plugin or manual social sharing icons

1. (disclaimer: I’ve never used this plugin… ) but if you look at the plugin page on wp.org
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-social-media-icons/

it has 20,000+ Active Installs.
and its average user rating is 4.9 out of 5 which is pretty good and very few of the rating ar e 1,2 or 3 stars 9 out of 654 reviews.

2. As a rule i use JetPack which is written and maintained by Automattic the company behind WordPress.com and it adds alot of the functionality that’s available on the wordpress.com including quite a neat social networking / sharing. ( Note However: quite a few critics jetpack for being quite bulky and slowing down sites )

3. Possibly depends on what you what to do and how competent a programmer (php) you are.
The rule of thumb is the more plugins you use the bigger detrimental effect there will be on the performance of your site.

Plugins by their nature packing a lot of different functionality so that they’re of use to the biggest audience, however any single user might only want to use a small subset of the plugins functionally.. if the plugin is well written then programmer should have written the plugin to be as efficient as possible.

Also bare in mind what that plugin is actually doing, its actually not a simple task, for every page loaded it calls up twitter, facebook, google etc… x every other network you’ve included to get the current share count for that page / url which mean for every http request to your server its then making n^x requests to other server before it can then send that info back to the user.. any plugin worth its salt will either employ some form of caching or like the jetpack use javascript(ajax) client side request to get the current count request.

4. It depends almost completely on how the theme your using works and is written, the way wordpress works the theme pretty much controls complete what ends up getting sent to the browser of your users.

WordPress has hooks (actions and filters) which are the primary way in which a plugin developer adds their functionality to a page, when you build a theme there are certain actions you supposed to include and a lot that are triggered by key theme function e.g.

wp_head() executes any code attached to the wp_head action.

Options :

Add html and buttons directly into your theme template – again WP is pretty flexible on how wordpress lets a theme developer structure a them, e.g. a them can consist of just two files if you want index.php and style.css, or you can break it up into hundreds of files.
add a function to function.php of you theme that outputs you buttons, figure out which action hook will output theme where you want them too and attach you function to it
do the same as 2. but instead of doing it in a the function.php of our theme create your own customisations plugin to store your functions and actions.

A good place to start:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Functions_File
https://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin

What’s wrong with simply using the plugin? If you want that functionality that’s the easiest way to go.

First of all:

whats the chances this plugin directs things to benefit theM

VERY Unlikely otherwise 20k people wouldn’t be using it and it wouldn’t have a rating of 4.9 out of 5.

Plus the plugin directory is regulated and any user who thinks a plugin is breaking the rules or behaving badly can report it to the moderators for inspection. ( only do that when you know someones breaking the rules the moderators have enough work to do without someone starting a witch hunt. )
the rule
see items 7 and 9, 10 amongst others.

and I agree with WPyogi says:

If you want that functionality that’s the easiest way to go

doing it your self is totally possible but I think you maybe missing the point:

seems i find a lot that must be outdated cause it just doesn’t work right

If you’ve used wordpress for any amount of time you’ll realise that most plugins don’t work perfectly out of the box, mainly because the plugin developer isn’t using your theme or all the plugins you’ve chosen to install and whatever version of wordpress your currently using, not to mention PHP, MySQL apache etc… in fact the odds of any of the other 60 million+ wordpress installs out there having exactly the same combination of software and code running on there site as you is tiny…

assuming any will just work is actually quite ignorant, any plugin that add visual content to your site has to battle with the style from you theme and other plugins, If you have an issue that is a ‘rendering’ one odds are its actually that the stylesheet from your theme is adding styles that are too specific, that are overloading those of the plugin.

Yes at the end of the day the buttons are just links.. so of course you could just add:

<a href="....."><img id='my-soc-btn-xxx' src='...' /></a>

to your theme where you want them, but.. it’s down to you to figure out where in the theme they need to go, exactly what each value for the href (url) needs to be, plus you will have to add the images somewhere, and add css that styles you buttons according to your tastes and the existing styles in your site.

all those sites google, facebook and twitter… all have apis that tell you how the urls have to be structured to work with there site and everyone is totally different.

and the link is probably going to need to change from page to page so you going to have to compute each of those links specific to the page that loaded.

All of which is possible if your a php programmer/web developer who understand how wp themes work and load, how to use css to style your buttons and can find (google) and read the various api docs for wordpress, twitter, facebook etc….

I’m an experience 10yrs+ professional web developer and I could do all of the above, it would take me a few hours.. maybe a day with research, the point is I never would it would be a waste of my time.. and 98% of the people who use wordpress aren’t web developers and wouldn’t have the first clue where to start.

If you think the plugin is doing something malicious don’t use it..

If you’re worried about performance install a caching plugin, if you site is a standard blog it doesn’t need to be dynamically rendered by php every page request..

i recommend WP Super Cache there are many others. n.b. if your worried about the amount of code loaded by the plugin its a drop in the ocean compared to the millions of lines of code that are loaded and executed by wordpress itself every page request if your not using any kind of caching.