9 Best WordPress Social Sharing Plugins Compared – 2020

When considering the must-have features for a blog, magazine, or business WordPress site, what do you generally have on your list?

I would be surprised if your list didn’t include a social sharing tool, considering user sharing through places like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter is essential for accumulating more revenue, drawing customers to your site, and ensuring your business stays connected with customers.

Seeing as how hundreds of social sharing plugins exist all over the internet, developers don’t have the easiest task when whittling down the prospects.

Therefore, we completed the work for you, giving a full examination of each WordPress social sharing plugin, and outlining some of the main advantages of each one.

How I’m Testing These Social Sharing Plugins

Considering a social sharing plugin should complete its task easily, we want to focus on three main areas of concern:

• The settings offered.
• My experience with the UX.
• The website speed after installing each social sharing plugin.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some social plugins are known to significantly slow down websites. Therefore, I’ll use Pingdom and GTmetrix to check out site speeds after the plugins are installed.

Starting out, my test website has the following speeds:

• Pingdom performance grade: 88
• Pingdom load time: 1.19 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.4 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 97%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 90%

Top Social sharing WordPress plugins

1. Monarch

• Price: Elegant Themes Subscription ($89 per year)

Upon landing on the Monarch dashboard, I noticed that the tools were consolidated well, and you receive quite a few social sharing animations and buttons. In terms of the UX, Monarch is the best you can find. I can’t imagine a beginner getting too confused about this. For example, you receive a few social sharing configurations, including sidebars, inlines, pop-ups, fly-ins and social buttons on media. Overall, five locations exist for placing your buttons.

The social following tools speed up your development as well, since it minimizes the need for other plugins. You get to choose from the social network buttons, of which there are 20. Some of the other settings include social network names and follower counts on the buttons, colors, responsiveness and speed optimization. Besides choosing the networks you desire, most of the default settings don’t need to be changed.

Why Use This Plugin?

The easy to use backend dashboard and the beautiful designs of the social share buttons make this a great option for both beginners and expert WordPress users. Since the plugin is also a part of the Elegant Themes subscription, you’ll also get access to other plugins and themes as well. You can learn more in our full Elegant Themes review.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 88
• Pingdom load time: 1.68 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.9 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 95%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 84%

After installing the Monarch plugin, no changes occurred to the site speeds. However, as one might assume, throwing in a few slide-ins and social buttons would be bound to slow it down a bit. The score changes aren’t terrible, but you should be aware of them.

Don’t forget to use our Elegant Themes coupon to get 20% off.

2. Social Warfare

• Price: $29

Social Warfare is pretty much useless without the premium version. If you install the free version and go to the dashboard, you’ll find access to a handful of sharing buttons, and no other features. However, upon activating the premium plan, things change.

For example, you  get access to about 15 social sharing buttons. The buttons are visually displayed on the dashboard, and share counts are optional. The plugin provides settings for positioning your sharing buttons on blog posts and pages, and there’s even a tool for placing a Pinterest hover button on top of images. The primary tabs are called Styles, Social Identity and Advanced, all of which are pretty standard.

My favorite setting provides a click to tweet button on certain lines of text in your blog posts.

Why Use This Plugin?

The social share buttons of this plugin feature animated designs that expand upon hovering over a button. This will greatly help improve user interactions on your website and encourage more visitors to share blog articles.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 79
• Pingdom load time: 1.8 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.4 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 97%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 88%

The score that changed the most was the Pingdom performance grade. Quite a bit actually.

3. Kiwi

• Price: Free

Even though Kiwi is a free WordPress plugin, it offers a set of features that you’d only see in a premium plugin. Made for beginners, Kiwi is a powerful and completely free social sharing plugin that comes with modern and elegant social share button designs that you can customize to your preference.

On the back-end side of the plugin, it offers a simple dashboard to customize the way sharing buttons are shown on your website. You can also drag and drop icons to rearrange the order of the share buttons, change the shape of the buttons, show share counts, and do much more.

In addition, the plugin also supports Google Analytics integration to help you track social share counts and adds a “click to tweet” button in the WordPress editor which you can use to insert tweet buttons inside your blog posts.

