Do you want to add the Pinterest “Pin It” button in WordPress? Recently, a new traffic source popped up in our blog stats.
It was significant enough for us to take notice. This traffic source was Pinterest.
Pinterest is a popular social networking site that allows you to share visual content and drive a lot of traffic to your website (follow WPBeginner on Pinterest).
In this article, we will show you how to add the Pinterest “Pin It” button to your WordPress blog. We will also explain how to add the Pin It button over the images of your website.
Adding a Pinterest “Pin It” Button Using a Plugin
Pinterest officially changed the “Pin It” button name to Save in 2016.
Although some plugins still use the name “Pin It” instead of Save, they do the same job of pinning your images to Pinterest.
The easiest way to add a Pinterest button to your WordPress site is by using a social sharing plugin.
We recommend using Shared Counts plugin for this purpose. It is the best social media plugin for WordPress because it’s free and allows you to easily add the Pinterest button along with other popular social networks.
To get started, you need to install and activate the Shared Counts plugin. You can follow our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for detailed instructions.
Upon installation, head over to Settings » Shared Counts page to configure the plugin.
On the settings page, you need to scroll down to the Display section and then click on the “Share Buttons to Display” textbox.
This will open a dropdown menu where you can select the social media services you want to add. By default, Pinterest will be present in that box, along with Facebook and Twitter.
You can also select the location and post type where you want to display the Pinterest button. It comes with multiple button styles that you can choose from the ‘Share button style’ option.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the Save Changes button to store the settings.
You can now visit any post on your website to see the Pinterest button in action.
Another neat thing about SharedCounts is the free Custom Pinterest Image addon available on Github. This lets you set a custom Pinterest sharing image and description that’s optimized for Pinterest.
Note: We use SharedCount plugin on our website because it’s the best option in the market. It’s very well-coded and it’s free.
Manually Adding a Pinterest Pin It Button in WordPress
Some intermediate users may prefer to add the social sharing buttons manually to their WordPress site instead of using a plugin.
Let’s take a look at how to manually add a Pinterest button in WordPress.
The first thing you need to do is make a complete WordPress backup of your site. This will help you restore your site in case something breaks by accident.
Next, you need to connect to your WordPress hosting using an FTP client and then go to the /wp-content/themes/ folder.
From here, you need to open your current theme folder and then locate the footer.php file.
Next, simply right-click on that file and then select Download from the menu. This will download the footer.php file to your computer.
Now you need to open the footer.php file using a plain text editor like Notepad and then paste the following script right before the