Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
Share buttons and pop up share icons for social media sharing
Safe pick
Yes — Social Media Share Buttons & So… is a safe, well-maintained plugin to use in 2026. It runs on 100K+ sites, is rated 4.8/5 and was last updated 1 week ago, and scores 87/100 on our health check.
- Proven at scale on 100K+ active sites
- Loved by users — 4.8/5 from 5,333 reviews
- Actively developed — last update 1 week ago
- Responsive support — 80% of recent threads resolved
How does it stack up?
Side-by-side on installs, updates, ratings & support
Daily downloads
Download spikes usually follow a new release — each site that auto-updates counts as a download.
Rankings
Where Social Media Share Buttons… stands todayWordPress.org search rankings
Live position in the plugin search, top 100| Keyword | Position |
|---|---|
| share | #4 |
| share icons | #1 |
| social | #2 |
| social media | #1 |
| widget | >100 |
Version adoption
Share of active sites per release.
Rating breakdown
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 from 5,333 reviews
About Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sha…
From the official readme · v3.0.2Description
Try it out on your free dummy site: Click here => https://tastewp.com/plugins/ultimate-social-media-icons
(this trick works for all plugins – just replace “wordpress” with “tastewp” in the plugin’s WP repo URL)
Social media plugin which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.
This free plugin has a lot to offer. Even more can be found in the Premium Plugin, please watch this short video:
See all features of the Premium plugin.
The free social media plugin includes the following features:
- Pick from 16 different designs for your social media share icons
- Give several actions to one social media share icon (e.g. your facebook share icon can lead visitors to your Facebook page, and also give visitors the opportunity to like your page)
- Decide to give your social media icons an animation (e.g. automatic shuffling, mouse-over effects) to make your visitors aware of the share icons, increasing the chance that they follow/share your blog
- Make your social media icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’
- Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog by Email
- Add ‘counts’ to your social media buttons
- Decide to display a pop-up (on all or only on selected pages) asking people to follow/share you via your social media icons
- Decide to display sharing-buttons and social media icons at the end of every post
- Select from many other customization features for your socialmedia icons!
For GDPR compliance, please have a look at our Social Media GDPR Compliance page.
The social media plugin is very easy to use as it takes you through all the steps:
- Step 1: Choose which social media icons you want to display
- Step 2: Define what actions your social media icons should perform
- Step 3: Pick design & animation options for your social media icons
- Step 4: Add counts to your social media icons (optional)
- Step 5: Select from various other social share options, e.g. make your social media icons ‘float’
- Step 6: Add sharing/linking icons next to each blog post (optional)
- Step 7: Add a customized pop-up asking people to follow or share (optional)
- Step 8: Add a subscription form on your site (optional)
In case of issues or questions please ask in the Support forum.
We hope you enjoy the free social media plugin!
New premium social share plugin
We released a premium social share plugin with many more exciting features:
- Many more social networks supported, including Snapchat share buttons, Whatsapp share buttons, Yummly share buttons, Phone button, Yelp share buttons, Soundcloud share buttons, Skype share buttons Flickr share buttons, Blogger share buttons, Reddit share buttons, Vimeo share buttons, Tumblr share buttons, Xing share buttons, Xhenta, Vkontakte share buttons (VK), Telegram share buttons, Amazon share buttons, Goodreads share buttons, Angies list share buttons, Steam share buttons, Twitch share buttons, Spotify share buttons, Odnoklassniki share buttons (OK), Buffer share buttons, Weibo share buttons, Pocket share buttons, Meneame share buttons, Frype share buttons, LiveJournal share buttons, Patreon share buttons, Dloky share buttons, Discord share buttons, Github share buttons, WordPress buttons, Etsy share buttons, Better Business Bureau share buttons, Digg share buttons, Delicious share buttons, Print share buttons, and many other share buttons!
- More design styles to make your social share icons look really cool & matching the design of your website
- Themed design styles, e.g. if you have a website about cats you can pick from social media logos which look like cats etc.
- Better social sharing and following features, e.g. you can define the Tweet-texts better (e.g. pull the post titles into your Tweets automatically), let people follow you on Facebook directly without leaving your site etc.
- Place the social icons on specific pages, i.e. you can define on which pages the icons to the social media sites should not show
- Position the social icons by anchor and margins, i.e. you can define the margins where your share icons should be displayed (from top/bottom/left/right), and then have them floating, or stick, still visible when user scrolls down or not etc.
