There are many blog toolbars that you can add to your website. These toolbars can be configured to appear at the top or bottom of your blog, or at the bottom of the sidebar etc. You can use blog toolbars to enhance the engagement of your readers by providing them with highlighted content, a search box, sharing tools and much more.
There is a common misconception that installing blog toolbar will reduce your site speed (or rather increase the wait time of your readers), but that’s not entirely true. With the improvement of CDN and caching technology, modern blog toolbars start up extremely fast and are very easy to install.
Here is a list of nine awesome toolbars for you to enhance the reader engagement on your blog and start building your blog community.
Wibiya Toolbar
This is the most common blog toolbar that people are using right now. The Wibiya toolbar lets you customize the features that you want to appear on the toolbar. You can select from wide range of applications like Photo Gallery, Twitter, Random Posts, Real Time Users, Smart Share etc.
The Wibiya toolbar offers:
- Application and color libraries where you can select from tons of buttons that you want to appear on the toolbar and then color match them with your theme. Wibiya is calling for the help of other developers so I should expect to see more Wibiya applications real soon.
- Images in your blog will automatically be inserted into a black strip at the bottom. This strip appears every time a reader hovers their mouse near the bottom. When the reader clicks on that strip, the screen will black out and a set of sharing tools will appear, which is pretty cool.
- Wibiya’s very light-weight. From my testing, the Wibiya toolbar weighs in at just 1.8kB and it takes 34ms to load.
- You can choose to install on WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, vBulletin, Tumblr or even on any website.
- Wibiya requires that you to have an account before using it. You can login to this account and see how many people have been engaged in your blog and other statistics such as page views, which buttons are often clicked, etc.
Gigya Toolbar
The Gigya toolbar comes as WordPress plug-in and sadly, it isn’t supported on other platforms. It used to be a popular blog toolbar, but since Gigya doesn’t focus on developing it anymore, bloggers have started to use other toolbars instead. However, Gigya still offers you these nice features:
- Allows your readers to login to their social account and post their status.
- Supports multiple languages.
- Doesn’t affect page loading times much at all.
Meebo bar
Meebo is a well known for Instant Messaging, but they also offer other tools such as the Meebo bar. The Meebo bar is actually a pretty cool toolbar that helps you and your readers become closer by exchanging information through social networks and IM. The Meebo bar is a real nice-to-have toolbar which ofers you these features:
- Readers can chat with their friends right on your page or share the page with other people through social network and Instant Messaging.
- Meebo bar allows you to customize what buttons you want to appear on your toolbar, mostly like Wibiya. However, Meebo bar offers slightly more applications than Wibiya.
- You can also track analytics of your bar in the Meebo dashboard. Analytics include how many people have engaged in your blog content, pageviews and which bar buttons have been clicked.
Apture Toolbar
Apture is a new name in blog toolbar ‘directory’, but what it has done so far is really good. Apture lets you install a top toolbar that only appears when readers scroll down your blog and it has an extremely simple interface. The Apture bar contains three sharing buttons in which two buttons count how many people have shared your content and the another one lets them email your post to other people. Apture bar offers you following advantages:
- Readers can search anything they want in the page they are reading. It helps you gain insight about what information you may not have included in your articles.
- Apture links with external sources to provide extra information when readers don’t understand a phrase/term on your blog. That results in increasing the time on page because they don’t have to leave your site to look up information elsewhere.
- Customized interface. It appears when the user scrolls down, which doesn’t affect the reading experience of the users.
WordPress Static Toolbar
If you would rather have just a simple toolbar which you can control right from the admin page of your blog then this plug-in is an answer for you. The WordPress Static toolbar offers:
- Display the most recent posts on your blog. You can control how many posts you want to display in the control pane of the plugin.
- Allows readers to search in your blog from the toolbar.
- Integrates sharing tools and social network tools right into the bar, which let readers share content in real time and connect with you through the social networks that you are joining in.
WordPress bar
WordPress bar is another toolbar for WordPress only. WordPress bar offers several unique features such as:
- This plugin places a toolbar on external sites that your blog links to. On the external site, the toolbar will show your blog home page link, how many people have clicked on the link and posts in your blog that link to this site. I installed this toolbar on one of my other blogs and the results were pretty awesome. Readers remember to go back to my site to check out more information and I can see the frequent visitors rate increased by at least 5%.
- Track how many times users clicked on your links.
- The plugin also offers multiple colors for you to choose from.
WordPress Toolbar
This toolbar is similar to the WordPress bar described above. This plugin will insert a toolbar on every external site that your blog links to in order to remind your readers of your original post that lead them to that external site. It also shows your blog home page, social network buttons to share your post and a comment button so that readers can come back and comment on your article.
Iconcy Toolbar
This plugin will insert into your home page or individual blog posts, a sidebar which will let readers:
- Navigate to the home page.
- Subscribe to your RSS Feeds.
- Share the content through social networks.
- Let users tweet your content through Twitter.
