Answering the question of the best social networking WordPress plugin isn’t easy without considering what you need from it. Social media has taken the exchange of information online to a whole different level.
Years back, people used to subscribe to blogs to interact with the latest information. However, the modern world has revolutionized so much that most websites rely on social platforms for most of their traffic. Website owners who need to take advantage of this and other perks would do well with a good community WordPress plugin. It enables them to add and manage social media sharing buttons and bars on their website’s pages and posts.
We are here for these precise people. We will analyze the best social networking WordPress plugin for this year.
What to Look Out For in a Social Media Plugin?
The main issue that users face with social media plugins for WordPress websites is in performance. The presence of additional scripts and style-sheets in these plugins will often culminate in a slow website. So what do you look for in your ideal plugin to strike out this and other issues?
The only solution is to find the perfect balance between the features and performance that your site ends up with. A social media plugin with too many features will be counterproductive if it means a much slower website. A slow website affects the user experience adversely.
You should then decide the social networks that will be showcased most prominently on your site. The fewer you add, the less cluttered your website appears and the better its user experience.
How do you want to display your social icons? Do you want to showcase them on your sidebar, before articles, after articles, or anywhere else? Ensure that the community WordPress plugin you choose supports the option you want.
We’ve analyzed the features and performance of the best social media plugins for your WordPress website. Take a look at them and their features:
Best social networking WordPress plugin listed bellow:
1. BuddyPress
When looking for a plugin that gives you a robust, modern, and sophisticated website, BuddyPress is a great option. Its components are ideal for a website with an extensive connection to social networks. Its top-notch coding makes it a go-to option for developers and site builders alike. This plugin has simple but effective features that prevent site clustering.
BuddyPress has membership features that allow users to register on your website easily. They can create user profiles before interacting both privately and publicly. This community WordPress plugin makes it easy to create social connections, private conversations, and group communities. With BuddyPress, you can create an interactive platform for any niche community, including schools, companies, and teams.
BuddyPress has a powerful theme compatibility API, which makes each one of your pages have the right feel and appearance. The plugin has many themes tailored specifically for it available on WordPress.org for download and many more from third-party theme creators. If you’re using either Akismet or bbPress, you can rely on BuddyPress’s inbuilt support for them.
BuddyPress Support and Updates
BuddyPress boasts a vast community that offers free support for all its users. Most days, this platform sees up to 10 queries, more than half of which receive responses within 24 hours.
This social networking WordPress plugin receives regular updates, which have bug fixes and feature updates and additions. These free updates ensure that you never lag behind but remain updated with the latest social networking trends.
BuddyPress Main Takeaways
| Active Installations | Over 100,000 |
| Average Rating: | 4.2 / 5 Stars |
| Extensibility | Highly extensible |
| WordPress Version | 4.9 or higher |
| Updates | Regular |
| Support | Community support (decent) |
2. bbPress
bbPress is a great choice if you’re after an elegant community WordPress plugin that will give you a timeless properly-set discussion board. It is easy to integrate as you build your burgeoning community.
The user interaction on your website when you use this social networking WordPress plugin will be exceptional. bbPress gives you a real-time communication platform that is driven by IRC as well as ad hoc Skype chats. However, the developers have mentioned plans for testing out Slack as a possible replacement for IRC. Knowing Slack, you can expect more features and a different interface.
If you’re a developer, you may find bbPress more attractive than other options because of its bug tracker. This community WordPress plugin uses Trac, which is a bug tracker. It makes it easy to track bugs and enhancements as well as the source code from the past and present. There is an official bbPress development blog for the development team.
bbPress Support and Updates
Talking of communities, the documentation of bbPress is amazingly well-driven by users. It relies on community contributions, guides, and articles that are created by users for other users. The developers go in manually and add users as editors or authors. Therefore, there won’t be spamming.
