Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Chaos Engineering might sound like a buzzword - but take it from someone who used to joke his job title was Chief Chaos Engineer (more on that later) it is much more than buzz or a passing fad - it’s a practice.
The world can be a scary place and more and more companies are beginning to turn to Chaos Engineering to proactively poke and prod their systems and in doing so are improving their reliability and guarding against unexpected failures in production and unplanned downtime.
WordCamp Birmingham’s organizers announced today that the in-person event planned for the first week in February is now postponed until April or May. Organizers had been planning the event since August 2021 and had just announced the last group of speakers a week ago.
“In the last 30 days, our local COVID-19 numbers have risen dramatically as a result of the highly-transmissible Omicron variant,” lead organizer Ryan Marks said in the announcement.
“The WordPress community is bigger than any single WordCamp. We cannot in good conscience continue forward with our event, given the current risk, since this decision could negatively impact other in-person WordCamps currently in the planning stages.”
Marks said all attendees will be automatically refunded within the next few days. WordPress Community Support administrator Angela Jin has prepared an official letter for those who need proof of cancellation for getting travel refunded.
WordCamp Birmingham organizers are looking at dates in April or May, 2022, but said that rescheduling will depend on local infection rates and venue availability. Their contract with the Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema allowed organizers to cancel without any loss of deposit as long as they gave more than seven days notice.
The event’s COVID-19 safety protocols, which were written before Omicron was spreading in the area, came under greater scrutiny a week ago. Shortly thereafter, organizers updated the guidelines to have a more rigid masking requirement, but some attendees and sponsors had already decided not to attend due to current conditions.
While WordCamp Birmingham organizers worked to update the COVID-19 safety protocols, more concerned community members condemned the gathering as “irresponsible” at a time when hospitals have been pushed to the brink.
Organizers continued to monitor the situation, hoping for the opportunity to hold a safe event. After assessing the timing of the event and the level of community spread, they unanimously decided to that it was necessary to postpone. They had also reached the point where some of their payments would have been nonrefundable and needed to act in stewardship of their funds.
“We knew that being the first in-person US WordCamp was both a risk and a responsibility,” lead organizer Ryan Marks said. “If we could do it safely, other WordCamps in the US could do the same. If lots of people got sick, we’d set back US WordCamps such as Montclair, NJ, and Buffalo, NY, and possibly the global program as a whole from moving toward having safe in-person WordCamps.
“We saw news reports and estimates indicating Omicron cases would be peaking right as we were hosting WordCamp. That was sufficient for our organizing team to make the call to postpone. Pushing the event a couple months could mean a much safer event for everyone.”
Alabama has the second lowest percentage of vaccinated residents in the US, with just 48.1% fully vaccinated. The state currently has an average positive test rate of 37.4%. More than 25% of Alabama students have shifted to remote learning as more school systems have had to close due to record-breaking COVID rates.
“Our problem is we just don’t have enough adults to safely and effectively operate the school…in some cases, now we’re seeing up to 35% of the faculty report that they have COVID, or they’re close contact,” Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey told AL.com. The local mitigation efforts are not working to slow the spread of Omicron in the Birmingham area right now.
Many attendees communicated their disappointment about the postponed WordCamp on social media but were supportive of the organizers’ decision.
When WordCamp Birmingham’s organizers began planning in August, they had no idea that a new more transmissible variant would be making its way across the world just as the in-person event was set to kick off. The timing is unfortunate, and the stakes are too high to risk pushing forward.
WordCamp Birmingham’s previously selected speakers will be invited to speak at the rescheduled event, pandemic conditions permitting. The 200 people who signed up to attend will need to buy their tickets again and reschedule their accomodations.
“Our goal is to have the same great event we have currently planned, just a bit later,” Marks said.
In Scenario 2a we introduced the App Connect 'operator'. This works as a sort of digital assistant to help us look after App Connect containers. In that scenario, we used the operator to deploy a container via the Kubernetes command line. In this scenario, we're going to do exactly the same deployment but instead through a user interface known as the App Connect Dashboard.
The App Connect Dashboard is a user interface that provides a simplified way to deploy BAR files within App Connect containers and administer them once live. Some of the facilities it provides are:
Last week, Wicked Plugins launched version 1.0 of its Wicked Block Builder. I have kept my eye on this plugin since its November 2021 beta release. The project promised that developers would be able to “effortlessly build custom blocks,” and I was finally ready to put that to the test.
