Sticky Social Bar WordPress Plugin Review By A Developer

Sticky Social Bar is WordPress plugin from PixelGrade that allows you to add a floating social media bar to posts, pages and your home page. I recently implemented it on WP Mods and have been very impressed with how it works.

Before Sticky Social Bar was released, I had tried out several floating social media bar solutions such as Digg DiggCevherShare and ShareThis. They all were all unsuitable for one reason or another; whether it was styling issues or errors. Let’s look at this plugin instead!

Sticky Social Bar Makes Floating Bars

Thankfully, my search for a good social media bar is over as Sticky Social Bar does everything that you need. In total there are 12 social media buttons to choose. There are 11 buttons from popular social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest and there is an option for readers to share your content via email too. To change which buttons are displayed on your bar you simple select the box and then click enable or disable. The order of buttons can be changed easily too by simply dragging and dropping them into your preferred order.

Easily Customizable Buttons

You can change the code for each button directly via the admin area. This is useful if you want to customise the button in some way. For example, you could edit all your buttons to display small sharing buttons rather than the default boxes. You can also easily add your own buttons too. This makes it a very versatile plugin as you could add anything to this area e.g. other social media buttons, a print option or even an advertisement.

How to customize buttons on Sticky Social Bar?

In the settings area you can set the position of the bar, it’s visibility and the style. You can choose to show the bar on posts, pages and/or the home page. There is no option to show it on other areas of your site such as category archives though this isn’t something that many people would share anyways (though they have suggested that they might add this functionality soon).

By default the bar is aligned vertically with your content though you can disable this if you want. To position your bar you just need to define the number of pixels from the top of the page and the offset position from your content.

Position the buttons with drag and drop

One of the best features of Sticky Social Bar is the ability to position the bar to the exact position visually. By clicking on the ‘Set the position’ button you are taken to your latest post (even if it’s a draft). From here you can drag the bar to the position you want it to be displayed. This is a wonderful addition to the WordPress plugin as the vast majority of social media bar plugins only let you set the position manually, which usually requires you to reload your page several times as you change the figures through trial and error.

Once you have chosen your buttons, chosen where the bar is displayed and set its position, you will see the bar displayed on your website.

It should integrate well with most WordPress designs out there. The default style is a white box with all buttons placed inside. An identical design is available in dark and there is a divided style that wraps a box around each button.

Colors

Dark and light transparent styles are available too. This is great for designs that use a background image or pattern instead of a solid colour (e.g. like WP Mods currently has). Don’t worry if you aren’t happy with the 5 default styles on offer. You can place a new style in the plugin CSS folder and after reloading your settings page you will be able to choose it as a style.

Sticky Social Bar retails for only $7 from CodeCanyon. As someone who has tested the vast majority of floating bar solutions out there, I can honestly say that PixelGrades option is by far the best available at the moment (the fact that I’m using it on WP Mods just now is testament to this!).

It blends in beautifully with your existing design. The bar isn’t displayed until the start of your content. As the user scrolls down the page the bar remains in a fixed position. This is a great way of encouraging people to share your content as although it is placed outside of your content, it is always in view. I encourage you to check it out if you are looking for a way of keeping your social media sharing buttons in view all the time.

If you have any questions regarding the plugin please leave a comment and I’ll answer the query as best as I can.

Good luck,
Kevin

Link: Sticky Social Bar

Kevin Muldoon
Kevin Muldoon

Kevin Muldoon is a professional blogger with a love of travel. He writes regularly about topics such as WordPress, Blogging, Productivity, Internet Marketing and Social Media on his personal blog and and provides technical support at Rise Forums. He can also be found on Twitter: @KevinMuldoon

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