One look at the sheer number of premium and free Pinterest WordPress plugins out there should tell you all you need to know about what a pivotal role Pinterest has begun to play in the way we manage and market our websites. Once merely a cute social media platform for curating inspiring images and ideas, today, it is a significant source of traffic for an increasing number of websites, driving more visitors to pages than Twitter and other social media platforms.
With this in mind, it didn’t take developers long to release a host of tools to help website owners maximize Pinterest’s impact on their traffic and encourage users to pin images to their boards.
Below, we’ll review five of the very best free Pinterest plugins out there, as well as looking at a few paid versions for those serious about taking your Pinterest game to the next level. All of the plugins we’ve featured in this guide have been tested with the latest major release of WordPress (as of the time of writing) to ensure there are zero compatibility issues.
Top Five Best Free Pinterest Plugins for WordPress…
Formerly known as AccessPress Pinterest, PI Button is a nifty, free plugin packed with features to help you optimize your WordPress website for Pinterest users.
At its core, this lightweight plugin is all about enabling you to automatically add Pinterest’s ‘Pin It’ buttons onto images on your website so that users are encouraged to pin your content to their boards.
It does this very well, taking less than a minute to set-up and configure so that you can get people pinning your pictures in no time.
Yet as good as that is, it’s only the beginning of what PI button offers.
Elsewhere, there’s plenty of tools for promoting your own Pinterest account, including the latest pins feed, Pinterest profile widget, and a button encouraging your audience to follow you and engage with you on Pinterest.
The plugin does offer a premium version which allows you to upload your own social media sharing buttons for Pinterest and provides added support for custom post types, but the free version works very well on its own and is definitely worth a look if you’re serious about integrating Pinterest into your overall marketing strategy.
While PI Button may focus on being the most dynamic and multi-functional Pinterest plugin, GS Pins only does one thing, but does it really, really well.
Designed to make it easy to turn Pinterest pins into a portfolio on your website, the plugin comes with multiple style options so that you can showcase your favorite pins in a way that blends in beautifully with your WordPress theme. There’s even a custom CSS feature so that you can further configure the look and feel of your pins if you’re not happy with them.
Displaying pins is no more difficult than using straightforward shortcodes which can be configured to display the latest pins from a Pinterest user of your choosing, or pull pins from specific boards, themes, or search terms.
Unlike some of the older Pinterest plugins out there, this regularly updated plugin integrates well with Gutenburg and WooCommerce, making it just as good an option for displaying products as it is for design portfolio items.
Like GS Pins, Pin It only serves a single function but does so in a way that outperforms just about any similar free plugin we’ve come across.
In this instance, that function is simple:
Ensure that when your website visitors hover over your images, the Pinterest Pin It button appears, encouraging them to save your content to their Pinterest boards.
Setting things up takes a matter of minutes, and we found it so easy to use that you’d soon be able to get to grips with it even if you’re a complete WordPress novice.
What’s more, Pin It proves to be one of the best options for enabling the pin button on mobile devices, making it a remarkably useful tool at a time when more users are browsing the web on smart devices than standard laptops and desktop computers.
If you like the way this plugin works but needs more Pinterest features, you can always pay for the premium upgrade. This provides many of the same features that you’d get with the free version of PI Button, such as displaying your own Pinterest profile and adding follow buttons.
That said, even sticking with the free version will work wonders in encouraging visitors to pin your content, thus increasing the chances of driving even more traffic via Pinterest.
Feed Them Social may not be exclusively geared towards Pinterest, but it does such a good job at including Pinterest boards as part of a wider social media showcase that we couldn’t help but include it here.
As we mentioned in our recent Feed Them Social review, this comprehensive plugin takes the hard work out of curating and displaying posts from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram via your website, which can be a quick, easy and effective way to ensure your site is constantly updated with new content.
In terms of Pinterest, the plugin makes it easy to display pins from specific boards or individual users, with the option to choose how many pins you share per feed.
While other Pinterest display tools might offer more customizable options and an array of themes, Feed Them Social is definitely a solid choice if you’re planning to display content from multiple social media platforms but don’t want the hassle (or the drain on your site speed) that comes with using individual plugins for each platform.
If there’s one thing we love the most about Image Pinning from BestWebSoft, it’s that the sidebar widgets it offers for displaying your Pinterest profile or favorite pins are so beautifully designed out of the box that there isn’t much need to customize them.
Not that you wouldn’t be able to do it if you wanted to.
Everything that you can do with Image Pinning can be fully customized to match your branding, whether that’s showcasing your Pinterest boards, adding a Follow Me button, or including those all-important pin-it buttons to your images. As well as changing the overall aesthetic style of your boards, you can also resize your thumbnail pins, and even use a custom CSS feature for more advanced customization.
Finding such a flexible, powerful plugin that does all of this for free is a rarity in itself, but BestWebSoft is seemingly not content to leave it at that.
Along with simple shortcodes which speed up the whole process of Pinterest-optimizing your website, Image Inning also boasts the fact that it’s one of the few plugins of its type that is fully compatible with WordPress Multilanguage, making it a top pick for non-English speakers.
BestWebSoft does offer a premium version of this tool, but the benefits of this seem limited to accessing better support and being able to toggle Pinterest sharing on and off for individual pages.
IF you can do without that (and let’s be honest, most of us can), then this free plugin makes an excellent addition to your traffic-building toolkit.
Get Image Pinning by BestWebSoft
…And Three Premium Options
Much like our free pick, Feed THem Social, Social Warfare Pro isn’t a Pinterest-exclusive plugin, but it does such a fantastic job of including the image-sharing platform into a wider social media optimization effort that we’d be crazy to not include it here.
