Social Share Buttons Documentation

Display → Spots on the page. Pick as many as suit you.

• Below the content is where most shares happen. Someone who finished reading is the person most likely to pass it on.
• Above the content catches people who already know they want to share.
• Floating beside the content stays visible while reading. It hides itself on narrow windows, where there is no room beside the text.
• A bar pinned to the bottom is for phones, where the floating rail cannot fit. It can be shown on every screen size if you prefer.

Show it on decides which content carries them. Tick the kinds of content — the list is built from your own site, so a post type you have added is already in it — and, if you want them there, the archives too.

There is nothing here about the basket, the checkout or the front page, and that is deliberate. Buttons attach to a piece of content; there is no article on a checkout to share, so a rule about one would be a rule that does nothing. If your front page is a static page, ticking Pages covers it, or name it under And also on these particular ones.

Sharing an archive link is usually a mistake: it goes stale as soon as you publish again. That is why nothing under Archives is ticked to begin with.

And also on these particular ones covers a single page that does not fit the pattern. But never on these always wins, and takes a page, a post, a product or a whole category — choosing a category covers everything filed under it. Everything is found by typing its name; there are no IDs to look up.

Quick exclude ticks the basket, the checkout and the account pages. Those three are worth a tick of their own because they are pages: tick Pages above and share buttons land on all three, which is almost never what anyone means. There is nothing to tick on the other side of the screen, because buttons attach to a piece of content and there is no article on a checkout to share.

Addresses to keep it off takes one path per line, with standing for anything — the same shape you already know from redirects. /account/ keeps it off every page under /account/. It is matched against the path only, so it works whatever your domain is, and it is not a regular expression: a mistyped one is a rule that matches nothing rather than a rule that matches the site.

Who sees it

Screen sizes limits it to desktop, tablet or mobile. Leave all three clear for every size. It is decided by the width of the window rather than by guessing from the browser, so a narrow desktop window counts as narrow and the answer survives page caching.

Visitors limits it to people who are signed in or signed out. Tick Signed in and Only these roles appears underneath, narrowing it further — the role list is your own site's. A role is something only a signed-in visitor has, so the question is not asked until it can be answered.

When

Leave it on Always and it runs until you say otherwise. Between two dates opens a window: a start, an end, particular days of the week, and a time of day. Everything is worked out against your site's clock, the one under Settings → General.

One caveat worth knowing: a page cache can outlive the moment a schedule ends, because the cached copy was made while the schedule was still running. If the timing has to be exact, keep those pages out of your cache.

Once you have ticked something, the exceptions box only offers what is inside those ticks. There is no sense excluding a product from buttons that only appear on posts.