- Optimized for mobile – you can define separate selections for your social network icons for mobile
- More functions for email icon, such as Share (by email), Contact you, Link to a certain page etc.
- Social media counters optimized to encourage more social media sharing from your visitors
- More pop up options which contain your social media buttons, e.g. define a limit to how often the pop-up is shown to the same user, show pop-up only when people try to leave your website etc.
- Friendly support in case you’re stuck
- Many more settings and options for your social media network icons
Have a look at the Premium Plugin features
Installation
Extract the zip file and drop the contents into the wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WordPress installation. Then activate the plugin from the plugins page.
Then go to plugin settings page and follow the instructions. After you’re done, go to the Widget area (Appearance >> Widget) and place the widget on your sidebar to display your social sharing icons on your blog.
Note: This plugin requires CURL to be activated/installed on your server (which should be the standard case), and a PHP version of 5.4 or above. If you don’t have it, please contact your hosting provider or server admin.
Frequently asked questions
Please also check the more comprehensive FAQ on http://ultimatelysocial.com/faq
.
I face fundamental issues (the plugin doesn’t load etc.)
Please ensure that: You’re using the latest version of the plugin(s) Your site is running on PHP 5.4 or above You have CURL activated (should be activated by default) If you’re not familiar with those please contact your hosting company or server admin. Please check if you have browser extensions activated which may conflict with the plugin. Known culprits include: Open SEO Stats (Formerly: PageRank Status) in Chrome Adblock Plus in Chrome Vine in Chrome Either de-activate those extensions or try it in a different browser. If the plugin setting’s area looks ‘funny’ after an upgrade then…
I get error messages ‘Error : 7’, ‘Error : 56’, ‘Error : 6’ etc.
Those point to a CURL-issue on your site. Please contact your server admin or your hosting company to resolve it. The plugin requires CURL for the social share counts and other features.
Social share icons don’t show
Please ensure you actually placed the social share buttons either as social widget (in your widget area) or as floating icons under question 5). The Premium Plugin makes placing the social icons especially easy and also allows you to place sticky social share icons on your site, define the placement of the social share icons by margins and many other options, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/. If only some social share icons show, but not all, then please clear your cache, and check if you may have conflicting browser extensions (e.g. ‘Disconnect’-app in Chrome). Also…
Twitter social share counts are not displaying (anymore)
Unfortunately, Twitter stopped providing any social share count. God knows why.
Changes don’t get saved / Deleted plugin but the social share icons still show
Most likely you have the WP Cache plugin installed. Please de-activate and then re-activate it, then the social share icons should display again.
Links when clicking on the social share icons don’t work
Please ensure you’ve entered the ‘http://’ at the beginning of the url (for all social networks). If the social share icons are not clickable at all there is most likely an issue with your template. This is especially the case if you’ve given your social share buttons several features, which should show a pop-up (tooltip) when you move over the social share icons.
I cannot upload custom social share icons
Most likely that’s because you’ve set ‘allow_url_fopen’ to ‘off’. Please turn it to ‘on’ (or ask your server admin to do so, he’ll know what to do. Tell them you need it to upload custom share icons for a social media buttons plugin).
My Youtube social share icon (direct follow) doesn’t work
Please ensure that you’ve selected the radio button ‘Username’ when you enter a youtube username, or ‘Channel ID’ when you entered a channel ID.
Aligning the social share icons (centered, left- or right-aligned) doesn’t work
The alignment options under question 5 align the social share icons with respect to each other, not where they appear on the page. Our new Premium Plugin is the best social sharing plugin on the market, allowing you to define also many other social share icon alignments (e.g. within a widget, within shortcode etc.).
Clicking on the RSS icon returns funny codes
That’s normal. RSS users will know what to do with it (i.e. copy & paste the url into their RSS readers).
Facebook ‘like’-count isn’t correct
When you ‘like’ something on your blog via facebook it likes the site you’re currently on (e.g. your blog) and not your Facebook page. The new Premium Plugin also allows to show the number of your Facebook page likes, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.
