Easy Social Share Buttons 12: Highlight Share, Social Profile Card Studio, Redesigned Experience

View Full Version 12.0 Changelog

We’re releasing Easy Social Share Buttons 12, our biggest update for the last few years. It adds two headline features, the new Highlight Share floating bar and the free Social Profile Card Studio, plus a redesigned settings experience, twelve new email subscribe providers, major Pinterest Pro improvements, a lighter front end, and a long list of polish and security work. Whether you share blog posts, sell products, or build link-in-bio pages, version 12 gives you more control and a faster site.

Below is a walkthrough of everything new, with a screenshot or short clip for each change.

A note about this release: Version 12 changes a lot across the plugin. It went through private beta testing, but issues may still show up in some setups. If you hit a problem, please contact us and we’ll help right away. In the meantime, you can log in to your account, download the previous release, and roll back until it’s fixed.

Social Profile Card Studio: Link-in-Bio Pages and Profile Cards, Free

Social Profile Card Studio turns your bio link into a professional profile card in seconds. It’s a free plugin that builds mobile-first cards you can place anywhere on your site, with 72 ready-made presets, a smart style generator, and scheduled blocks for timing promotions and links. It runs as a standalone plugin on unlimited sites and integrates with Easy Social Share Buttons.

Easy Social Share Buttons 12 also adds a Social Profile Card module to After Share Events. It shows a profile card built in Social Profile Card Studio inside the after-share popup, so the moment a visitor shares your content they see your profile card and a clear next step: follow, subscribe, or visit your link-in-bio page. The only setup is choosing which card to show.

Because Social Profile Card Studio is free and works on its own, you can start building your link-in-bio page today and bring it into Easy Social Share Buttons later. Whether you run one blog or an agency with dozens of client sites, the studio keeps your brand consistent across every bio link.

Learn more about Social Profile Card Studio →

Highlight Share: Let Visitors Share Any Passage They Highlight

Highlight Share lets visitors share the exact passage they want from your post, not just a generic link. A floating bar appears over the text they select, so the right content gets shared.

Configure it under Share Buttons > Highlight Share: networks, post types, template, button size, spacing, and panel background. It’s also toggleable under Advanced > Features and from the Dashboard, and the Getting Started wizard now includes a dedicated Highlight Share step so new sites can enable it in seconds.

Pinterest Pro: Per-Image Titles and Smarter Image Pinning

Pinterest Pro now lets you set a custom Pinterest title for each image directly in the Media Library, in the attachment screen, media modal, and image block sidebar. The title appears on your pins automatically, so pins show the title you intended. You can also set a default title for all images, and per-image titles take priority. All Pinterest fields are sanitized on save, with titles capped at 100 characters.

The Image block sidebar now shows a single Pinterest Pro by Easy Social Share Buttons panel with Pinterest Text, Pinterest Title, Pinterest Repin ID, and Disable Pinning. Saved markup carries both the native data-pin-* attributes (readable by Pinterest tools out of the box) and the plugin’s data-essb-pin-* attributes used by the hover Pin button. A new Apply media-library Pinterest fields to template images option, enabled by default, also adds attachment Pinterest fields to images rendered by themes and widgets, not only inserted images, while excluding very small images and the site logo.

Twelve New Email Subscribe Providers

The subscribe form connector list just grew. Easy Social Share Buttons 12 adds native support for ConvertKit, Klaviyo, MailerLite (new API), SendGrid, Mailgun, EmailOctopus, Drip, Omnisend, SendFox, Moosend, Sender, and Mailjet. They sit alongside the existing providers and use the same form designs, double opt-in, and success redirect options, so you can switch providers without rebuilding your forms. If you’ve been waiting to connect a specific email platform, chances are it’s supported now.

A Redesigned Settings Experience

Version 12 makes configuration faster and more visual. The most-used screens now share a consistent design across network selection, color customization, multi-select fields, and position assignment.

New Network Selection with Brand Colors

The social network selection component used on the global networks page and the per-position network lists has been redesigned. It now uses network brand colors (including custom networks), supports drag-and-drop reordering, and allows inline editing of button text. The same component now drives share buttons, social profile links, and the social followers counter, so selection and configuration behave the same across all three.