MaxBlogPress StripeAd
This plugin will install a small stripe text ad at the top of your blog which doesn’t move when readers scroll down. It’s not exactly a toolbar but I find that it will help to increase the revenue of your blog by exposing more ads without interfering with the readers attention. Many bloggers have installed this plugin and I recommend you so as well.
Are there any other Toolbars that I Forgot to Mention?
There are many other toolbars, but I did not include them all since the toolbars I listed here are the major ones that I have tested. Some toolbars are poorly written and may affect your site loading speed, so beware of that and do your own page speed testing.
Are you using any other great toolbars that are not in my list? Please let me know by commenting below.
By Jamie Northrup
Nice list Kirk, I didn’t know about the WordPress one for external links, I’m gonna give it a try, thanks for the great info
By Kirk Maxi
Yup, give it a try Jamie. You’re welcome
By Hunter
Have you noticed if any of the toolbars, increased a sites page load time? Thanks.
By Kirk Maxi
Wibiya loads very fast and takes only 1.8KB as I mentioned and it’s ranked #1 in my speed test. #2 is Apture bar and #3 is Meebo bar. Gigya bar takes up 6.2KB and needs 600ms to load so I don’t recommend it. The other hosted toolbars, you will need to use CDN to store them to make it load fast enough in your blog. In addition, they pretty depend on Addthis buttons for social media sharing so load time often falls in range 400ms – 600ms.
Cheers
By Ashlie
I’m not sure I understand the usefulness of a toolbar. I get the search bar to search your own site for info but the other bars? Do they take visitors away from your site. I work hard to increase traffic to my site with SEO and other marketing strategies, and I do not anything more than I have to have that will take visitors away. Can you help clarify this some?
By Kirk Maxi
Hi Ashlie,
That’s the reason why you need a toolbar to keep your visitors around and keep them engaged in the content. Imagine if a blog doesn’t have sharing tools and you have exit the page and go to Twitter to share it, you might not naturally come back to the same page.
These toolbars that I am introducing will not take your visitors away. All of the sharing tools are opened as either pop-ups or lightbox windows so you don’t have to concerned that visitors will navigate away. Instead, they might appreciate it because you have a convenient toolbar for them.
If you’re still in doubt about the effectiveness of the toolbars, install one that has analytics and track the engagement score of readers over one month, you’ll know whether it works or not and after that, you can always uninstall it.
Hope that helps, Ashlie.
By Richard
Hi Kirk,
Awesome list. I have the maxblogpress stripe ad running on my blog. But these other toolbars seem really useful and have tons of features.
By Kirk Maxi
Hi Richard,
I am using External bar now for my affiliate links. I have improved it a bit to let users share that page with other people (guess what, when they share it, they also share with my affiliate link). I haven’t tested to see it’s working so far but the bar has been awesone. Users are able to come back to my blog and view another post. You should try it out.
By Ileane
Hey Kirk, great list. I think you covered all of the ones I know about. I use Wibiya on my blogger blogs. I’m not a fan of Apture because it’s normally at the top of the page. That interferes with a lot of my Chrome extensions like Diigo and Amplify for example. Also Apture doesn’t have too many choices of sharing networks to choose from. I used to see Meebo on a lot of blogs but I think most people switched to Wibiya or Apture now.
Do you know if any of these work with Blogger besides Wibiya? I don’t want to add a toolbar to my WordPress blog just yet. Thanks for the run down.
By Kirk Maxi
Hi Ileane,
Right now only Wibiya, Apture and Meebo bar support the Blogger platform (that I know of).
I think one of the reasons Apture doesn’t have a lot of sharing choices is because it focuses entirely on search functionality and Apture is strong in this field. I also like Wibiya. It’s the most complete blog toolbar right now.
By Thu Nguyen
Another great list of awesome shares!
I have used Wibiya and Apture together, somehow, eliminating Wibiya and keeping Apture because of it’s searching capabilities. I guess that’s because I have had problems with loading times as well. Now, I haven’t heard of the others and where in the world do you find all these great stuff? Great job and thanks again for hunting down the things I didn’t knew existed.
Talk soon!
Thu
By Kirk Maxi
lol, I was doing some searching on the WordPress plugins page. The result is that I found tons of them. After a day of testing, the list contained the best that I found. Really glad that you like it, Thu
By Udegbunam Chukwudi
Wibiya is my choice. Some folks say its slow but on my end, it’s blazing fast and what I even love about it is that is that it loads only after the whole page has loaded. Sweet
By Kirk Maxi
lol, the new version of Wibiya is much faster. You can make it faster by not installing the plugin and just put the js code into the file if you are familiar with WordPress. So saying Wibiya is slow is not true.
Have a good day, Udegbunam
By Jaydip Parikh
Awesome list. I guess even I come to know about few toolbar today after reading that. So according to me you haven’t missed any.
By Kirk Maxi
Thanks Jaydip
There are more toolbars but most of them are low quality so I did not add them to the list.
Thanks for the comment. Have a good day
By Latest9
Wonderful list mate. I am using only Wibiya out of it. It is awesome and Flexible too. But would love to check more. You are rock-star.