Sharing doesn’t take the right text or picture
We use the share codes from Facebook etc. and therefore don’t have any influence over which text & pic Facebook decides to share. Note that you can define an image as ‘Featured Image’ which tells Facebook etc. to share that one. You’ll find this ‘Featured Image’ section in your blog’s admin area where you can edit your blog post. You can crosscheck which image Facebook will take by entering your url on https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/. UPDATE: we made significant enhancements to the premium plugin, it now allows you to define the sharing pics and texts for your social…
The pop-up shows although I only gave my social share icon one function
The pop-up only disappears if you’ve given your social share icons only a ‘visit us’-function, otherwise (e.g. if you gave it ‘Like’ (on facebook) or ‘Tweet’ functions) a pop-up is still needed because the social share buttons for those are coming directly from the social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and we don’t have any influence over their design.
I selected to display the social share icons after every post but they don’t show
The social share icons usually do show, however not on your blog page, but on your single posts pages. The Premium plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/) also allows to display the social share icons on your homepage.
Plugin decreases my site’s loading speed
The plugin is one of the most optimized social media plugin in terms of impact on a site’s loading speed (optimized code, compressed pictures etc.). If you still experience loading speed issues, please note that: The more sharing- and invite- features you place on your site, the more external codes you load (i.e. from the social media sites; we just use their share code), therefore impacting loading speed. So to prevent this, give your social share icons only ‘Visit us’-functionality rather than sharing-functionalities. We’ve programmed it so that the code for the social media icons is the…
After moving from demo-server to live-server the follow/subscribe-link doesn’t work anymore
Please delete and install the plugin again. If you already placed the code for a subscription form on your site, remove it again and take the new one from the new plugin installation.
There are other issues when I activate the plugin or place the social share icons
Please check the following: The plugin requires that CURL is installed & activated on your server (which should be the standard case). If you don’t have it, please contact your hosting provider. Please ensure that you don’t have any browser extension activated which may conflict with the plugin, esp. those which block certain content. Known culprits include the ‘Disconnect’ extension in Chrome or the ‘Privacy Badger’ extension in Firefox. If issues persist most likely your theme has issues which makes it incompatible with our plugin. Please contact your template creator for that. As part of…
How can I see how many people decided to share or like my post?
You can see this by activating the social share ‘counts’ on the front end (under question 4 in the USM plugin, question 5 in the USM+ plugin). We cannot provide you this data in other ways as it’s coming directly from the social media sites. One exception: if you like to know when people start to follow you by email, then you can get email alerts. For that, please claim your feed (see question above).
How can I change the ‘Please follow & like us :)’?
You can change it in the Widget-area where you dropped the widget (with the social share icons) on the sidebar. Please click on it (on the sidebar), it will open the menu where you can change the text. If you don’t want to show any text, just enter a space (‘ ‘).
Changelog
Tested upto WordPress 7.0.4 [SECURITY] WeChat icons security fix. [OTHER] Other fixes
3.0.2
- Tested upto WordPress 7.0.4
- [SECURITY] WeChat icons security fix.
- [OTHER] Other fixes
Screenshots
For developers
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Best Social Media Share Buttons &… alternatives
All share plugins →
FAQ
Social Media Share Buttons & Social…: quick answers
Straight answers, pulled from live WordPress.org data.
Live data from WordPress.org · checked Sep 26, 2026
Is Social Media Share Buttons & So… free?
Yes. Social Media Share Buttons & So… is free to download and use from the official WordPress.org plugin directory.
Is Social Media Share Buttons & So… safe to use in 2026?
Yes — Social Media Share Buttons & So… is a safe, well-maintained plugin to use in 2026. It runs on 100K+ sites, is rated 4.8/5 and was last updated 1 week ago, and scores 87/100 on our health check.
How many websites use Social Media Share Buttons & So…?
Social Media Share Buttons & So… is active on 100K+ WordPress websites and has been downloaded 12,578,272 times since it launched in September 2014. It was downloaded 90,499 times in the last 30 days.
Does Social Media Share Buttons & So… work with WordPress 7.1?
Social Media Share Buttons & So… is officially tested up to WordPress 7.0.6, while the latest release is 7.1.2. It may still work, but try it on a staging site first.
When was Social Media Share Buttons & So… last updated?
The latest version, 3.0.2, was released on September 18, 2026 (1 week ago).
Who makes Social Media Share Buttons & So…?
Social Media Share Buttons & So… is developed and maintained by Inisev.
What are the best alternatives to Social Media Share Buttons & So…?
The most popular alternatives to Social Media Share Buttons & So… are AddToAny Share Buttons (300K+ installs), Ocean Social Sharing (60K+ installs) and Buttonizer (40K+ installs).
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