As readers of our recent Social Warfare review may recall, this is the very same social media plugin that we use here at WPLift.
As you can imagine, we try, test, and review countless social media plugins every year, so for this one to impress us so much that we decided to add it to our own site really speaks volumes about its winning combination of effortless user-friendliness and feature-rich approach to social media optimization.
At its heart, the plugin’s job is to add attractive sharing buttons to your website so that visitors are encouraged to post your posts and pages to all of the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) as well as some of the oft-overlooked platforms like Reddit, Linkedin, and Whatsapp that many plugins of this type tend to ignore.
Even with that, Social Warfare Pro does a better job than many of its competitors, offering a plethora of stylish design options, the ability to display your most popular posts as determined by how many social shares they got, and even a handy click-to-tweet feature so that readers can share bitesize quotes from your articles without having to copy and paste.
That’s all well and good, but we mustn’t forget that we’re talking about Pinterest today. Fortunately, Social Warfare Pro more than delivers on that front.
As you’d expect from any social media sharing tool, this one makes it easy to add pin-it buttons to your images, but it also goes one step further by providing advanced Pinterest settings so that you can take greater control over how your images look once they’re displayed in Pinterest boards. This includes adding your own Pinterest profile to the image metadata so that those discovering your content on the platform itself will be encouraged to check you out and give you a follow.
We also love the range of options for displaying share counts, that being the number of times each individual image has been shared. Don’t want to display a share count until an image has been pinned at least 100 times? Simply use the advanced settings to make that so. Prefer to add up your Pinterest shares with the number of times your article has been tweeted or posted to Linkedin? That’s totally doable too.
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the incredibly useful analytics features. So far, Social Warfare Pro is the tool on this list that actually tracks how many times your images are saved (and how many times your content is being shared on other platforms). This can prove exceptionally useful in helping you analyze what images are getting the most pins and which ones are being ignored.
As a result, you can adapt your content policy to include only those images that have a better chance of being pinned, thus increasing the likelihood of boosting traffic from Pinterest.
At the time of writing, Social Warfare Pro started at $29 for a one-year, single-site license, with more expensive options for five sites ($89), ten sites ($139), and finally unlimited websites at $349.
At $17 for a regular license (with an optional 12-months extended support for an extra $4.50), Pinterest 2 WordPress is a reasonably priced option for displaying Pinterest boards and profiles on your website using highly attractive templates.
Sure, this isn’t the only plugin out there that does this, but it’s certainly the only plugin that does it in such a beautiful and eye-catching fashion.
Overall you have thirty different background patterns to play with, ranging from those well suited to DIY and home decor blogs to tech-themed templates, delicious food-based designs, and more. In other words, no matter what kind of website you’re running, you’re almost guaranteed to find a background pattern to suit.
And if not? Well, that’s OK, too, because everything here is completely customizable with unlimited variations on size, style, and color.
If you’re looking for a simple way to display existing Pinterest content on your website in a way that really speaks volumes about your commitment to quality design, then Pinterest 2 WordPress is undoubtedly the way to go.
Last but by no means least, all-in-one Pinterest WordPress plugin, Pinterest Pro is a worthy choice for anyone looking for a quality premium plugin on a small budget.
Costing just $8 (with an optional extended 12 months support for less than $1.20 extra), Pinterest Pro combines everything you like about most single-function Pinterest plugins into one handy, easy-to-use tool.
Not only does it make adding your own Follow Me On Pinterest button to your website an absolute breeze, but it also allows you to forgo the standard Pinterest follow button in favor of one that better suits your website’s branding.
The same goes for the pin it buttons that you can have hovering over your images.
Don’t like the usual Pin It button and prefer one that’s a similar color and font to the rest of your site? Just upload that instead.
Elsewhere, you can use this versatile, lightweight plugin to display your Pinterest profile or selected pins in your sidebars, footers, or even on pages.
Like all of the plugins featured on our list, this one takes almost no effort to learn and comes with a simple, intuitive interface so that you can get your website Pinterest optimized as quickly as possible.
Which is the Best Pinterest Plugin for Your WordPress Website?
While there may be countless Pinterest plugins for WordPress out there, the eight that we’ve featured above really do represent the very best of the best.
We chose our five free options based on those which not only contained the most helpful features but which were the easiest to use and didn’t slow down our website as some of the more clunky plugins are prone to doing.
In terms of our three premium picks, we looked at all of the above while also considering which plugins represented the very best value for your hard-earned money.
Yet while we’ve certainly got our favorites, only one question remains:
Which one of these tools should you use on your website?
The truth is that any of the eight options above will make a valuable addition to your WordPress website, but deciding on which one to use will all come down to exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
If your goal is to display your carefully curated Pinterest boards on your own website (or showcase other people’s boards), then our second-placed premium pick, Pinterest 2 WordPress does this better than most, offering gorgeous, highly customizable patterns to suit any website niche.
If you’re aiming to do that without spending a penny, then our second-placed free option GS Pins for Pinterest is absolutely the one for you.
Are you looking to encourage people to share your content for you? Give Social Warfare Pro a try if you have the money to spend, or Pin It by Weblizar if you don’t.
Finally, if you’re looking to do all of the above as well as adding Follow Me buttons and making Pinterest a major part of your traffic-building strategy, you really can’t go wrong with our top-ranked choice, PI Button, a plugin that combines a sleek, user-friendly interface with all the features you could ever need to really make the most of Pinterest.
