How to Add Social Media Icons in WordPress: Best Practices and Useful Plugins

If you have other digital presence beside your website, why not show it to your visitors? In this article. we will show you how to add social media icons to WordPress.

Showing your social media to your visitors allows them to follow you – and the best way to do it is by having social media icons on your website. Since it doesn’t take much of your space, you can put it anywhere without disturbing your overall layout.

Steps to Add Social Media Icons to WordPress

There are two ways you can do this: adding the social icons by hand or making use of third-party icon WordPress plugins.

If you decide to use social media plugins, here is a list of our favorite ones:

• Simple Social Icons (neat and simple interface)
• Social Media Buttons (allows you to change the color of your icons)
• Social Icons Widget by WPZOOM (can adjust size and padding, search icons by keywords, different styles to choose from, etc)

Using a WordPress plugin is a great choice for beginners as it doesn’t require much technical skill on your part. However, most of them don’t include less popular social networks. If you don’t find an option to add your particular social profile on the plugin, you need to do it manually.

Although you will encounter some coding, we assure you that adding social media icons to WordPress isn’t complicated at all. Here is how you can easily add social media icons to your WordPress site.

1. Choose a Social Media Icon

Finding an icon you need isn’t hard at all. A quick Google search will provide you with a vast number of choices.

A workaround through this is by filtering Google Image Search based on usage rights. Go to Images -> Tools -> Usage rights -> Labeled for reuse.

Now, Google will only show results you can use freely. You can look for each icon that you like, or you could just download all-in-one icon packs.

A few sites such as Iconfinder provide you with free icon packs with many varieties for you to use.

Once you find the icons, download them and upload them to the WordPress media library. Go to Media -> Add New, and put the icons there.

It’s best if you use the multi-uploader so that you can upload all the icons at once.

2. Add Widget and Configure HTML

Now, you have to add the WordPress widget containing the social media icons on your site.

On your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Customizer -> Widgets. Then, add “Custom HTML” by dragging it to your header, sidebar, or footer section.

Fill the title with “Social Media” for example, and copy-paste the following code.

<div><a href="http://instagram.com/username"><img style="margin:5px" src="[path to your icon]" width="30" height="30" alt="Instagram"></a><a href="http://facebook.com/username"><img style="margin:5px" src="[path to your icon]" width="30" height="30" alt="Facebook"></a><a href="http://youtube.com/user/username" ><img style="margin:5px" src="[path to your icon]" width="30" height="30" alt="YouTube"></a></div>

Go to Media -> Library and click on an icon that you uploaded. Take a look at the URL column. That’s the direct link you need to use to replace the bracket shown in the code above.

Your final code should look somewhere like this.

Make sure that the direct URL of your image ends with the file extension such as .png or .jpg, otherwise it means that you put the wrong code and the icons won’t show up.

After you’re done replacing the parts of your code, click Save. Go to your site to check out your new widget.

Now that you successfully added social media buttons on your site, you can repeat the process for each more button that you want to add. It’s simple and doesn’t require much of your time, yet gives you a boost in increasing your social media and site’s engagement.

Summary

Adding social media icons to your website is a great way to increase your following and overall brand’s visibility.

Now you know how to add social media icons to WordPress.

Hopefully, this article was helpful. Good luck!