Monarch Plugin Review: A Powerful Social Sharing Toolkit for WordPress

As a WordPress site owner, you know how critical it is to make it easy for your visitors to share your content on their social media channels. More social shares can mean more traffic, leads, and ultimately customers for your business. While WordPress doesn‘t include social sharing functionality out of the box, there are many plugins available to add this key feature to your site.

One of the most popular and full-featured options is the Monarch plugin from Elegant Themes. In this in-depth review, we‘ll take a close look at everything Monarch has to offer and help you decide if it‘s the right social sharing solution for your WordPress website.

What Is Monarch?

Monarch is a premium WordPress plugin that enables you to add highly customizable social share buttons, social follow buttons, and share counts to your website. It supports over 20 social networks and allows you to display your buttons in a variety of prominent locations.

The plugin is designed to help you increase social shares and followers without slowing down your site. It includes share counts to provide social proof and integrates with Google Analytics so you can track how many visits and new followers you get from each network.

Key Features of Monarch

Let‘s dive into the main features Monarch offers for adding social sharing to your WordPress site:

Customizable Social Share Buttons

Monarch allows you to add stylish share buttons for over 20 of the most popular social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, WhatsApp, Telegram, and many more.

Monarch supports over 20 social networks for social sharing

You have full control over the appearance of the buttons to ensure they fit your site‘s design. You can choose from 5 icon shapes, 4 hover effects, and unlimited custom colors.

Monarch offers many style options for social share buttons

There are also multiple options for the share count and button label, allowing you to display the numbers and network name in different arrangements.

Multiple Display Locations

To maximize visibility and shares, Monarch lets you display the share buttons in five different spots:

  • Floating Sidebar – Buttons "float" in a vertical row on the side of the page
  • Inline Content – Buttons automatically added above/below your post content
  • On Media – Buttons appear when a visitor hovers over an image or video
  • Pop-Up – Buttons displayed in a pop-up, triggered by a time delay or when a user starts to leave the page
  • Fly-In – Buttons "fly in" from the bottom corner after a set time or when the visitor scrolls

You can enable multiple locations and customize the triggers for the pop-up and fly-in options.

Social Follow Buttons

In addition to share buttons, Monarch also supports social follow buttons for over 35 networks. You can display your follower counts and include these buttons in your sidebar or anywhere else using a shortcode.

Add social follow buttons with Monarch to increase followers

Powerful Analytics and Reporting

Monarch offers comprehensive analytics so you can see how your share buttons are performing. You can view your total share and follow counts over time as well as stats for individual posts.

View in-depth social sharing analytics in Monarch

To track the traffic your site receives from social media, you can connect Monarch to Google Analytics. It will automatically add tracking tags to your share links so you‘ll know exactly how many visits each network sends to your site.

Advantages of Monarch

After testing Monarch extensively, here are some of the biggest benefits I‘ve found:

Highly Customizable

With Monarch, you have a ton of control over how your social buttons look and function. The ability to adjust the shape, color, label, and hover effect of the buttons means you can perfectly match them to your site‘s design and branding.

You also have granular control over where and how the buttons appear. For example, you can have a floating sidebar on your homepage, inline buttons on blog posts, and use the pop-up trigger to engage visitors after they finish reading your content.

This deep level of customization is something you won‘t find in most other social sharing plugins.

Easy to Set Up

Despite its many features, Monarch is surprisingly simple to configure. The settings are logically laid out and include helpful descriptions.

Even if you‘ve never used a social plugin before, you can get Monarch up and running in just a few minutes. Install and activate the plugin, enter your social profile information and license key, then configure your desired share buttons, follow buttons, and display rules.

Lightweight and Fast

A frequent issue with social sharing plugins is that they can slow down your site by adding bulky scripts and stylesheets. Monarch is designed to minimize this problem by only loading the JavaScript files needed for the active buttons on each page.

Combined with the plugin‘s streamlined, well-optimized code, this selective script loading means Monarch won‘t negatively impact your page speed or performance.

Integrates With Email Marketing Services

A unique feature of Monarch is the ability to integrate your social follow buttons with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp, AWeber, Hubspot, and more.

Connecting your accounts will automatically add new followers to your email list, allowing you to quickly grow your subscriber base and reach fans across multiple channels.

Potential Drawbacks

While Monarch is an excellent all-around social sharing plugin, there are a few potential limitations to be aware of:

  • It lacks support for a few less popular networks like Weibo and Xing
  • There‘s no option to create "click to tweet" boxes within your content
  • You may still need an additional plugin for more advanced social features like social login and auto-posting

However, these will only be issues for a small number of users. For most, Monarch‘s core functionality is more than enough.

How Much Does Monarch Cost?

Monarch is a premium plugin, so you‘ll need to pay to use it. It‘s available as part of the Elegant Themes membership, which costs $89 per year. This gives you access to Monarch as well as Elegant‘s flagship Divi theme and all of their other themes and plugins.

Considering everything that‘s included, the Elegant Themes bundle offers excellent value for the price. You can also get a lifetime membership for a one-time price of $249. Both options come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Monarch vs. Other Social Sharing Plugins

How does Monarch stack up against other popular social sharing plugins for WordPress? Let‘s compare it to two of the top alternatives.

Monarch vs. Social Warfare

Social Warfare is another powerful sharing plugin with a focus on performance and customization. It includes most of the same networks and display locations as Monarch.

One unique Social Warfare feature is the ability to upload Pinterest-specific images and descriptions. Monarch does have an advantage in its email integrations and pop-up/fly-in display options.

Pricing for Social Warfare starts at $29 per year for a single site license, making it more affordable than Monarch for those who don‘t need Elegant‘s other products.

Monarch vs. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is a lightweight sharing plugin built around the third-party sharedcount.com API. Its main advantage is speed – by offloading the share counting to an external service, it adds minimal bloat to your WordPress site.

However, Shared Counts is much more limited in its display and customization options compared to Monarch. It also lacks built-in analytics and follow buttons.

At $40 – $80 per year, Shared Counts is priced similarly to Monarch but offers less overall functionality.

Is Monarch Right for Your WordPress Site?

With its diverse feature set, in-depth analytics, and intuitive interface, Monarch is one of the most comprehensive social sharing toolkits available for WordPress. The ability to customize and control every aspect of your social buttons is unmatched.

We recommend Monarch for WordPress site owners who:

  • Want to maximize social shares/follows from a variety of networks
  • Need granular control over button placement and styling
  • Value in-depth performance tracking and analytics
  • Are already using or interested in Elegant‘s themes or other plugins

While there are less expensive sharing plugins that cover the basics, Monarch is worth the investment if you‘re serious about growing your social media presence and generating more traffic and engagement from social channels.

If you have any questions about Monarch or need help setting it up on your WordPress site, leave a comment below!

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