The updates are quite regular. At the time of writing, it had been just a month since the last update. bbPress gives you regular updates so that the features you have on your site remain modern. Updates will also have bug fixes and feature additions when necessary.
bbPress Main Takeaways
| Active Installations | Over 200,000 |
| Average Rating: | 4.2 / 5 Stars |
| Extensibility | Good |
| WordPress Version | 5 or higher |
| Updates | Regular |
| Support | Development team and user community |
3. Members
Members is a social networking WordPress plugin that enables you to manage memberships, roles, and responsibilities on your website. It comes with various great features, including the role editor. This function lets you create, edit, and delete the roles of users. You can give one or more roles to the same user. Members lets you deny certain roles to users too!
Another excellent feature of this fantastic social networking plugin is the ability to clone existing roles. You don’t have to build one all over again. Members lets you determine the access various users have to content depending on their roles.
The customizability that you get with Members is off the charts with its shortcode support. You can use shortcodes to control content access. This widget-ready plugin lets you display a login form widget and a users’ widget on your sidebars. If you want your site and its feed to be private, Members enables you to set this up.
Addons in Members
Members comes with various addons at no extra cost. They include the following:
Block Permissions: It allows site owners to display or hide blocks based on user roles, capabilities, or logged-in status.
Privacy Caps: It supports the creation of capabilities for control over WordPress data features and privacy.
Core Create Caps: It comes with the page and posts creation caps to pages and posts to separate them from their editable versions for added flexibility in editing.
Categories and Tag Caps: This addon comes with the capabilities for post tag and core category taxonomies. It hands the site owner control over who can create, manage, edit, assign, and delete tags and categories.
Admin Access: This is an addon that lets the site admins control the users who have access to the WordPress admin panel through their roles.
EDD Integration: It integrates the capabilities of the Easy Digital Downloads plugin into the plugin’s role manager.
Members Main Takeaways
| Active Installations | Over 200,000 |
| Average Rating: | 4.8 / 5 Stars |
| Extensibility | It comes highly recommended |
| WordPress Version | 4.7 or higher |
| Updates | Regular |
| Support | Reliable |
4. Nextend Social Login
The superb coding of Nextend Social Login allows it to integrate seamlessly with whichever theme or plugins that you have on your site. It supports Facebook, Google, Twitter. Therefore, your users can register and log in to your site with their accounts from any of these social networks.
Nextend Social Login lets existing users on your site to link their profiles easily to their profiles on the social networks. Your users can choose a custom redirect URL after the initial registration and login using their social accounts. Nextend Social Login allows you to showcase your Google, Twitter, and Facebook profile picture as an avatar.
The login buttons that come with this social networking WordPress accommodate customizable and translatable text. Compared to bbPress, BuddyPress, and Members, the free version of this plugin has much fewer features. Quite a few of its pro features are available at no additional cost in the previous three plugins.
Nextend Social Login Pro has additional features, several of which are compatibility features. This version is compatible with WooCommerce, so you can create a store on your site. It is also compatible with UserPro, BuddyPress, Ultimate Member, and Easy Digital Downloads.
You can configure whether the email address should be requested upon the registration of users with each premium provider. These premium providers include LinkedIn, Yahoo, Line, Slack, Disqus, Apple, WordPress.com, Amazon, Discord, Microsoft, GitHub, PayPal, and others. Nextend Social Login gives you a choice between wide buttons and icons.
You can assign particular roles to newly registered users regardless of the social provider they choose to use. You can also display the name of the providers that are already linked in the Users table.
Nextend Social Login Support and Updates
This community WordPress plugin is created by the Nextendweb team. It sees regular updates, and the team provides the support that you may need. It also has a forum on which support is provided by other users. The queries posted here aren’t as frequent or consistent in numbers as those of BuddyPress, for instance.
Nextend Social Login Main Takeaways
| Active Installations | Over 300,000 |
| Average Rating: | 4.7 / 5 Stars |
| Extensibility | The premium version is more extensible than the free one, although both have excellent coding. |
| WordPress Version | 4.9 or higher |
| Updates | Regular |
| Support | Almost all the queries posed in the last two months have been resolved already. |
5. Youzify
Youzify is, without a doubt, top in terms of flexibility and feature wealth. It has more community-oriented features than we can list. It supports private messages, follow/unfollow, friend connections, members directory, and group directory. You can have ratings and reviews so you can assess user feedback.
