26 July 2022

Social Media Buttons The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

When it comes to social media buttons, there are now so many options out there it’s difficult to know what to use.

Do you go for a free plugin, a paid one, adding code to your site, or just leave the buttons off your site altogether?

There are pros and cons for all of those options.

But how do you decide what’s right for you or whether there’s a better option?

Well, in this post I’m going to go through all of the options and explain why I use a premium plugin called the Ultimate Social Deux.

Table of Contents

FREE PLUGINS

If you search for social media buttons on the WordPress repository you’ll find a multitude of free options.

The trouble is with them being free, many of their developers have already abandoned them and they may no longer work with the latest WordPress version.

Pay close attention to the last updated date and the WordPress version that the plugin is compatible up to.

That way, you’ll know whether the plugin is up to date or whether it could end up breaking your website.

…or even worse leaving your site open to hackers.

Some of the more popular free plugins for social media buttons that are well supported are DiggDigg, Shareaholic and Flare.

PAID PLUGINS

Paying for a plugin will usually get you more options, better coding and premium support, although not always.

Again there are many paid plugins out there for social media buttons and you can find many examples at CodeCanyon.

Personally, I use the Ultimate Social Deux plugin on my blog for a number of reasons, which include:

better load time – it uses lightweight code and loads very quickly;
colour control – I can decide on the colours of the social media buttons;
unlimited placement options – you can pretty much put your social media buttons anywhere, including using shortcodes;
WordPress best practice – the plugin follows best practice so it remains secure and compatible.

I’ll be following up on this post with a review of Ultimate Social Deux in the next few days.

ADDING SOCIAL MEDIA BUTTONS WITH CODE

OK, so this is more than likely going to be the most difficult of all of the options.

You’ll need to visit each of the social media networks and find the code to add their social media buttons.

That’s not the end of it though because you’ll need to style things with some CSS as well to make sure each button lines up correctly.

One thing I’ve found with loading the buttons using code from the various networks is that they tend to load quite slowly.

Even when you load them asynchronously, they can slow down your page quite a bit if you’ve added quite a few buttons.

Hubspot wrote The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Creating Social Media Buttons if you’re thinking of adding your social media buttons using code.

It points you in the right direction for all of the main social media networks.

NOT USING SOCIAL MEDIA BUTTONS

In an ideal scenario, I think this is the one I’d pick.

Why?

Because then loading times would stop being an issue when it comes to these little buttons and there’d be no more jerky scrolling because the javascript was loading slowly.

I also wouldn’t have to decide which buttons I should provide as a sharing option.

In any case, if someone really wants to share your stuff then I suspect they’ll do it whether you have social media buttons installed or not.

Many people who use Pinterest, for example, already have the bookmarklet installed on their browser and similarly with Buffer and Hootsuite, there’s a Chrome extension that many people use to share.

The trouble is, I’m not sure I’m totally convinced of that either, even though some sites have reported increased sharing after they removed the buttons.