How to add a Pinterest button to your WordPress site

If your WordPress site has images worth looking at, there is a good chance some of your visitors are Pinterest users who would love to save them. The friction stopping them isn't interest. It's the process: copy the URL, open a new tab, go to Pinterest, paste the link, fill in the description, pick a board. Most people don't do all of that. A Pinterest button turns that whole sequence into one click, and the visitor is done.

There are a few ways to add that button to a WordPress site, and they differ in how much you need to touch the code. I'll walk through three of them, from simplest to most hands-on, so you can pick the one that fits where you are with WordPress right now.

Starting with a plugin

For most people, a social sharing plugin is the right place to start. Plugins like AddToAny or Sassy Social Share add a full row of sharing buttons including Pinterest without requiring you to write any code. You install the plugin from the WordPress dashboard (Plugins, then Add New, then search the plugin name), activate it, and configure it through its settings panel. From there you choose which buttons to show, where they appear (above the content, below it, floating on the side), and which post types they show up on.

The Pinterest button in a sharing plugin works by reading the current page's URL and its featured image, then passing both to Pinterest's own Save interface. When a visitor clicks the button, Pinterest opens with the image and link already filled in. The visitor just picks which board to save it to, and they're done, with nothing to copy or paste on their end.

A few things are worth checking when you're evaluating a plugin. Look at how much JavaScript it loads on every page. Some sharing plugins load a fairly heavy bundle even on posts where you wouldn't normally expect social traffic, and that can drag your page speed down. Check that it works on mobile, since a lot of Pinterest browsing happens on phones. And look at when the plugin was last updated. A plugin that hasn't been touched in two years may still function, but it's worth a closer look before you rely on it.

One setting that often gets overlooked: most social sharing plugins let you define a minimum image size before the Pinterest hover button appears on an image. That's what keeps the button from showing up on your logo, your author avatar, or any small decorative image that was never meant to be pinned. It's worth finding that setting and using it.

• Confirm the button is active on the content types you actually want covered. Plugins often default to posts only, and you may want it on pages too.
• Set a featured image on every post. That's what Pinterest pulls as the pin image in most plugin configurations, and a missing featured image means Pinterest picks something on its own.
• Use the minimum image size setting to exclude logos, avatars, and small decorative images from the hover button.
• Don't enable every sharing network at once. A row of fifteen icons buries the Pinterest button and creates visual noise that tends to make people ignore the whole bar.

Pinterest's own Save button

Pinterest also provides an official Save button through their developer tools. Even if you go with a plugin in the end, it's worth understanding how this works, because it shows you exactly what any Pinterest button is doing underneath.

The official button is a small piece of JavaScript that you load in your site's header, combined with a snippet of HTML that you place wherever you want the button to appear. Pinterest handles the pinning experience once the button is clicked. There's no intermediary plugin and no plugin author's maintenance schedule to depend on. It's Pinterest's own code, kept current by Pinterest.

The trade-off is that adding it means either editing your theme files or using a code injection plugin to add the script to your site header. If you've never done either of those things, the plugin approach is a less stressful starting point. Once you're comfortable in WordPress and you understand what the button is doing, the official widget is a clean option. But there's no meaningful gap in the end result for a typical site. The visitor's experience is identical either way.

Building it without a plugin

If you only need a Pinterest button in one specific place, say on a particular image caption or a single landing page, you can build it without installing anything. Pinterest uses a predictable URL format: you pass the page URL, the image URL, and a description as parameters in a link, and Pinterest opens its Save dialog with everything pre-filled. The visitor sees the same experience as with a plugin. What's different is that you're constructing the link yourself rather than letting a plugin do it for you.

This approach is useful when you want precise control over exactly one button's placement and you're already comfortable working in the block editor or in a bit of HTML. It's also a useful exercise even if you end up with a plugin. Once you see the URL a sharing plugin is building behind the scenes, the button's behavior makes more sense, and debugging it becomes more straightforward. When Pinterest pulls the wrong image, for instance, you'll know where to look.

The three methods side by side

Think of the Pinterest button like a take-one holder on a store display. The interesting thing is already there, your images, your content. The holder doesn't make any of that better. What it does is remove the friction for someone who already wanted to take a copy. Without it, they'd have to remember your address, come back later, or ask at the counter, and most people won't do any of those things. With it, they save the image in one motion and move on. The button is the holder. Pinterest is just where the copies end up.

Whichever method you go with, take fifteen minutes to check how it actually behaves after you set it up. Look at it on your phone, try the button on a few different post types, and see what image Pinterest is pulling when someone clicks. Sometimes the first image on a page isn't the one you'd want pinned, and a small adjustment to your featured image or plugin settings fixes that right away. Testing it yourself before you assume it's working the way you expect will save you from finding out otherwise later, after a few hundred people have pinned the wrong thing.

If you're working through this kind of setup and you'd rather have someone in the room walking through it with you on your actual site, I run beginner WordPress sessions for individuals and small teams in the Niagara region. In person and at a real keyboard, with no webinar in sight. The services page has the details on what's currently available.