Why Use This Plugin?

Kiwi is the ideal social sharing plugin for beginning WordPress users for adding a basic set of social sharing buttons for their website or blog without having to break their bank. The smooth and modern design of the buttons will also improve website interactions as well.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 91
• Pingdom load time: 0.678 milliseconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.2 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 97%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 87%

This plugin was tested using a different test website with 91 Pingdom Rank, 774ms loading speed. On GTmetrix the stats recorded 0.7 loading speed, 97% PageSpeed score, and 88% YSlow score before installing the plugin.

As you can see from the test results, Kiwi didn’t even affect the speed or performance of the website. In fact, it seems like the plugin may have made the website load faster. Well, not really. It’s just that Pingdom is not as reliable as GTmetrix when it comes to site loading speed tests. Either way, the main takeaway is the plugin didn’t affect site speed.

4. Ultimate Social

• Price: $20

With 25 social buttons and 22 fan counters, the options with the Ultimate Social plugin do not disappoint. A few placement options show up on the backend, making it a little more complex than some of the other plugins. That’s not saying much though since the social sharing plugins are always pretty simple. For example, you can insert some of the sharing buttons through shortcodes, widgets and floating bars.

The dashboard settings also offer different color combinations for branding. Not to mention, you can place the fan count and sharing number on the buttons if you’d like. The skins aren’t anything crazy, but they get the job done. The main reason I enjoy this plugin is because it also integrates with platforms like Jigoshop and Easy Digital Downloads.

Why Use This Plugin?

Being able to choose from more than 20 locations and ways to display your social share buttons is the main benefit of using this plugin. However, the developer doesn’t seem to offer customer support for the plugin, which may be a problem if you need help setting it up on your website.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 73
• Pingdom load time: 1.71 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.6 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 97%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 87%

Once again, the Pingdom performance grade went down with one of these plugins.

5. Sumo

• Price: Free

If you’ve tried out Sumo (previously SumoMe) in the past, you know that the tool provides an entire suite of options. However, we’re only looking at the social sharing buttons today. In terms of simplicity, Sumo wins the crown. Activating the plugin only takes a minutes. But then you have to locate the Share app to activate it. I would argue that Sumo provides the largest count of social network buttons. Some of them I’d never even heard of before.

You can manage your layout, inline sharing, mobile optimization, display rules, services, tracking, and more. The dashboard even has a URL shortener for cleaning up the links that get shared from your site. The user experience rocks with Sumo, since you constantly know that you’re in the social sharing section of WordPress, with a popup window that looks far different from the regular WordPress layout.

The only problem I have is how you must activate every element individually in SumoMe. I often forget to do this, assuming that the social buttons are already revealed upon installing the plugin.

Why Use This Plugin?

Sumo is a plugin that offers a suite of tools, including email list building tools and newsletter tools. Using the plugin will grant you access to other tools as well. However, this means you’ll have to connect your website with the Sumo platform. Make sure you know how the company use the data they collect from your website.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 83
• Pingdom load time: 1.28 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 2 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 97%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 88%

Besides the increase in the GTmetrix page load time, this plugin looks pretty darn good when it comes to speed.

6. Social Buzz

• Price: $21

Social Buzz delivers a decent set of features, but the backend looks a little less organized and modern than most of the other plugins. Managing the overall look and style of social buttons only takes a few minutes, and the visuals help out with seeing what you can expect on the frontend. There’s also a little tab for specifying whether or not you’d like to only show share counts after you reach a certain threshold.

Some of the other settings help out with the location of your buttons and whether or not all of the featured buttons come up on every single one of your pages. The tracking pleases me the most, since all of the sharing stats are compared on the dashboard for easy consumption. However, by far the most impressive feature is the graph that shows up next to your sharing buttons. It simulates how popular an article is, pushing more shares and giving your site a unique look.

The graph can be turned off if needed.

Why Use This Plugin?

