Social sharing is one of the best ways to bring more traffic to your website.
Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins which also includes social sharing buttons.
The only problem is, the social buttons by default, are displayed after the content.
I’m sure you’ve read some of the research stating most readers never scroll below the fold.
Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold. Source: Jakob Nielsen
Considering this statistic, displaying your sharing buttons after your content is not the most effective way to increase sharing of your content.
Sharing Buttons Before Content
You can change the location of the buttons by playing around with code or simply install a plugin.
The Jetpack Extras plugin adds several custom fields to the sharing settings page to enable you to make this change.
Here you can easily change the button placement so they display before your content on posts, pages and media.
Displaying the buttons so they’re always above the fold should increase the sharing of your content which will also increase traffic back to your site.
Based on the feedback i have received from my ongoing survey, this will help a large percentage of WordPress bloggers.
If you don’t want all the features Jetpack offers, you can use the Jetpack sharing module on its own.
This code will work with any theme.
Paste this code at the end of your child themes functions.php file to display your Jetpack social sharing buttons before your posts content.
If you find this tip helpful, please share it (If you got this far!)
Brad Dalton
@wpsitesdotnet
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Hi Brad,
Thank you very much for the Information, you must have been reading my mind. Just last night I wanted to add new social media buttons to my website, and was trying to figure out which ones to use and where I wanted to place them. I see a lot of websites that place their buttons above the fold, but also in the middle and at the end of their content. I’m going to try use this plugin it sounds like it will help me configure my social media buttons on my site quick, easy and exactly where I want and need to place them.
Thank you again, your blogs have been so helpful to me, being a newbie and all:-)
Keep up the great work and take care.
Stephanie
Hi Stephanie.
Nice to hear from you.
Where is your Gravatar naughty girl! hahaha
You’ll need to install Jetpack first and then the extra’s plugin.