In the past two months, I have activated the plugin every so often. I knew a review of it would take me a while, and I would deactivate it before diving in. I kept feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of it — there are tons of settings to configure. The holiday season did not help either. I wanted to sit down with a clear head and decide whether this plugin was something developers in the WP Tavern audience should put in their toolbox.
The short answer: yes.
Or, at least you should give it a spin to see how it compares to similar plugins. This is a version 1.x project, so there are still some missing pieces. However, it will make client builds easier to put together without writing anything more than CSS for custom blocks.
When I first began using the plugin, I seemed to hit issue after issue. Like always, I was trying to run before I could walk. I like to test new plugins at full speed and often forget to stop and RTFM. With complex projects like Wicked Block Builder, I must remind myself that it is OK to seek help from the docs.
The plugin has a bit of a learning curve if you want to do anything advanced. My suggestion is to do the opposite of what I did. Start with a simple use case.
Fortunately, the plugin development team has a tutorial video that will have you building custom blocks in less than five minutes. I recommend following along when creating your first.
Once I hopped over that initial hurdle, using the plugin was a breeze.
The plugin allows developers to add blocks, block categories, patterns, and pattern categories. I primarily focused on block creation. The plugin worked in much the same way as other pattern builders.
Following along with the tutorial video, I created a Resource Card block. It included an image, title, summary, and button.
There are multiple tabs for developers to build out their blocks. Aside from the primary Settings tab, most of the work will happen under Attributes and Editor View. The Front-end View is only necessary if the block’s output does not match what it looks like in the editor. The screen also has a Styles panel for adding custom CSS, which is loaded for the editor and front-end.
The UI seems mostly straightforward when following along with the tutorial. However, there are tons of options, and it is easy to get lost once you start digging into them all.
Once I pieced together my custom block, it correctly appeared in the inserter. I also tested a slash command for /resource card to ensure it worked.
A couple of missing features I immediately noticed once inserting my block was a custom icon and example/preview. Both are relatively simple to add when creating a block type from code, so I hope they are on the agenda for a future version.
While searching for the custom block type via the inserter worked, I would also welcome an option to create custom keywords.
I filled in the details of the Resource Card block and saved it.
To my surprise, I did not break anything. I began wondering, Could creating blocks be this easy?
I ran through a few other simple block ideas, and the experience was enjoyable. While I no longer work with clients, I could see how this could save hours. Pairing it with template locking would also be a routine use case so that clients would only need to plug in their content and publish.
There are some block-supported features that I would like to see added. The plugin currently allows devs to enable alignment and wide alignment. However, others like spacing, typography, and color would be easy wins.
I tested the free version of the Wicked Block Builder. For simple blocks, it worked well. For more complex use cases, developers will need to upgrade to the pro version. It runs between $49 and $299 per year, depending on the number of supported sites.
While I have not tested the pro version, it does offer post and term selects, repeater fields, conditional logic, and inner-block support. After exhausting the basics, these will likely be necessary on some projects. However, the free version can still get you pretty far.
Hadoop was developed 13 years ago. Its suppliers have been enthusiastic about offering open-source plug-ins, as well as technical solutions. This, on one hand, has resolved the problems of users, while it has also led to the high cost of maintenance, thus Hadoop gradually lost its share of the market. Users are calling for a simple and scalable database at a low cost, therefore the column DDBs got increased attention.
ClickHouse is an open-source database by the owner of Yandex, Russia's largest search engine. It has an enhanced performance compared to many commercial MPP databases, such as Vertica or InfiniDB. ClickHouse has gained increased popularity among companies besides Yandex, for the ordinary analytical business which is more structured and has fewer data changes, they can be put into flat tables and into ClickHouse thereafter.
Now that 2021 has come and gone, it’s possible for SREs to look back definitively at the major incidents that occurred during the past year. Let’s do that in this post by examining outages on platforms like AWS, Verizon, and beyond — and what SREs can learn from these incidents.
2021 was not an excellent year for AWS, which suffered multiple network outages.
The team behind machine learning library Flink ML recently released version 2.0, including an updated API and a Python SDK. Flink ML, part of the Apache Flink stream processing framework, is a library that provides APIs and infrastructure for building machine learning algorithms. The previous API version required users to implement their own machine learning algorithms while the new version includes several basic off-the-shelf algorithms.