By Kirk Maxi
You’re welcome
Try to use the plugin that placed toolbar on your external sites. It’s helpful. Have a good day 
By Alex
Once again you have outdone yourself brother!
Fantastic resource you have put together here!
Now if I could only get Digg Digg to work, I might be doing OK
By Kirk Maxi
lol, what’s up with that plugin, Alex? I may be able to help.
By Udegbunam Chukwudi
@Kirk Maxi: That’s true man. I’m also thinking of restyling the toolbar to something cooler
. Thanks for the “support” man.lol
Do have a fab weekend
By Kirk Maxi
lol, thanks Udeg. With PHP knowledge, you can of course add more stuff to the toolbar or even make one by your own. Good luck, mate
Have a great weekend
By Udegbunam Chukwudi
After a few days of testing, I noticed that my page load time under Google Webmaster’s Tool had increased to 36 seconds
. I think due to the way the links are shortened, Google kinda assumes that the site linked to is hosted on your domain thus it treats it as such.
Scared of my search engine traffic dropping due to this increase in page load time, I removed the WordPress Bar. I’d probably have to look for another solution.
Thanks anyway
By Kirk Maxi
Hmmm 36secs, that’s too long, Udegbunam. Usually, a site has to load faster than 6s in order to keep visitors around. I can’t imagine the WordPress bar causing such a huge increase in load time. Did you actually test the speed of your site by using a plugin like Load Speed Test or Firebug?
By Udegbunam Chukwudi
I test my site speed using GTMETRIX and I’m always below 4 seconds. WordPress bar isn’t increasing the page load time but Google Webmasters Tool reports it so.
Take for example the link, goods.com/?drftgdtghd which actually loads baggages.com. If baggages.com loads in 100 seconds but has been loaded in a frame via the link goods.com/?drftgdtghd, Google seems to assume that goods.com is actually the one loading in 100 seconds.
Do you get my drift now?
By Kirk Maxi
I see what you mean. It seems that the short URL function inside WordPress is the problem, right? Not the bar itself. Let me take a look at that and see if I can make it the other way around — using bit.ly to shorten URLs, for example?
By Patricia@lavenderuses
Hi Kirk
Your post got recommended in Thu’s roundup so thought I would come visit and check out the post. As a newbie blogger this is a really helpful as I don’t know most of these plugins you talk about. Will now have to ask a techie friend about them all as I am such a technophobe! Thanks for sharing .
Patricia Perth Australia
By Kirk Maxi
Hi Patricia,
That’s totally fine. You don’t have to know them all. In my opinion, you can check out the Wibiya plugin to see if it will increase the engagement of your readers.
Thank for visiting my blog, Patricia. Have a great weekend.
By Chris Web
I have to agree, loading time is always my #1 concern with these type of applications, the 2nd is cross browser / mobile capabiliites, seems like too many of them are not set to go across the web in multiple platforms
By Kirk Maxi
Hi Chris,
The first three toolbars apply CDN technology so you don’t have to worry about the load speed. Wibiya is the fastest one, I believe. Although it may depend on the location of Wibiya’s server, one of my tests has shown that Wibiya only takes milliseconds to load. There is cross-browser support. For mobile, these bars won’t show up since you will be seeing a mobile theme.
I hope that helps
By Udegbunam Chukwudi
Using bit.ly as the url shortner would be AWESOME and would most definitely get me to try the plug-in once more
By Paritosh
I was planning to use a toolbar and had eyes on wibiya but resisted thinking about increase in page load time but this article (specially comments) clarified my doubts!
By Kirk Maxi
Glad you like it, Paritosh
By Hung | JVPrime
Nice listing
I saw many people used Wibiya toolbar
By Kirk Maxi
That’s right, Hung. It’s the greatest blog toolbar so far that I know.
By Shiva @ Webmasters Tips
This is a cool list. I have many times seen the Wibiya and gigya toolbars and the Maxblogpress Stripe ads but never seen the others like Apture. I will certainly check the other ones too
By Kirk Maxi
Yup, I really like Wibiya because the load time is really fast. Apture is fast, too! You should really check that out because it’s becoming something in the blogosphere right now, Shiva
By Aarthi
I think you forgot Skysa.com. They too provide a toolbar for blogs and websites.
By Kirk Maxi
Oh… I didn’t know about it. I will research Skysa and then add it to this list. Thanks a lot for helping me with this information, Aarthi
By Maria Pavel
I don’t like toolbars, at all. I like to have as much free space as i can in my blog. I’m thinking that if i don’t like cluttered blogs, than others feel the same.
Still, that WordPress Static Toolbar looks interesting, shrink it a little and it would be a good addition.
By Ali Mujtaba@Tinnitus
Hi Kirk,
Since the latest browser cut unnecessary toolbar just like Firefox 4 and Chrome. They give more spaces to browse, I think this kind of toolbars is annoying. but toolbar on the left at your page is nice, I like it. perfect placement and function is the key I guess