Redesigned Color Customizers

The long per-network color rows are gone. Color customizers for social share buttons, social profile link buttons, social followers counters, the Click to Share template, and the custom share buttons template builder now use a compact, searchable grid of network cards with a live preview. Each card shows the network icon and name as a live preview button, with Regular, Hover, Icon, and Icon-hover color pickers, per-network and global Reset actions, and a Preview hover toggle for instant feedback. Icon colors now apply to both SVG icons and text labels. Twitter/X uses a dark color scheme and the X icon. New icon color customization (normal and hover) is generated into the front-end dynamic CSS.

Post Types and Display Positions, Together

Post types and display positions are now managed on a single settings screen, with a new position selector for choosing where share buttons appear. Display by post type now uses a new, distinct layout instead of the previous one, making it easier to see which positions are active on each content type. Responsive controls have moved into the new position select component, so breakpoint-specific appearance is configured right where the position is chosen. Position assignment by post type was fully reworked, giving a clearer flow from “where” to “on which content types.”

Redesigned Subscribe Form Customizer

The subscribe form customization screen was remade. The nine bundled designs and custom forms are now managed in a single list with an editor popup that includes a live preview rendered by the real form engine. Both bundled and custom designs save directly from the editor without pressing an extra “Update Options” button, with no change to the stored options.

Cleaner Multi-Select Fields

Outdated Select2 multi-selects (After Share networks, pop-up networks, post types, and others) were replaced with a plugin-native multi-select that keeps the same saved options and adds a searchable dropdown, removable chips, and keyboard support.

Share Counters: Quicker Activation and Setup

The share counters screen was updated to allow quick internal counter activation and to set share counters with fewer steps and less room for mistakes.

Performance and a Lighter Front End

Under the hood, Easy Social Share Buttons 12 is leaner and faster:

Frontend scripts now run on vanilla JavaScript, with no jQuery dependency.
Restructured assets: core assets stay in assets/css and assets/js, while reusable parts live in assets/parts/css and assets/parts/js.
Parts manager renders only the CSS fragments your active features need, so inactive features don’t ship extra CSS.
Optimized render engine for faster execution and lower resource use, even on high-traffic sites.
Analytics logging no longer blocks PHP workers; the artificial delay is gone.

Migrate from Novashare and Tasty Pins in One Click

Switching plugins shouldn’t cost you your per-post customizations. Version 12 ships two data migration adapters, available under Advanced > Migrate Legacy Data:

Novashare adapter — imports per-post social title/description/image (Open Graph, Twitter, Google, and share-button image), Pinterest image, Pinterest description, hidden images, hide inline/floating and disable image-pins/highlight toggles, and recovery URLs. Also migrates per-image Pinterest attributes. Available when a Novashare install is detected.
Tasty Pins adapter — imports per-post Pinterest customizations: hidden images, default Pin title and text, force-pinning and banner-disable flags, and per-image Pinterest attributes.

Images are resolved from attachment IDs to URLs, existing Easy Social Share Buttons values are preserved through a non-destructive merge, and re-running a migration produces no duplicate writes. Both adapters replace the old runtime bridge option, which has been removed.

Security Hardening

Security work in this release:

CSRF nonce verification on the four frontend AJAX handlers: post count, love, mail, and analytics.
Hardened mail share action: POST-only input handling, article existence validation, sanitization and length limits, result reporting, and hardened headers.
Replaced unsafe unserialize() calls in migration and Pinterest hidden-image handling with safe alternatives.
Capability checks on the advanced options dispatcher and counter-clear AJAX.
Allowlisted open AJAX dispatcher with optional per-action nonce verification.
Sanitized share-conversions registration inputs and removed debug logging statements.

Removed Deprecated Features

To keep the plugin lean, several deprecated features were removed in version 12:

Social Metrics Lite.
The legacy Style Library (screen, hints, and toggle).
Legacy native social mode in After Share Actions.
Integrations for WP e-Commerce, JigoShop, and iThemes Exchange.
The Novashare runtime bridge option and panel (replaced by the migration adapter).
Deprecated click-to-chat module (use the free Social Chat plugin instead).

Sites using the removed After Share native social mode will have that action turned off; everything else is a clean removal with no data loss.