Best Floating Share Bar Plugin for WordPress

This week I researched floating share button bar plugins for my websites. A floating share button bar is a widget that remains stationary on either the left or right side of your website with links popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or StumbleUpon. Here is a review of 4 of the top free floating share plugins along with an additional one you may want to check out that I didn’t test myself.

I will add more if I come across other plugins. Feel free to subscribe to comments so you can be updated as well as let me know if you want to suggest any that I don’t cover.

Best Floating Social Media Share Button Bar Plugins

And the winner is…

UPDATE: A New Winner is crowned….

ShareBar. This plugin gives you a customizable floating share bar on either the left or the right. You can customize the color, the border, the width, and the location. A great feature is that this share bar will become a horizontal set of buttons if the browser is not wide enough to display the bar. The buttons available are: Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Share, Buzz, Reddit, DZone, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, DesignFloat, and email. Pinterest is available through the “Share” button. It will be nice when Pinterest is added as well as maybe comments and RSS too. Follow the author of this plugin to stay tuned to updates. Sharebar’s website. Sharebar’s Forum for questions.

The Runners Up….

WP Socializer. This is the best of the runners-up, in my opinion. You can download it here or you can simply go to your WordPress dashboard and add it in the Plugins section. This plugin has a lot of flexibility and ease of use. You can have all the main social media in the floating bar along with options for print, email, and comments. You can additionally have a list of icons at the top and/or bottom of your posts and/or pages too. The author of this plugin seems to be pretty responsive at his forum for questions about the plugin which is a big plus as well. Ultimately I had to switch because it was interfering with my feed and I couldn’t solve that. If it is updated in the future I may switch back because I really like this one!

Digg Digg. You can download it here from the WordPress plugin directory. This one was good, but I found the buttons a little too large for my liking. It has email and print buttons. Worth a look.

Slick Social Share. You can download it here from the WordPress plugin directory. Again the buttons were a little too big for my preference, but it has a cool “slide-out” feature that you may like and many buttons to choose from. This is made by Chemical Design who also makes other plugins both free and premium.

Get Social. You can download it here from the WordPress plugin directory. This one is also nice, with lots of options, but I didn’t care for the “share” logo on the bar. There is a companion plugin that will track all your social media stats which looks attractive.

Others I haven’t tried but look promising….

WP MashSocial Widget. You can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. I don’t know much about this one, except that it was inspired by the share bar on Mashable.com. It is rated 4.2 stars out of 5 on the WordPress plugin directory.

Mashable Social Share Bar – This one you’ll need to know how to hard code this into your theme. They provide the code they are using, but not explicit instructions on how to implement it. If someone knows where detailed instructions are, I will happily add them here.

Additional Resources

Smashing Magazine: 25 Social Media Plugins for WordPress – a list of 25 plugins for social sharing for your website, a few of which are floating, but most are not.

Please Share!

Do you have any Social Media Share Bar plugins to recommend? If you do, please let us know about it in the comments below.

And speaking of sharing on social media, if you found this post valuable, please share it with your friends and the world via your favorite social media! Thanks!