If you have a presence on the internet by some additional means to your website, why not show it to your visitors? In this article we will see how to add social media icons in WordPress.
By showing your social networks to visitors, they will be able to follow you, and the best way to achieve this is to put social network icons on your website. Since they don’t take up much space, you can place them anywhere without altering the overall design of the site.
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How do I do it?
There are two ways to do this: by adding the social media icons manually or with a third-party WordPress icon plugin.
If you decide to use the plugins, here is a list of our favorites that you can use:
Using a plugin is a great option for beginners as it doesn’t require much technical skill on your part. However, most do not include other less popular social networks. If you don’t find an option in the plugin to add your particular social profile, you’ll need to do it manually.
While you will face some coding, we assure you that adding social media icons to WordPress is not complicated at all. So let’s see how to easily add social media icons to your WordPress site.
1. Choose a social media icon
Finding the icon you need is not difficult at all. A quick Google search will show you many options.
AdviceNote: Please note that you cannot simply use icons that belong to others. That could lead you to break copyright laws.
One solution to this is to filter Google Image Search based on usage rights. go to Images -> Tools -> Rights Of Use -> Labeled for reuse.
Now, Google will only show results that you are free to use. You can select each icon you like or just download icon packs all in one.
Some sites like offer you 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 newand add the icons there.
It is better if you use the multiloader so that you can load all the icons at once.
2. Add widget and configure HTML
Now you have to add the widget containing the social media icons to your site.
In the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance -> widgets. Then, add the “Custom HTML” widget by dragging it to the header, sidebar, or footer section.
In the title you can write “Social networks”, for example, and then copy and paste the following code:
Advice: Do you notice the word username (username) and square brackets throughout the code? You should replace them with the names of your social media profiles and the direct URL of your icon image.
go to Media -> Library and click an icon you’ve uploaded. Take a look at the “Copy Link” field. That’s the direct link you should use to replace the brackets shown in the code above.
Your final code should look something like this:
Make sure the direct URL of your image ends with the file extension like .png either .jpgotherwise it means that you have entered the wrong code and the icons will not be displayed.
When you’re done replacing the parts of the code, click Save. Then go to your site to see the new widget.
Now that you’ve successfully added the social media buttons to your site, you can repeat the process for each additional button you want to add. It’s easy and won’t take much of your time, however, it will help you increase your social following and visitor interaction with your site.
Summary
Adding social media icons to your WordPress site is a great way to increase your following and overall brand visibility.
Now you know how to add social media icons to WordPress.
We hope this article will be useful to you. successes!
Gustavo is passionate about creating websites. He focuses on the application of SEO strategies at for Spain and Latin America, as well as the creation of high-level content. When he is not applying new WordPress tricks you can find him playing the guitar, traveling or taking an online course.
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