Adding social sharing functionality to your WooCommerce product pages can enhance user engagement and make it easier for your visitors to share your products with others. In this post, I’ll guide you through how to implement a custom share button in WooCommerce using the Web Share API.
Why Use the Web Share API?
The Web Share API allows websites to invoke the native sharing capabilities of the device, enabling users to share URLs, text, or even files with their preferred apps directly from the browser. This provides a seamless experience, especially on mobile devices.
Creating a Custom Share Button
Here’s how you can create a custom WooCommerce share button using a simple function hooked into the woocommerce_share action. The button will trigger the Web Share API when clicked, allowing users to easily share the current product page.
Step-by-Step Code Breakdown:
Result:
What Does This Code Do?
- Custom Share Button HTML: The code outputs a button that includes both text (
Share) and an SVG icon (a share symbol). This button will appear wherever thewoocommerce_shareaction is called in the WooCommerce template. - Styling the Button: We style the button using basic CSS to make it visually appealing, with a background color and hover effect.
- Web Share API Integration: Using jQuery, we listen for a click event on the button. When the button is clicked, the Web Share API is triggered. If the browser supports the API, it opens the native sharing options on the user’s device, pre-populated with the product title, some text, and the current page URL. If the API isn’t supported, an alert notifies the user to manually copy the link.
Adding the Function to WooCommerce
We hook our function into WooCommerce’s woocommerce_share action. This ensures that the button will appear in the correct place on the product pages. By default, this action outputs the social share buttons, but by hooking into it, we can add our custom sharing feature.
add_action('woocommerce_share', 'custom_woocommerce_share_content');
Browser Support
Keep in mind that the Web Share API is primarily supported on mobile devices and certain desktop browsers. If the browser doesn’t support the Web Share API, we provide a fallback that informs users to manually copy the URL.
Conclusion
With just a few lines of code, you can add a sleek, custom share button to your WooCommerce product pages that takes advantage of the Web Share API. This is a great way to make sharing easy for your users, especially on mobile devices. Try implementing this on your site and see how it can boost your product visibility!
