In Pursuit of Functionality and Protection – Knowing the Intricacies of Integrating Social Media Sharing Features without Compromising Blog Security, User Experience, and Content Quality.
Why you shouldn’t add social media sharing plugins to your blog. I don’t like social media, especially Facebook, which I consider a time-wasting and mind-numbing site. That’s what happens to most people who go there. For example, whenever I logged into Facebook to post an article or video in groups, I always saw messages like, “If your house caught fire and your mother was inside, would you jump into the fire after her?” and a bunch of smarta$$es would respond in unison, “Yes, I would jump after her,” and then they would like and share it.
Whenever I saw something like that, I immediately left because stupidity is contagious. It’s the haven of semi-illiterates, chavs, and sad princesses.
So, I kept leaving until last year when a well-known blogger messaged me there. He had embedded my video of Romania’s National Day, and I saw the message over a month later when I finally responded.
Maybe he thought I didn’t want to talk to him or who knows, but I simply didn’t log into Facebook.
That’s why I don’t have many likes on social media: because I don’t excel at things I don’t enjoy. I have great respect for the few who make money from it because such people do exist. But.. in their vast majority, those on there are like the individuals I described above.
Nevertheless, I made a few changes to my blog the other day and added share buttons for the most “important” social media platforms.
On that occasion, I noticed that WordPress plugins for adding social media buttons are utterly useless. I tried several, and all of them add the developer’s site to your blog. In other words, to share a post on a social network, you have to go through someone else’s site, which I find completely unacceptable. It fills your articles with dubious links.
I believe WordPress should do something about this, in the sense of obliging all developers of such dubious plugins to play fair.
It is simply unnecessary to access external sites to add such functionality to a blog. It seems abusive to use small things to parasitize others’ blogs.
If you want share buttons on your blog, you can add them yourself by editing the theme files you use because there are plenty of resources available on the Internet, without resorting to WordPress plugins developed by people who believe that a few lines of code entitle them to be worshipped.
What’s worse is that many of these social media sharing WordPress plugins have hundreds of thousands of users, many of whom don’t know that what these modules do is not right.
That’s precisely why I thought it would be necessary to write about this here, so you don’t clutter your blog with plugins that are not only unnecessary but can also be harmful from all perspectives: from SEO to the security of your blog.
In light of the issues surrounding social media sharing plugins and their potential drawbacks, what are your thoughts on maintaining a balance between incorporating convenient functionalities on your blog and ensuring the security and integrity of your content? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below!