Social Media Icons

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To add social media icons and links to your WordPress website you will likely end up using one or more of the plugins mentioned in this post. However, if you want, you can go to a web site that will give you free graphics for social media links called Design Deck. At this website you can use these graphics for personal or commercial use, however there are some restrictions on how the zip file is used. Click the Download button.

Simple Social Icons

simple social icons

This plugin allows you to insert social icons in any widget area. Displaying social media buttons on your site encourages users to follow you on different social media networks. You can choose which profiles to link to, customize the color and size of your icons, as well as align them to the left, center, or right, all from the widget form (no settings page necessary!). wpbeginner.com has a short post on this plugin.

Sharing

social media feather

What about sharing? Do you want users to share your posts on their own social media accounts? What if users could just click a button to put your post or page on Facebook or elsewhere? You could consider the plugin Social Media Feather. The social media buttons can be easily and automatically be added to all your posts, pages or any other custom post types.

Also available are plugins like Sharethis, Sociable, and AddtoAny. Sociable has not been updated for some time.

You could use a WordPress plugin called Social Snap. Here is an article over at wpbeginner.com called How to Add Social Share Buttons in WordPress (Beginner’s Guide).

Floating Social Bar

wpbeginner.com created the Floating Social Bar plugin and has this to say about their plugin…

Most social media plugins for WordPress come with a lot of bloat. With countless social networks that no body wants, and unnecessary scripts that slow down your website. Floating Social Bar is the best social media plugin for WordPress, it allows you to add only a handful of social networks that really matter. It is highly optimized for speed so that your social buttons don’t slow down your website. Floating Social Bar adds a horizontal share bar on your blog posts, and pages. The floating technique positively reinforces your users to share your content which results in an increase of social media shares.