Social Media Feeds, Google Reviews & Social Wall – CollectSocials

Description

CollectSocials puts your social posts and customer reviews on your WordPress
site, in a design you control. You build a feed once in the hosted CollectSocials
studio, copy its feed key, and paste that key into the CollectSocials Feed block
on any page. There is no settings screen to fill in first.

Unlimited page views, on every plan including free

Social feed tools usually meter how much traffic your feed gets, because every
visitor fetches it from their servers. This plugin does not work that way. On a
schedule you choose, it copies each feed’s posts, its design and the renderer
script into your own site’s database, and from then on your own domain serves
every page view. Once a feed has synced, its views are not metered and no view
counter ticks down, so there is no traffic tier to outgrow: a cached feed on a
site with a million monthly visitors costs exactly what it costs on a site with
ten. That is true on the free plan, not only on paid ones.

The one exception, stated plainly: a feed that has not completed its first sync
yet — or one this site cannot cache, because its key is wrong or you are past
the 20-feed limit — is loaded from CollectSocials on each visit instead, and
those views do count against your plan. The Feeds screen shows each feed’s sync
status so you can see which case you are in.

It is also why this plugin has a sync interval, a “Sync now” button and a sync
status screen at all. A plugin that loads a feed from somebody else’s server on
every visit has nothing to schedule and nothing to report. This one holds your
posts, so it tells you when it last fetched them and whether that worked.

The feed also still renders on the day a social network has an outage, and
nothing on the page calls out to CollectSocials. The photos and videos
are the one exception, and worth stating plainly: those are still served by the
social network from its own CDN — as they are in every plugin of this kind — so
during an outage you keep the layout, the captions and the links, and the
pictures are the part that can go missing.

Platforms in one feed

A single feed can mix as many of these as your plan allows:

• Instagram — account posts, reels and hashtag content
• TikTok — videos from your account
• YouTube — channel uploads and playlists
• Facebook — page posts
• Pinterest — pins from your boards
• Vimeo — videos from your account
• Tumblr — posts from your blog
• Google Reviews — star ratings and review text from your Business Profile
• RSS — any blog or news feed, including your own WordPress posts
• X (Twitter) — a premium platform, available on paid plans

Designed once, rendered exactly

Feeds are assembled in the CollectSocials studio from three layers (layout, card
template and theme) across 40 layouts, including grid, masonry, carousel
and mosaic. Colours, fonts, spacing, borders,
headers and separate mobile styling are all editable. The plugin then renders the
design you published through the same renderer a hosted embed uses, so there is
no second set of styles to keep in sync inside your theme.

Worth being plain about, because it is unusual: all 16 themes, the theme builder
and every built-in card template are on the free plan. Styling is not the part we
hold back. Layouts are where free stops — it covers seven of the 40 (grid, list,
carousel, masonry, mosaic, slider and stagger) and paid plans open the rest.

What the free plan covers

Three sources, a daily refresh, all 16 themes plus the theme builder, seven of
the 40 layouts, every built-in card template, and unlimited plugin-served views.
Because the plugin serves synced feeds from your own site, their
page views do not count against a quota — a busy WordPress site can stay on the
free plan indefinitely. Every platform listed above is available on free except X
(Twitter), which is premium. Paid plans (Pro, Business, Scale) add the
remaining layouts, the custom card builder, more sources, a faster refresh and
higher limits. There is nothing to buy inside WordPress: the
plugin is free and works with whichever plan your account is on, and upgrades
happen on collectsocials.com.

How often it updates

New posts are collected upstream on your CollectSocials plan’s schedule — daily
on the free plan. The plugin re-syncs that cached data on the WordPress interval
you pick: hourly, twice daily or daily. It defaults to twice daily rather than
daily because the photos and videos in a feed are served by the social networks
themselves, from links that expire after a day or two. A sync does not mint new
links — it copies whatever was collected upstream — but the shorter interval
means your site starts serving newly collected links sooner, instead of holding
a day-old copy of them. Syncing more often than your plan collects simply
re-reads the same data, so this is not a real-time feed, and we would rather say
so here than have you find out later.

Beyond this site

The same CollectSocials account powers embeds on any website, so a feed you build
for WordPress works wherever else you need it.

How it works / data disclosure: this plugin connects to your CollectSocials
account (collectsocials.com) using the public feed key you paste into a block or
into the CollectSocials menu. On the schedule you choose it downloads your feed’s
posts and design into this site’s database, and a copy of the widget renderer
script into your uploads folder, then serves every page view locally. No visitor
data is sent to CollectSocials, and once a feed has synced, no part of a page
load calls CollectSocials. Before that first sync completes, and for a feed the
plugin cannot cache (see the 20-feed limit above), the page falls back to
loading that feed from CollectSocials the way a plain embed would.
The images and videos inside a feed are the exception every social feed plugin
shares: they are hosted by the social network and load from its CDN, so a
visitor’s browser does request those files from that network. A free
CollectSocials account is required: https://collectsocials.com/?ref=wordpress
The service’s terms of use are at https://collectsocials.com/terms-of-service and
its privacy policy is at https://collectsocials.com/privacy-policy

Attribution is optional and off by default. The CollectSocials menu has an
unticked checkbox, “Show a small ‘Powered by CollectSocials’ link under my
feeds”. Leave it alone and this plugin adds no credit link to your page. Tick it
only if you would like to credit the plugin, and untick it whenever you change
your mind. (If branding is switched off for your CollectSocials plan, no link is
added regardless of the checkbox.)

Separately from that checkbox, and worth stating plainly: on the CollectSocials
free plan the feed itself carries a small “Powered by CollectSocials” line,
drawn by the CollectSocials renderer inside the feed, exactly as it does on any
free CollectSocials embed anywhere. That is a property of the free plan rather
than of this plugin, and any paid plan removes it from your CollectSocials
dashboard with no change here. Ticking the checkbox above on a free plan does
not add a second one; the plugin’s own link replaces the one inside the feed.