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Want your posts to get shared more?
Easy!
Add social sharing buttons to your posts. Some visitors will use them and for others, it will remind them to share your content however they prefer to do that.
Adding social sharing buttons to WordPress is actually pretty easy. You just need to pick the right plugin.
There are tons of free WordPress plugins for adding social media sharing buttons to your site.
I recommend using the Simple Share Buttons Adder plugin above all others. Here’s why:
- You get control over where the buttons display
- There are lots of style options
- It won’t slow down your site
The first step is to search for “Simple Share Buttons Adder” in your Plugins menu. Then, install and activate the plugin.
Once activated, you’ll find a new Share Buttons submenu under Settings in your dashboard.
Choose your networks
At the top of the settings page, you’ll see there are three tabs. The Classic buttons are really just there for backward compatibility. You should use the Modern share buttons since these ones load faster.
Once in the Modern Share Buttons tab, drag-and-drop any networks you want to display into the box below.
You can add and remove networks any time to customize which buttons display on your site.
This next step is the most important one.
Now that you’ve selected which networks you want to use, you can use this setting to decide where to display the buttons.
There’s a nice variety of options for fine-tuning where the buttons show up. Also, don’t miss the Placement drop-down option. With that setting, you can choose to display the social buttons before, after, or before and after the content.
That pretty much covers how to add social sharing buttons to your WordPress posts and pages.
I won’t cover the rest of this plugin’s settings in detail, but I do want to point out that there are some cool styling options available.
The Styling section lets you choose from 11 different pre-defined styles, plus you can change the color and size of the buttons too.
The Counters section lets you turn on/off the counter next to each network that tells visitors how many times the page has been shared.
There are some neat options in the Advanced section as well and for any developers reading this, you’ll appreciate the simple CSS section for adding a bit of your own code to customize the design of the buttons.
Conclusion
Adding social sharing buttons is easy with the right tools.
While there are a lot of plugins available for this sort of customization, a lot of them are buggy and bloated. The last thing you want to do is slow down your whole site because you added a few social sharing buttons.
If you have any questions or comments about how to add social buttons, please leave a comment below.