Adding Share Buttons using Jetpack

We all know how important it is to narrow the gap between your website and an audience. Sharing content through Share buttons is such an ordinary and familiar thing to do in the digital area. 

People are eager to let friends know about stories they read and enjoy, photos that inspire them, or a video that makes perfect sense. Consistent sharing means an extra opportunity to grow your network and increase relevant traffic sources for your website.

While creating our WordPress themes, we made sure they have the necessary sharing capabilities built-in so that nothing will stay in your way.

Install Jetpack and configure the sharing feature

To make sure you have all the popular social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more displayed on your website, you need to follow a few easy steps:

1. Install and activate the Jetpack plugin by going to the WordPress Dashboard → Plugins → Add New → Search for “Jetpack” and click on Install Now. Once it installs, click on Activate;
2. Now go to Jetpack → Settings → Sharing → under the Sharing buttons tab activate the option “Add sharing buttons to your posts and pages.”
   • If you want to customize what social media services are displayed, click on Configure your sharing buttons or go in your WordPress Dashboard to Settings → Sharing. In the new panel, simply drag and drop the services you need in the Enabled Services section. Below is a visual representation.

Note: The Email sharing option is only available if you are using the Akismet spam-filtering plugin to prevent spam abuse or if you explicitly enable it by adding the following to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'sharing_services_email', '__return_true' );

Disable Sharing On Specific Pages

If you think some of the sharing buttons are becoming irrelevant on specific pages, then feel free to change that. This is especially useful if you want to keep the sharing buttons only on your blog posts. 

To achieve this, go to Settings → Sharing, and in the Show buttons on section uncheck the locations you don’t want the sharing option to show up. Click on Save Changes, and you’re done.

That’s it. Now every time you open a blog post, you should see the sharing options enabled.