How to Add a Facebook Share Button to Your Website

Putting a Facebook share button on your website is one of the simplest and most effective ways to let your audience market your content for you. It turns every reader into a potential promoter, expanding your reach well beyond your existing followers. We’ll take a look at two primary methods for adding a Facebook share button to your site: the official copy-and-paste method from Meta and the even easier plugin approach for platforms like WordPress.

Why a Facebook Share Button Is Still a Game Changer

In a world of complex algorithms and paid ad strategies, the humble share button remains a powerhouse for organic growth. It’s a direct line to the most valuable kind of marketing: word-of-mouth recommendations. When a user shares your content, it’s not just a click, it's a personal endorsement sent directly to their friends, family, and professional network.

Here’s why it’s so effective:

• Epic Boost in Visibility: Every share puts your content in front of a brand-new audience. If one hundred people share your article with their network of 500 friends, you’re suddenly reaching up to 50,000 potential new readers without spending a penny.
• More Traffic, More Leads: With increased visibility comes a direct increase in website traffic. People trust recommendations from friends, making them far more likely to click a shared link than an ad. This targeted traffic is often high-quality, as it’s pre-qualified by a trusted source.
• Builds Powerful Social Proof: A high share count serves as a valuable signal. When new visitors see that your content has been shared hundreds or thousands of times, it immediately establishes credibility. It says, "This is helpful, trustworthy, and worth your time."
• It's Free, User-Generated Promotion: You’re empowering your biggest fans to become an extension of your marketing team. They do the work of distributing your content for you, driven purely by the value they got from it. This is organic marketing at its finest.

Getting Ready: 3 Things You Need Before You Start

Before you jump into the code or plugins, a little preparation will make sure your shared content looks professional and works correctly. Taking care of these three elements first will save you from headaches later.

1. Create a Facebook Developer App ID (For the Official Method)

If you plan to use Facebook's official code snippet, you'll need an App ID. It sounds more intimidating than it is. This ID simply tells Facebook which application (in this case, your website) is making the request to use its features.

Here’s how to get one in just a few minutes:

1. Go to the Meta for Developers website and log in with your personal Facebook account.
2. In the top right corner, click on "My Apps."
3. Click the green "Create App" button.
4. Choose "Other" for the app type and click "Next." Then select "Business" and click "Next."
5. Give your app a display name - something like "[Your Website Name] Share Button" works great - and add your contact email. Click "Create App."
6. You may be asked to re-enter your Facebook password for security.
7. Once your app is created, you'll land on its dashboard. Your App ID is the number displayed at the top of the page. Keep this page open, you'll need this ID shortly.

Note: If you're using a WordPress plugin or a built-in CMS feature, you can often skip this step, but it's good practice to have an App ID to connect your site correctly with Facebook's tools, like the Sharing Debugger.

2. Have Content Worth Sharing

This might seem obvious, but a share button is useless if no one wants to click it. The driving force behind any share is the quality of your content. Before you add the button, ask yourself: Does this piece of content solve a problem? Is it exceptionally entertaining or inspiring? Does it offer an expert perspective that people can't find elsewhere? If the answer is yes, people will be excited to share it.

3. Optimize with Open Graph (OG) Tags

This is the most important - and most overlooked - step. Open Graph tags are snippets of code in the <,head>, section of your page that control how your content appears when it's shared on social platforms like Facebook. Without them, Facebook has to guess what image, title, and description to show, and it often guesses wrong.

By setting up OG tags, you take charge of the preview. Here are the most important ones:

<,meta property="og:title" content="Your Catchy Title Here" />,
<,meta property="og:description" content="A compelling summary of your content to entice clicks." />,
<,meta property="og:image" content="https://www.yourwebsite.com/path/to/your-share-image.jpg" />,
<,meta property="og:url" content="https://www.yourwebsite.com/the-actual-page-url" />,
<,meta property="og:type" content="article" />,

• og:title: This is the headline that will appear in the shared post. Make it attention-grabbing.
• og:description: The short summary that appears below the headline. It’s your chance to convince someone to click.
• og:image: The most important one! Share a direct URL to a high-quality (1200x630 pixels is ideal) image that represents your content. A great image dramatically increases click-through rates.

