Social Media Widgets for WordPress

Want to highlight your social media profiles in any widget area of your WordPress site? Here are the best-looking and easiest to use, social media widgets for WordPress.

Simple Social Icons by Nathan Rice

This has been my top choice for a long time. I tested a lot of other plugins for this post, but Simple Social Icons still comes out on top. It’s easy to use and customize and looks great. It’s also very lightweight in terms of performance. It adds just 3 http requests, and 30.4kb of data.

You can easily control the color of the icons, to match your site including applying a different color on rollover. You can specify the icon size to anything you want and are not restricted to the usual 16, 32 or 64px sizes.

The set of social profiles included seems complete without being overwhelming – all the major ones are there including Pinterest and Instagram.
The developer of the plugin, Nathan Rice is well-respected, so you can have peace of mind when using it.

Social Icons Widget by WPZoom

This is another good choice, particularly if you want a few more customization options, compared to Simple Social Icons. You can choose from a vast array of icons from 4 different icon sets, you can re-order them, choose to have a background color, or just the bare icon and more. Here’s just two examples of different versions of the widget you can create:

Worth a Mention

Meks Smart Social Widget

The two plugins above let you customize colors to match your site. But if you want to maintain the native color of each social network, and don’t need color customization,check out Meks Smart Social Widget.
It has a vast selection of social networks including some obscure ones.

Metro Style Social Widget

I’m just mentioning this one in case you want a completely different look/feel. It provides a “metro” style look, which is the tiled design, popularized by Microsoft’s Windows 8 interface:

Plugin info

Do you have a fave social media widget plugin that I haven’t listed? Share with the class in the comments!