Business cards are no longer used just to provide basic information about yourself and your company. Today, more and more companies are using creatively designed business cards to convey the image and personality of their businesses to leave a long lasting impression. In this post you will see business card designs ranging from really creative to very simple and...
The post 50 New Inspiring Business Card Designs appeared first on DesignrFix.
There’s a whole host of WordPress Real Estate plugins out there for when it comes to building a real estate website with WordPress. Some of these plugins are great options that will not only make your life a lot easier but will have a noticeable impact on your business. In this article, you’ll find a selection […]
The post The Best Real Estate WordPress Plugins appeared first on WPExplorer.
Like many developers, I’ve decided to redo my portfolio in the summer of 2021. I wanted to do everything from scratch, including the design and development, because I liked the idea of:
I know that I wanted to do something simple but efficient. I’ve tried many times to do another portfolio but I’ve always felt stuck at some point and wanted to wipe everything clean by remaking the design or the entire development. I talked to many developers about this and I think that we all know this feeling of getting tired of a project because of how long it is taking to finish. For the first time, I’ve managed to never get this feeling simply by designing this entire project in one afternoon and developing it in two weeks.
Without going further, I want to point out that prior to that I’ve studied @lhbizarro’s course on how to create an immersive website from scratch and I would not have been able to create my portfolio this fast without. It is a true wealth of knowledge that I now use on a regular basis.
One of the best tips that I can give to any developer in order to not get tired of doing their portfolio is to go as fast as possible. If you know that you get tired easily with a project, I highly suggest doing it when you have the time and then rush it like crazy. This goes for the coding and for the design part.
Get inspired by websites that you like, find colours that match your vibe, fonts that you like, use your favourite design tool and don’t overthink it.
Things can always get better but if you don’t stick to what you’re doing you will never be able to finish it.
I’m really proud and happy about my portfolio but I know that it isn’t that creative and that crazy compared to stuff that you can see online. I’ve set the bar at a level that I knew I could reach and I think that this is a good way of being sure that you’ll have a new website that will make you progress and feel good about yourself.
For the different text animations I’ve chose to do something that I’ve been doing a long time, which is animating lines for paragraphs and letters or words for titles with the help of the Intersection Observer API.
Using it is the most efficient and optimal way to do such animations as it only triggers once in your browser and allows you to have many spans translating without making your user’s machine launch like a rocket.
You have to know that, the more elements there are to animate, the harder it will be to have a smooth experience on every device, which is why I used the least amount of spans to do my animations.
To split my text I always use GSAP’s SplitText because it spoon-feeds you the least fun part of the work. It’s really easy to use and never disappoints.
There is multiple ways of animating your divs or spans and I’ve decided to show you two ways of doing it:
Controlling an animation entirely with JavaScript allows you to have code that’s easier to read and understand because everything will be in the same file. But it could a bit less optimal because you’ll be using JavaScript animation libraries.
Open the following example to see the code:
With CSS your code can get a bit out of hand if you are not organised. There’s a lot more classes to take care of. It’s up to you what you prefer to use but I feel like it’s important to talk about both options because each can have their advantages and disadvantages depending on your needs.
The next example shows how to do it with CSS + JS (open the Codesandbox):
I’d like to show you the HTML and CSS part of the infinite slider on my portfolio. If you’d like to understand the WebGL part, I can recommend the following tutorial: Creating an Infinite Circular Gallery using WebGL with OGL and GLSL Shaders
The main idea of an infinite slider is to duplicate the actual content so that you can never see the end of it.
You can see the example here (open the Codesandbox for a better scroll experience):
Basically, you wrap everything in a big division that contains the doubled content and when you’ve translated the equivalent of 50% of the big wrapper, you put everything back to its initial position. It’s more like an illusion and it will make more sense when you look at this schematic drawing:
At this very moment the big wrapper snaps back to its initial position to mimic the effect of an infinite slider.
Although I won’t explain the WebGL part because Luis already explains it in his tutorial, I do want to talk about the post-processing part with OGL because I love this process and it provides a very powerful way of adding interactions to your website.
To do the post-processing, all you need is the following:
this.post = new Post(this.gl);
this.pass = this.post.addPass({
fragment,
uniforms: {
uResolution: {
value: new Vec2(1, window.innerHeight / window.innerWidth)
},
uMouse: {
value: new Vec2()
},
uVelo: {
value: 0
},
uAmount: {
value: 0
}
}
});We pass the mouse position, velocity and the time to the uniform. It will allow us to create a grain effect, and an RGB distortion based on the mouse position. You can find many shaders like this and I find it really cool to have it. And it’s not that hard to implement.
float circle(vec2 uv, vec2 disc_center, float disc_radius, float border_size) {
uv -= disc_center;
uv*= uResolution;
float dist = sqrt(dot(uv, uv));
return smoothstep(disc_radius+border_size, disc_radius-border_size, dist);
}
float random( vec2 p )
{
vec2 K1 = vec2(
23.14069263277926,
2.665144142690225
);
return fract( cos( dot(p,K1) ) * 12345.6789 );
}
void main() {
vec2 newUV = vUv;
float c = circle(newUV, uMouse, 0.0, 0.6);
float r = texture2D(tMap, newUV.xy += c * (uVelo * .9)).x;
float g = texture2D(tMap, newUV.xy += c * (uVelo * .925)).y;
float b = texture2D(tMap, newUV.xy += c * (uVelo * .95)).z;
vec4 newColor = vec4(r, g, b, 1.);
newUV.y *= random(vec2(newUV.y, uAmount));
newColor.rgb += random(newUV)* 0.10;
gl_FragColor = newColor;
}You can find the complete implementation here:
I hoped that you liked this case study and learned a few tips and tricks! If you have any questions you can hit me up @anatoletouvron 
The post Case Study: Anatole Touvron’s Portfolio appeared first on Codrops.
Are you looking for the best social media plugins for your WordPress site?
There are so many social media plugins available for WordPress that it becomes overwhelming for beginners to choose the best plugin.
In this article, we will share our expert pick of the best social media plugins for WordPress that you can install right away.
The main problem with most social media plugins for WordPress is performance. Since these plugins have to load additional stylesheets and scripts, they often slow down your website. For more on this topic, see our article on how WordPress plugins affect your site’s load time.
You need to find a balance between features and performance of your WordPress site. A social media plugin with lots of features can become less useful if it’s slowing down your website and affecting user experience.
Next, you need to decide which social networks will be more prominently displayed on your website. Adding fewer options can reduce clutter and offer a better user experience.
Many social media plugins allow you to show social icons in sidebar, below article, before article, and so on. You need to decide how you would like to display them on your site and if the plugin supports that option.
Unlike other best WordPress social media plugin lists, we’ll only share the plugins that are built with performance in mind. Each of these plugins will cover various different social media use-cases, so there won’t be too many plugins that have duplicate functionality.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the best social media plugins for WordPress.
Want to display your Instagram photos in WordPress? Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed allows you to beautifully display your recent Instagram photos in WordPress. It’s the most popular social feed plugin used by over 1 million websites.
It’s highly customizable, and you can select from one of the many feed layouts including hashtag feeds, shoppable feed, Instagram stories, and more. You can even selectively display user-generated content on your site with the built-in moderation system.
Smash Balloon has all the advanced features you can think of such as ability to highlight specific Instagram posts, display items you’re tagged in, combine multiple Instagram account content in one feed, and more.
The best part is that that all images are cached, so your site will be blazing fast. You can also embed the feed anywhere on your site including blog posts, pages, sidebar, product pages, and more.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to create a custom Instagram photo feed in WordPress.
Note: There’s also a free version of Instagram Feed for WordPress by Smash Balloon that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
Shared Counts is a fast and easy to use social media plugin for WordPress. It comes with a limited number of the most popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Yummly, and LinkedIn.
There are multiple button styles, and you can choose where to show the button (before or after the content or manually). You can also enable it for custom post types.
The plugin tries to get social share count for each network. You can also choose to just show the total number of shares on all networks.
We’re using Shared Counts for WPBeginner social share buttons.
Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin. It helps you connect your WordPress site with your favorite apps, so you can automate routine tasks and save time.
For example, you can use it to setup a workflow that automatically share your new blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The best part is that you can setup automations without any coding skills. It’s a point-and-click set up.
If you’re running an online store, then you can setup smart automations like asking users to share a testimonial after they make a purchase. If you’re selling online courses, then you can ask users to share their certificate photo on Instagram to get additional rewards.
Uncanny Automator also lets you connect your WordPress site with dozens of other popular apps like Google Sheet, Slack, MailChimp, Zoom, and more.
This is why it’s in our list of must have WordPress plugins for all websites.
Note: There’s also a free version of Uncanny Automator that comes with basic integrations that you can use to get started with.
Want to display custom Facebook feed in WordPress? Smash Balloon Facebook Feed allows you to seamlessly integrate your Facebook content in WordPress. It’s the most popular social feed plugin used by over 200,000 websites.
You can use it to display your Facebook page content, photos, videos, albums, and events. There’s also a feed template to showcase your Facebook group content.
All Facebook feeds can be customized with an easy to use custom feed builder that allows you to filter posts, show comments & reactions, and more.
Smash Balloon has all the advanced features you can think of such as ability to display live video, filter posts by word or hashtag, combine multiple Facebook account content in one feed, and more.
The best part is that that all images are cached, so your site will be blazing fast. You can also embed the feed anywhere on your site including blog posts, pages, sidebar, product pages, and more.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to create a custom Facebook feed in WordPress.
Note: There’s also a free version of Facebook Feed for WordPress by Smash Balloon that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin used by over 3 million websites. Aside from helping you optimize your WordPress site for higher SEO rankings, it also helps you optimize your website for social media.
All social media networks rely on meta data to display the right images and content when someone shares a page from your site.
AIOSEO lets you set custom thumbnails for social media networks like Facebook, so you can fix the wrong Facebook thumbnail image issue for your site.
It also lets you set up Twitter cards for WordPress, so you can get rich snippets on Twitter. The best part is that you get a full social preview for each post and page inside the WordPress block editor, so you can control exactly how your content will look on social media platforms.
AIOSEO also lets you enter social profiles for your website and author for SEO knowledge panels inside Google which can help boost your rankings.
Last but not least, it has the ability to enter social media ownership verification code that you’re often asked to add to claim ownership of your page and unlock additional analytics on platforms like Facebook and Pinterest.
For all these reasons, we use AIOSEO on WPBeginner to improve our SEO and social rankings.
Note: There’s a free version of AIOSEO available that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
Want to display custom Twitter feeds in WordPress? Smash Balloon, the leading social feed plugin for WordPress, has a custom Twitter feed plugin that lets you seamlessly integrate Twitter content into their WordPress site. It’s trusted by over 100,000 website owners.
Smash Balloon Twitter plugin comes with 6 different feed types including user tweets timeline, mentions timeline, home timeline, twitter hashtag feed, twitter search terms, and more.
All feed layouts are highly customizable, so you can use it to match your brand colors and styles. You can use multi-column masonry layout, display tweets in rotating carousel sliders, add infinite scroll for tweets, and show Tweet engagement stats including Like, Retweet, and replies.
You can combine multiple Twitter account feeds into one, moderate which tweet shows up on your site from a specific hashtag (great for user reviews), enable Twitter card view, and more.
Smash Balloon Twitter Card plugin has built-in post caching, so it always loads fast, and the best part is that it’s GDPR compliant.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to create a custom Twitter feed in WordPress.
Note: There’s also a free version of Twitter Feed for WordPress by Smash Balloon that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin to help you grow your website traffic and social media followers using viral giveaways and contest.
It comes with a drag & drop giveaway builder and tons of pre-built viral giveaway templates that are designed to help you get more subscribers, improve social engagement, and increase your traffic.
RafflePress seamlessly integrates with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Their viral refer-a-friend feature is really powerful and can truly supercharge your growth.
You can use giveaway actions to get more video views, get more followers on Instagram, get more likes on Facebook, increase twitter followers, get more blog comments, and more.
Users can get more entries in the giveaway by completing giveaway actions. RafflePress lets you combine multiple entries, so you can get maximum benefits. Since it integrates with all the best email marketing services, you can use the giveaway to also get more email subscribers.
We use RafflePress to run giveaways on WPBeginner site, and it’s a must have WordPress plugin if you want to grow faster.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to create a giveaway in WordPress to grow your social media following.
Note: There’s also a free version of RafflePress but it has limited entry options. To get the full power, you need to use the Pro version.
MonsterInsights is the best WordPress analytics plugin used by over 3 million websites. It helps you properly setup Google Analytics and see the stats that matter right inside your WordPress dashboard.
We believe you can’t improve what you can’t measure. It’s a lot easier to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website.
MonsterInsights helps you identify which social media networks and campaigns are working the best, so you can double down on what works and stop wasting time on what doesn’t.
You can use it to unlock easy-win opportunities, improve conversions, and grow your revenue.
The best part is that it’s user-friendly so you don’t have to be a data-nerd to see how your social media efforts are performing.
It also comes with other powerful features like the Headline Analyzer which helps you write more click-worthy headlines to boost your social media traffic. There is also a popular posts addon that lets you showcase your most popular content in your WordPress homepage, sidebar, and other areas.
We use MonsterInsights to power our website analytics on WPBeginner.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to properly set up Google Analytics in WordPress.
Note: There’s also a free version of MonsterInsights that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
Want to display custom YouTube feed in WordPress? Smash Balloon YouTube Feed allows you to seamlessly integrate your YouTube content in WordPress. It’s the most popular YouTube feed plugin used by over 30,000 websites.
You can use it to display your latest YouTube videos from your channel, display playlists, embed YouTube live streams, and more. It comes with multiple layout options, so you can display the content how you want without any restrictions.
It comes with multiple YouTube feed layouts including grid, gallery, list, and carousel slider.
You can also use this YouTube plugin to curate content from your favorite channels, selectively show videos with certain keywords in title, convert videos into new posts on your website, and even build custom YouTube feeds using tailored search queries.
Smash Balloon has all the advanced features you can think of such as ability to have custom pause and end actions for product placements, smart loading of YouTube players to boost website speed, Gutenberg block editor support, and more.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to create a custom YouTube feed in WordPress.
Note: There’s also a free version of YouTube Feed for WordPress by Smash Balloon that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
Pretty Links is one of the best affiliate and link shortening plugin for WordPress used by over 300,000 websites.
It makes it easy to share brandable short links on your social media profiles. This is great for sharing affiliate links or product links on your Instagram stories, reels, YouTube videos, podcasts, and more.
The benefit of Pretty Links is that it lets you create links that are memorable and easy to type for your users.
You can easily track all the link clicks and manage them from a central place inside your WordPress dashboard.
Aside from the social media benefits, it also comes with smart content marketing features to boost affiliate revenue such as automatic keyword replacement, advanced redirect types, and more.
Note: There’s also a free version of Pretty Links that comes with basic features that you can use to get started with.
SeedProd is the best WordPress page builder plugin used by over 1 million websites. It comes with a drag & drop page builder that you can use to create custom landing pages and even completely custom WordPress themes (no coding needed).
The best part is that it comes with social media integration that you can use to create a link in bio page for your Instagram profile.
SeedProd comes with over 150+ pre-made page layouts that you can use to create custom sales pages, webinar landing page, and just about every type of landing page that you can imagine.
A lot of bloggers and website owners use SeedProd to create custom landing pages for social media campaigns.
It seamlessly integrates with popular email marketing services and other third-party platforms.
Note: There’s also a free version of SeedProd that comes with essential features that you can use to get started with.
Smash Balloon Social Wall plugin lets you create a smart community page on your website that combines the social media content from your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channel.
It’s super simple to set up and is one of the easiest ways to increase social engagement. You can choose from the Grid, List, or Carousel layout to highlight your best social media posts.
You can see the demo of Social Wall here.
This plugin is not a standalone plugin, and it only works when you have the other social media feeds plugin from Smash Balloon.
OptinMonster is the best WordPress popup plugin in the market used by over 1 million websites. It helps you convert your abandoning website visitors into social media followers and email subscribers.
You can use it to create dynamic popups, floating bars, scroll boxes, or even gamified spin to win campaigns to grow your social media followers. All social media popups are fully responsive and work on all devices.
OptinMonster comes with a chatbot integration for ManyChat that helps you grow your business with Facebook messenger.
Since the popup builder is fully drag & drop and comes with tons of personalization features, you can really use it to promote anything you like. It comes with powerful features like A/B testing, geolocation targeting, exit-intent detection, page level targeting, and more.
This is why it’s consistently rated the #1 most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world, and we use it on WPBeginner.
Note: There’s also a free version of OptinMonster that comes with essential features for small websites.
Novashare is another popular WordPress social sharing plugin that’s built with performance in mind. It lets you add social sharing buttons on your site without slowing down your site or hindering user experience.
This social media plugin integrates with all the top social platforms, so you can add share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Buffer, WhatsApp, SMS, Reddit, Telegram, Pinterest, and more.
It also comes with other powerful features like the ability to add floating social bar in WordPress posts, show total share count, embed click to tweet blocks inside your post, add Pinterest image hover pins, show follow buttons in your sidebar or footer, and even add UTM tracking to social links.
The best part is that it’s fully responsive and GDPR friendly.
Nextend Social Login is the most popular social login plugin for WordPress. It lets your visitors register and login to your website using their social profiles.
It comes with built-in support for Login with Facebook, Login with Google, Twitter connect, and even has support for login with other popular platforms like Apple, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Github, Amazon, PayPal, Slack, Discord, and more.
Several studies have shown that adding social login to your eCommerce store or WordPress membership site can help boost conversions since it reduces the extra steps needed to create a profile.
It comes with several other powerful features like letting users link their WordPress profile on your site with their social profile, request custom username, connect social login with WordPress comments, and more.
Nextend social login plugin works with all major WordPress registration & eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, BuddyPress, and even the default WordPress login & registration forms.
Note: There’s also a free version of Nextend social, but it doesn’t support all the popular login methods.
Better Click to Tweet is a free plugin that lets you add click to tweet blocks in WordPress. This is a great standalone social media plugin for WordPress that does one thing, and does it really well.
It’s fully compatible with the WordPress block editor as well as the classic editor. You can add beautiful quotable tweets that match your brand styles.
Our founder Syed Balkhi uses this plugin on his personal blog.
Generally, when you see the list of the best social media plugins, it contains only the social sharing plugins which all offer duplicate functionality, and most of them will slow down your site.
This is why we have only listed the absolute best WordPress social media plugins for the various use cases.
If you’re looking for the best social sharing plugin for WordPress that is also fast, then go with Shared Count (free) or Novashare (premium).
If you’re looking for the best social media feed plugin to display your social media content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, then go with Smash Balloon. They offer the best social feeds plugin for WordPress, and over 1.6 million websites use their plugin.
Having helped millions of readers with WordPress, we have answered quite a lot of questions. Below are the answers to the most frequently asked questions about WordPress social media plugins.
Are there other WordPress sharing plugins in the market?
Yes, there are literally dozens of other WordPress social media plugins in the market. We did not include them in our article to help our readers avoid choice paralysis.
Also, you might be surprised to see that we haven’t included several popular social media plugins like AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny, Sumo, Shareaholic, and others because they all load external scripts that significantly slow down your sites. Furthermore, some of these free social sharing plugin companies are also selling your user data.
Aside from that, there are other social plugins like Monarch, Social Snap, Ultimately Social, Jetpack, etc that we believe are not as performance optimized as the sharing plugins we mentioned above.
How can I automatically share my WordPress content on social media?
There are several WordPress plugins and SaaS tools that can help you automate your social media sharing including Uncanny Automator, Revive Social, Buffer, Jetpack Social, and more.
We believe that Uncanny Automator is the best solution since it also lets you build many other automated workflows to save you time.
Which WordPress plugins can help me get more social media followers?
The easiest and fastest way to increase your social media followers is by running a viral giveaway. RafflePress is the best social media giveaway plugin for WordPress.
We regularly use that across our websites to help us grow our social media followers. It’s refer-a-friend and other viral features help you leverage the word of mouth advertising to get more social followers.
The other tool we use is OptinMonster. We created custom slide-in popups that has helped us grow our Facebook group to over 80,000+ members.
Can I create paywall to hide my WordPress content?
Yes, you can absolutely use WordPress to create a paywall to hide your premium content. We recommend using the MemberPress plugin which has this functionality.
It lets you control the number of free views after which you can require readers to pay to join your site similar to popular sites like NY Times, and others.
Here’s the detailed guide on how to create a paywall in WordPress.
We hope this article helped you find the best social media plugin for your WordPress site. You may also want to see our ultimate step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners, and our comparison of the best push notification software.
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The post 16 Best Social Media Plugins for WordPress (2022) first appeared on WPBeginner.
