social media profile to show, user friendly and interactive interface, visitors stats and much more.
Features
Latest use of APIs
5 beautifully designed theme options
Custom CSS
Mobile friendly
Short codes
Cache setting
Free updates for lifetime
AddToAny Share Buttons
AddToAny Share is the most popular social sharing plugin with the perfect functionality that anyone needs ever. This clean and light weighted plugin is simple to use and always updated. AddToAny Share is a universal plugin with active users 300,000+. This plugin comes with inbuilt features such as share buttons, follow buttons, floating share buttons, CSS based, different icons, vectore share, and universal share buttons.
Features
Customisable and extensible
Custom placement
Simple and efficient
Supports more than 100 social media sites and apps
SEO optimised
Analytics integration
Mobile optimised and retina ready
Floating Social Bar
Floating Social Bar is a light weight eye catching social media bar that adds a horizontal floating share bar to your posts, pages and other content. This simple plugin supports social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. One of the wonderful features of Floating Social Bar is it loads scripts only at the time of necessity. This plugin also allows you to drag and drop the social sharing buttons that you want to display.
Features
Easy to use
Slim and fast
SEO Optimised
WordPress verified
Loads script when necessary
Mobile friendly sticky buttons
Works well with all themes
Jetpack
Jetpack is another awesome social sharing plugin which comes with tons of amazing and powerful features such as security services, visitor stats, centralized management, and better image performance and help you to get more traffic. Jetpack comes with 34 modules and the number of modules is continually been increasing. This incredibly versatile plugin supports more than 9 social media networks.
Features
Custom CSS
Centralised management
Better image performance
Security services
Custom placement
Provides traffic growth and insights
Mobile optimised
SEO optimised
AddThis
If you are looking for a social sharing plugin which not only looks best but also has best features then, AddThis plugin is the perfect choice. You have to register with ADDThis service to use this awesome plugin.
Features
More than 20 button styles
Customisable
Share buttons
Sharing sidebar
Mobile sharing toolbar
Offers analytics tracking
Cresta Social Share Counter
This is another easy to use great social sharing WordPress plugin. This simple yet powerful social sharing plugin supports five major social media networks including Facebook, Twitter,Google+, linkedIn and Pinterest. It comes with some amazing features such as an option to let you choose up to 9 button styles, custom button placement, show the floating social buttons and many more.
Features
Show social counter
9 buttons style options
Fade animation
Floating social buttons
Shortcode
Sharify
Sharify is another light weight plugin free plugin for you to add responsive and beautiful social sharing buttons to your WordPress posts and pages. It comes with some very beautiful buttons which looks good on every device and theme. Sharify is faster than other plugins as it comes with caching which makes your site load faster and reduce server load.
Features
Responsive sharing buttons
Option to hide/display sharing buttons
Color changing options of sharing buttons
Share counts for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn
SSL and Shortcode support
SEO optimised
Social Media
Social media is one of the best top rated social sharing plugins which is 100% free and easy to use. With social media, you can easily share your content in more than 200+ social media platforms with a custom logo upload option. This popular social sharing plugin has 50,000+ active users.
Features
Supports more than 200+ social media platforms
Icon placement option before or after the posts
Offers more than 16 pre-made icon themes
Social sharing counts
Beautiful icon animation
Pop-up display option
Several actions to one icon
Translation ready
Final Thoughts, There are tons and tons of other great free and premium social sharing plugins for your WordPress sites other than the plugins that we have mentioned above. However, the above mentioned social sharing plugins are the best of the best and picking any one plugin from above and using it in your website can help you a lot in giving your website traffic a boost. If you want to boost your blog traffic and increase
the search engine rankings of your website then choosing the best free WordPress social sharing plugin is the most important and right thing to do.
What are some of your favorite social sharing plugins? Are you thinking to use any of the social sharing plugins mentioned in our list? We’d love to hear from you, please feel free to comment your likes in the comment section below!
We hope this article helped you to find the right social sharing plugin for your WordPress website. You may also like our post How to Add Instagram Photos and Videos to Your WordPress Site