If you're using a CMS like WordPress, SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math make adding OG tags incredibly easy through a simple user interface on each page or post editor - no coding required.

Method 1: The Official Meta for Developers Configurator

This method involves adding two pieces of code to your website. It’s the most customizable and reliable approach, as it comes directly from Facebook.

Step 1: Go to the Share Button Configurator Page

First, head over to Meta's official tool page: Share Button Configurator.

Step 2: Set Up Your Button's Appearance

You’ll see a simple form to design your button. Here’s what the options mean:

• URL to share: Enter the link you want the button to share. If this is for a blog template, you can leave it blank for now or put your homepage. We'll make it dynamic later.
• Layout: This changes the button's style. Common choices include box_count (shows share count above), button_count (shows count to the right), button (just the button), and icon_link (just the logo).
• Size: Choose between Small and Large for the button text and icon.

As you change the settings, you’ll see the button preview update in real-time.

Step 3: Get Your Code Snippets

Once you’re happy with the design, click the "Get Code" button. A window will pop up with two pieces of code.

Snippet 1: The JavaScript SDK

This code is the "engine" that powers all of Facebook's plugins. You only need to add it once per page, ideally right after the opening <,body>, tag.

<,div id="fb-root">,<,/div>,
<,script async defer crossorigin="anonymous" src="https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&,version=v19.0&,appId=YOUR_APP_ID" nonce="XXXXXXXX">,<,/script>,

Replace YOUR_APP_ID with the App ID you created earlier. The rest can be copied and pasted exactly as is.

Snippet 2: The Button Placement Code

This is the code for the button itself. Place this HTML tag exactly where you want the share button to appear on your page - for example, at the end of a blog post.

<,div class="fb-share-button" data-href="https://your-page-to-share.com" data-layout="button_count" data-size="large">,<,/div>,

The trick here is to make the data-href dynamic. On a blog, you don't want every post to share the homepage. You want it to share the URL of the post being read. How you do this depends on your back-end language or templating engine. For example, in PHP it might look like this:

<,div class="fb-share-button" data-href="<,?php echo get_permalink(), ?>," data-layout="button_count" data-size="large">,<,/div>,

That get_permalink() part is a common WordPress function that automatically inserts the current page's URL.

Method 2: Using a Plugin on WordPress or a Feature on Hosted Platforms

If you're not comfortable editing code, or if you just want a faster solution, this is the way to go.

For WordPress Websites

The massive WordPress ecosystem has countless plugins designed for social sharing.

1. Navigate to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins >, Add New.
3. Search for "social sharing" or "share buttons." You'll see dozens of highly-rated options. Sassy Social Share is a popular and free choice, while premium options like Social Snap offer more features.
4. Click Install Now on the plugin you've chosen, and then Activate.
5. Find the plugin's new settings menu in your sidebar. From here, you’ll be able to toggle Facebook on, choose a button style, and decide where on your pages the buttons should appear (e.g., above content, below content, a floating sidebar, etc.). It’s usually just a matter of checking a few boxes.

For Other Platforms (Shopify, Squarespace, Wix)

• Shopify: Social share buttons are typically controlled within your theme’s settings. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store >, Themes. Click Customize on your current theme and look for a section related to "Social media," "Product pages," or "Blog posts."
• Squarespace: You can enable share buttons across your site easily. Go to Marketing >, Share Buttons and toggle them on for the content types where you want them to appear (like blog posts or products).
• Wix: Wix makes adding social elements simple through its editor. Just click the "+" (Add) button in the editor, go to "Social," and choose a social bar. You can then customize it to include Facebook and other networks you want.

Final Thoughts

Adding a Facebook share button is a high-impact, low-effort way to turn readers into brand advocates and drive meaningful organic growth for your website. Whether you choose to add the official code for fine-tuned control or a simple CMS plugin for speed and ease, the outcome is the same: you make your content easier to spread, leading to more visibility and traffic.

Driving traffic from social media is just one half of the equation, nurturing that new audience is where the real value is built. That’s why we built Postbase to simplify things. Our platform makes it easy to schedule your content across all your channels consistently, including Facebook, so your new visitors find an active and engaging presence when they check you out. Plus, our unified inbox pulls all your comments and DMs into one clean feed, ensuring you can connect with every new follower who finds you from those shared links.

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