Everyone loves emojis, and Youzify ensures that you don’t miss them on your website. In fact, the plugin offers over 35 social embeds. You can comment on posts and reply to comments. With this social networking WordPress theme, you can put up notices on your website as well as notifications when they’re closer.
Youzify gives you the power to set some words as forbidden so as to prevent having some users offend others. You can set the maximum number of attachments and the file sizes that are seen as a danger to the speed of the site. This plugin even lets you set the “activity posts” that appear per page on a group, profile, and global activity stream. Youzify enables you to provide Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitch.
The lazy loading feature Youzify offers helps maintain the decent speed of your website. You can enable and disable groups and their harder elements.
The elements and features that come with the premium plugin form the rest of the piece. It comes with tab examples, headers, and many other element variations. The plugin comes with over 15 profile tabs. Youzify Pro has more features than we can count.
Youzify Support and Updates
The people behind Youzify are the creators, Youzify. The updates that this plugin receives are regular and relevant. However, an interactive platform for plugin users is available online.
Youzify Main Takeaways
| Active Installations | Over 9,000 |
| Average Rating: | Over 4.9 / 5 stars |
| Extensibility | Its wealth of features give the right idea; it is highly extensible |
| WordPress Version | 4.9 or higher |
| Updates | Regular |
| Support | Available |
6. UserPro
UserPro is a premium social networking plugin. It offers various features for interaction, such as the follow/unfollow feature. You can use shortcodes to showcase the numbers of followers and following.
UserPro has a social activity stream that informs the users of new activity on the website. Public activity shows sitewide activity to everyone. On the other hand, there is a private activity stream which each can access during their own time. UserPro enables you to display the members in a collage layout if not a standard table format. The plugin allows you to restrict post and page access for any user.
When you have regular members that want to post stuff on your site, you can rely on the frontend publisher UserPro has to offer. You can display the posts a particular user or author has created on the sidebar. Every inch of this plugin is fully responsive, so it will appear elegant on any device. UserPro lets you assign badges to your users manually or automatically.
UserPro lets you embed customizable registration forms. You can choose to have photos and other file uploads on your registration form. As the admin, you have the power to organize and order fields as you wish.
This plugin is fully integrated with Bkontakt, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google. It is possible to post on a user’s timeline directly when you need viral social marketing. To keep them comfortable, users can set their own passwords and email addresses.
UserPro Support and Updates
Deluxe Themes, the creators of UserPro, offer a period of 6 months of support. It is an Envato plugin and has regular updates. To extend the support to 12 months, you need to pay an additional $12.75, which is in itself a discount!
It doesn’t see as many updates as the other plugins in this piece. At the time of writing, its last update was half a year before.
UserPro Main Takeaways
| Sales | 20,000+ |
| Average Rating: | Over 4.33 / 5 Stars |
| Extensibility | Highly extensible |
| Pricing | $39 |
| Updates | Not regular |
| Support | Deluxe Themes has an average response time of 1 to 2 business days. |
Final Thoughts
Everyone has different views on what should be present and what is best when it comes to social media sharing. This is why it is advisable to try out a few of the plugins that we’ve listed for you. For the premium plugin, thoroughly reviewing the demo should suffice.
Take a look at the freedom various plugins give you, including the positions where you can display the sharing buttons. Explore the styles that each plugin offers and the social networks they come with. It goes without saying that you have to choose a plugin that includes the social platforms that you prefer. Ensure that the one you go with blends seamlessly with the design of your website.
I have used BuddyPress for a while and enjoyed its effectiveness and the freedom it allowed me. It didn’t slow my website down, which was a huge plus. However, since I’m always open to exploring new faces, I have also tried UserPro and loved the premium features that I’ve already explored above.
You can try out these and the others with confidence and even switch them around to figure out the one that suits your needs best. All the best as you make your website more socially accessible.
