Simple Social Sharing Links for WordPress Without a Plugin

Today I am going to show you how to create very simple social sharing links for your WordPress blog. We all know that there are a gazillion different WordPress plugins out there to handle social media, but these may not always give you the exact customization that you want. Maybe you want to have text-only “share” links and the plugin does not support this. Maybe you want to use different icons than the ones the plugin provides. Maybe you want to format/position these icons differently from how the plugin does it by default. If this describes your situation, this post will help you get off to a good start with that.

So below are some basic WordPress ready sharing links for some popular social media websites. Please note that these links will work at the time this post was written. Websites often change their APIs and it is possible that the URLs to share out content on these social sites may have changed since the writing of this post… so be sure to check that all of these examples still work. If any do not, consult the website of the social platform in question and look for any advice on blogs and forums on how to change the link to something that will work with an updated API. And please do let me know if any of these do not work as well. 🙂

I have just kept the format of the links as plain text since it’s the most basic HTML that most people probably understand best. All you have to do is simplly paste the following code into the index.php or single.php or any other .php file of your WordPress theme. From there you can format and style these links however you like.

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100&p[title]=<?php the_title(); ?>&p[url]=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" target="_blank">Facebook</a>
<a href="http://twitter.com/home/?status=<?php the_title(); ?>%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>" target="_blank">Twitter</a>
<a href="https://plus.google.com/share?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" target="_blank">Google+</a>
<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank">Digg</a>
<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank">StumbleUpon</a>
<a href="http://delicious.com/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank">Delicious</a>
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" target="_blank">Reddit</a>

And that’s all there is to it!