The creative BuzzFeed-style share counts and the large share buttons that comes with this plugin will definitely help you get more shares, especially if you have a viral news or listicle blog.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 78
• Pingdom load time: 1.5 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 2.3 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 90%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 87%

7. Fixed Social Share

• Price: $19

Customizing your social sharing buttons is incredible on the Fixed Social Share plugin. Each of the buttons has its own page for you to adjust settings like background coloring, hover color, icon color, the actual icon, and the icon URL. The Schema integration is a nice touch, while the custom CSS module is something you can’t find in the majority of plugins on this list.

Displaying the number of shares comes in handy, and you receive a setting that sets a threshold for the number of shares needed before placing the actual number on the button. The button designs are simple, but that’s not a bad thing. You can also customize the exact positioning of your button, with an insane amount of precision.

Why Use This Plugin?

Unlike most other social sharing plugins, this plugin offers a much deeper level of customization for editing the design of each social share button on your website. It’ll help create social share buttons that match your website branding colors.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 83
• Pingdom load time: 1.7 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.8 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 90%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 85%

8. WP Social Sharing

• Price: Free

Besides the free aspect, the WP Social Sharing plugin has a certain amount of cleanliness to it. There’s no doubt that WP Social Sharing is the easiest social sharing plugin to manage. It includes just one page, with a quick list for webmasters to check off boxes and make decisions. Now, this eliminates much of the customization options you would expect from other plugins, but I like WP Social Sharing for the ultimate beginners, or developers who don’t want to think much about social buttons.

Only six social media buttons are provided, so keep that in mind. The settings include options to always show social icons, adjust the positioning, add text to the buttons and move around where the text shows up. A shortcode comes along with the plugin, and you’ll rest easy knowing that each of the social buttons are mobile friendly. Finally, you can choose to place these social buttons on posts, pages or media items. It’s a solid plugin since you don’t have to pay a dime, and the settings aren’t hard to manage.

Why Use This Plugin?

The lightweight design of the plugin is its best feature. Although, in exchange for speed you’ll have to live with its extremely limited features and the limited number of social networks the plugin supports.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 88
• Pingdom load time: 1.30 seconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 1.6 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 96%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 88%

9. AddThis

• Price: Free

AddThis is a yet another free WordPress plugin that allows you to setup social sharing buttons for your website and blog. With over 100,000 active installs, AddThis is one of the most popular free social sharing buttons available on WordPress as well.

AddThis offers multiple ways for you to display social share buttons on your website, including floating share buttons, inline buttons, as well as share buttons on images. In addition to share buttons, AddThis also allows you to get analytics and track clicks by integrating your website with the AddThis platform.

Why Use This Plugin?

While AddThis is a great plugin for beginners and advanced users, the plugin requires connecting your website to AddThis cloud platform for all the tools to function properly.

As with most free plugins, you can never know how the company may use and collect your website data. If you’re concerned about privacy, this may not be the best option for your website.

How Does This Social Sharing Plugin Affect Site Speed?

• Pingdom performance grade: 88
• Pingdom load time: 0.688 milliseconds
• GTmetrix page load time: 2.1 seconds
• GTmetrix PageSpeed score: 93%
• GTmetrix YSlow score: 83%

This plugin was tested using a different test website with 91 Pingdom rank and 774ms loading speed. On GTmetrix the stats recorded 0.7 loading speed, 97% PageSpeed score, and 88% YSlow score before installing the plugin.

As expected, the plugin seems to have affected the page load time quite badly by adding over 1 extra second to the load time. It’s best to avoid this plugin if you’re concerned about your website load times.

Which Social Sharing Plugin is Right for You?

When going strictly based on my personal experience with the social sharing plugins, I would definitely recommend Monarch and Fixed Social Share. Beginners should check out Kiwi, since you don’t have to pay any money, and it offers a smooth share button designs as well as easy to understand dashboard.

Now that we’ve had a chance to go over some of the top social sharing plugins to choose from, let us know if you have any experience with these. If you liked our comparison of top social media plugins, you may also want to take a look at our top backup plugins comparison post.

Share your thoughts in the comments sections below, and feel free to ask us any questions you may have.