Social Sharing Plugins

byBPanzer

743 followers

6 years ago

Good morning my Wealthy Affiliate family! I haven't been as active these past few days, because my main focus has been on building up my website. It can be a very time-consuming (but rewarding) task indeed!

Recently I have been playing around with different social media sharing icon plugins, and thought that I would share with you my experience on what different ones do, and how they may work for you and your website.

First off, I'm not sure if this is suggested for most WordPress templates, but on the theme I went with, WordPress recommended that I activate "Booster Extension" for social sharing, and other bonus features, so I went with the suggestion from WordPress to activate it. Can honestly say, that after spending over an hour fooling around with the settings, I ended up deactivating it, because I did not like all the features it came with (for it did not let me pick and choose which the ones I liked, but installed everything instead), and did not work with the theme I was going for.

I was aiming to keep it simple, by incorporating the share icons, and possibly a "sign-up for my newsletter" link/pop-up, but the Booster Extension was anything but simple. It added thumbs up/thumbs down options for all of my post images, as well as ten different smiley mood faces to choose from at the bottom of my post, and a few other features I was not crazy about. These are all great features, however, they you brightly colored and cartoonish, and did not go with my theme whatsoever.

The search continued for another social sharing plugin. This time I tried the first option that popped up in my search (since I got a ton of good reviews), and it was called "Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)." This one did have a good bit of options for how you wanted your icons displayed, but again, it took me a while of playing with it to find a set up I liked. They also are really big about pushing you to go premium status. After testing my icon links, I realized that this plugin still was not the one for me, because I wanted my share links to open into a new window, and not take a person away from my website, by sending them to their social media page and off of my site.

So, once again, the search continued. Finally, I stumbled across a plugin that has all that I am looking for, and does not push you to upgrade in any way. This one is called "Sassy Social Share." I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical about it being the clean and simple platform I was looking for by their name, but I stood corrected, for it was everything I needed, and looks great on my website! Which goes to show, that you should never judge a book by its cover!

Just wanted to share, so that my experience can help save someone else time who is just looking for a simple social share plugin, without all the bells and whistles.

Hope you are having a great day! If you have found other sharing plugins you love that are even better, then please let me know!

Thank you!

~Brandy