The Jetpack plugin from WordPress is a great way of adding some core WordPress.com features to your self hosted website; in particular, we’ll be looking at the Sharing feature of the plugin.
As great as this functionality is, it doesn’t bring the ability to share content to the world’s most popular messenger app, WhatsApp (with almost a billion monthly users), whilst using mobile devices. Depending on your device’s browser, there can be share options for WhatsApp but these are hidden behind a trigger; what we’re after is something inline to prompt users that sharing is an option via WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Sharing Button for Jetpack solves this problem by utilising the Jetpack plugin (so you will need to have Jetpack installed). The plugin rather simply adds WhatsApp to a list of the available services, so when you’re creating your share widget the messenger app appears as an option.
As these buttons don’t work with the web version of WhatsApp just yet, they rather cleverly display only on mobile devices, so by default they include specific targeting to prevent it been shown to users who won’t be able to utilise the functionality.
