Best Social Media Plugins for WordPress 2025
WordPress social media plugins help you share content, display social feeds, and encourage sharing — but many are performance nightmares. This guide covers the best-performing options that don’t slow your site.
The Performance Warning
Many popular social media plugins (AddThis, ShareThis, old versions of social sharing plugins) load heavy external scripts that dramatically slow page load times. A social sharing plugin that adds 500ms to your load time costs more in SEO rankings and conversions than it gains in shares.
The plugins in this list are tested for minimal performance impact.
Social Sharing Button Plugins
1. Social Snap — Best Overall
Price: Free / $39+/year
Social Snap is the best balance of features and performance. Its sharing buttons are lightweight, highly customizable (placement, design, networks), and include click-to-tweet functionality.
Networks: Facebook, Twitter/X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more.
Best features: Click-to-tweet, floating sidebar buttons, share count display, Open Graph integration.
2. Social Warfare — Best for Pinterest
Price: Free / $29+/year
Social Warfare is particularly good for Pinterest traffic. Its pin-specific image feature lets you set a custom image for Pinterest pinning (different from your post’s featured image) — critical for optimizing Pinterest content.
Best for: Visual sites, food blogs, lifestyle brands, fashion — any site with strong Pinterest potential.
3. Grow by Mediavine — Best for Ad-Monetized Blogs
Price: Free
Grow is the official social sharing plugin from Mediavine. It’s built for performance on ad-heavy blogs and includes email signup integration. Free for all users.
4. Lightweight Social Share — Best Minimal Option
Price: Free
For sites that need simple sharing buttons with zero performance overhead. No share counts, no external scripts — just clean, fast sharing links.
Social Feed Plugins
5. Smash Balloon — Best Social Feed Plugin Suite
Price: Free / $49+/year per platform
Smash Balloon creates beautiful, custom-styled feeds from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. Its feeds are cached on your server — no loading from external APIs on every page view.
Best for: Displaying Instagram or YouTube content on your homepage or blog sidebar.
Auto-Publishing and Scheduling
6. Revive Old Posts
Price: Free / $75+/year
Revive Old Posts automatically shares your blog posts to social media — both new content when published and old content on a rotating schedule. Connects to Twitter/X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
This is one of the highest-value WordPress social plugins because it generates ongoing social traffic from content you’ve already created.
7. Blog2Social
Price: Free / $7+/month
Blog2Social lets you auto-publish to more networks than Revive Old Posts, including Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and more. The paid version lets you customize the social post for each network.
Social Login
8. Nextend Social Login
Price: Free (basic) / $49+/year (Pro)
Adds “Login with Google/Facebook” buttons to your WordPress login and WooCommerce checkout. Reduces friction for new user registration — important for membership sites and ecommerce.
WooCommerce Social Proof
9. FOMO / WooCommerce Live Sales Notification
Price: Free / varies
Displays real-time “X people bought this recently” notifications. Strong psychological trigger that increases conversions on product pages.
Performance Best Practices for Social Plugins
- Test your PageSpeed before and after installing any social plugin — use Google PageSpeed Insights
- Avoid loading share count APIs — making API calls to get share counts adds latency
- Use async loading where available — prevent social scripts from blocking page rendering
- Don’t stack sharing plugins — choose one comprehensive plugin rather than multiple
For a broader social media strategy, see our social media management guide for WordPress.
Useful resources: