Scriptless Social Sharing

Scriptless Social Sharing is a very lightweight social sharing plugin developed by Robin Cornett. It is available for free from the official WordPress plugin repository.

There is a plethora of social sharing plugins for WordPress websites, offering all kinds of features and gimmicks. The developer of this one took a different path than most authors of such plugins. The focus is not on the number of features (or gimmicks, if you will), but rather on simplicity and performance. As the name suggests, the plugin does not load any javascripts in the frontend and makes no calls to the social networks. All it does is creating buttons with sharing links.

The plugin supports the most popular social networks, for example: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, as well as sharing by email, sms or WhatsApp. Displaying share counts is not supported, because it would require making connections to the social networks. That would negatively affect the performance and the main point of this plugin are fast page loads.

The buttons can be automatically inserted into typical areas for each post type: before content or after content. Manual placement is also supported, via a simple shortcode. The author has provided also a custom function allowing placing the buttons on archive pages (for example: category or tag archives). However, when placed on archive pages, the buttons cannot share the archive URL, but individual posts. If you would like to share archive pages, you need to find another solution.

Basic customization can be achieved through the GUI. Icons can be loaded as SVG or a web font. You can also display only the names of the networks, without their logos. More advanced customization can be easily achieved with custom CSS added to your theme.

All in all, Scriptless Social Sharing is a simple plugin adding social sharing buttons to your site. It delivers what it promises. No bells and whistles, but perhaps your website does not need bells and whistles when it comes to social sharing buttons. Highly recommended.