Novashare Review: A Lightweight Social Sharing Plugin for WordPress

Why Social Sharing Buttons Still Matter

Social sharing buttons are one of those website features that seem optional until you visit a site that doesn't have them. There's something about seeing those little icons that subtly reinforces a site's credibility. Even if you rarely click them yourself, their absence can make a site feel incomplete or less trustworthy.

Novashare is a newer entrant to the WordPress social sharing space, built by the same team behind PerfMatters — a well-known performance optimization plugin. Their pitch is simple: WordPress social sharing at the speed of light. The plugin is designed to add sharing functionality with virtually zero performance overhead, which is a refreshing approach when the dominant alternative, Social Warfare, has a reputation for being both bulky and expensive.

Setting Up Inline Content Sharing Buttons

Getting started with Novashare is straightforward. Once installed, the plugin lives under your WordPress settings menu and offers three core widgets: inline content buttons, a floating bar, and click to tweet blocks.

The inline content setup lets you toggle sharing buttons on or off for different post types. You can choose from a solid list of social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and more — plus utility options like print and email. One nice touch is the ability to drag and rearrange the icons so they appear in whatever order makes sense for your audience.

Button placement is flexible too. You can position the sharing icons above the content, below it, or both. There's also a "don't add to content" option, which seems confusing at first but is actually designed for people who want to use Novashare's shortcodes to place buttons manually within their content rather than having them auto-inserted.

Mobile Controls and Styling Options

Novashare includes a mobile breakpoint setting that gives you granular control over when the sharing buttons appear. You can hide them above the breakpoint (so desktop users won't see them) or below the breakpoint (hiding them on mobile devices). This is useful if your analytics show that sharing behavior differs significantly between device types.

On the styling front, you get control over button size (small, medium, or large), button shape (square, rounded, or circular), and color overrides for both the default and hover states. If you don't like the standard brand colors for each network, you can set your own. The plugin also supports total share counts and per-network share counts, with a smart minimum threshold setting so you're not displaying an embarrassing zero or one share on a new post.

The Floating Bar Widget

The floating bar is Novashare's second sharing widget and works similarly to the inline buttons but stays visible as the reader scrolls. You can configure it independently — choosing different networks, sizes, and styles from what you've set for the inline content buttons.

During testing, the floating bar performed smoothly across different configurations. Switching between large rounded icons and small circular ones showed off the range of visual options. A subdued color scheme with small circular buttons works well for content-heavy pages like blog posts, where you don't want the sharing icons competing with the actual content for the reader's attention.

The floating bar can be enabled on a per-post-type basis, and you can also override it on individual posts if you need the social buttons on some pages but not others.

Click to Tweet: Shareable Quotes Made Easy

The click to tweet feature lets you embed tweetable quotes directly within your content. Unlike the inline buttons and floating bar, this one is added manually — either through a Gutenberg block or a shortcode, making it compatible with page builders as well.

You get three styling options: the theme's default styling, a simple transparent background, or a simple alternative. The call-to-action text defaults to "Click to Tweet," which is honestly the right choice for almost everyone since readers already know what that means. You can position the CTA on the left or right side of the block.

There are also some thoughtful options for power users. You can remove the post URL from the tweet if you're just trying to promote brand awareness through an @ mention. You can exclude your Twitter username or hide hashtags from the display box. When a reader clicks the button, Twitter opens with the pre-filled tweet text and a link back to your post — it just works.

Per-Post Controls and Open Graph Settings

One of Novashare's more practical features is the per-post control panel. At the bottom of every post or page editor, you'll find a Novashare settings box where you can selectively hide the inline content buttons or the floating bar on that specific piece of content. This kind of granular control is important when you have posts where social sharing doesn't make sense — like a landing page or a thank-you page.

The open graph settings are where Novashare really earns its keep for anyone doing social media marketing. You can set custom social media titles, descriptions, and images for each post. There's even a separate field for Pinterest images, which is smart since Pinterest uses a vertical 800x1200 format compared to the standard 1200x630 for Facebook and Twitter.

This matters more than most people realize. From experience sharing affiliate links in Facebook groups, roughly a third of shared links have no social image at all — and those posts get noticeably less engagement. Taking the time to set proper open graph images is one of the easiest wins for anyone who wants their content to look professional when shared.

Configuration, Analytics, and Integrations

The configuration screen houses a few more advanced settings worth knowing about. To display accurate share counts, you'll need to connect your Twitter username and Facebook App ID. The Facebook setup requires a business account and creating an app, which isn't hard but isn't exactly intuitive either. That said, the core sharing functionality works perfectly without logging into anything.

Novashare includes built-in Google Analytics UTM campaign tracking. Every shared link can automatically include UTM parameters — the network as the source, "social" as the medium, and a customizable campaign name. This is a clean way to track how much traffic your sharing buttons are actually driving. By default the campaign name is set to "novashare," which is honestly fine to leave as-is since it lets you filter analytics specifically for traffic coming through the plugin.

There's also a Bitly integration for link shortening. Just toggle it on, add your access token, and your shared links will be automatically shortened. It's a small feature but a nice one for platforms like Twitter where character count matters.

Why Use a Plugin Instead of Your Page Builder?

A fair question is why you'd add another plugin when page builders like Elementor Pro already include social sharing widgets. Having tried both approaches, the page builder route is surprisingly frustrating. The buttons tend to get wonky, the front-end rendering doesn't always match the editor, and managing display conditions across multiple posts and pages becomes a headache.

With a dedicated plugin like Novashare, you configure it once and it just works across your entire site. Toggling sharing on or off for individual posts takes seconds, and you don't have to open a page builder or set up display conditions. If Elementor's social sharing experience improves significantly, that might change — but for now, a standalone plugin is the cleaner solution.

Novashare's biggest selling point is its performance footprint. Coming from the PerfMatters team, lightweight is baked into the plugin's DNA. The overhead it adds to your site is essentially negligible, which you can't say about every social sharing plugin on the market.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.