What is Simple Post Like?
Simple Post Like is a free, open-source WordPress plugin that adds a like button to your posts. It gives you three display styles, flexible auto-injection, guest like support with hashed IP tracking, a shortcode for manual placement, and a statistics dashboard — all in a single plugin with no jQuery dependency and no theme requirement.
It is designed to be the simplest possible way to add post reactions to a WordPress site — focused, well-built, and easy to configure from a single admin page.
What Can It Do?
Three Display Styles Choose between a full button with icon and label, a compact icon with counter, or a minimal icon-only button. Switch styles globally from Settings, or override per-instance using the shortcode.
Auto-Injection Simple Post Like hooks into WordPress’s the_content filter and places the button automatically — before content, after content, both, or nowhere. Archive page injection is controlled separately, so you can show the button on blog index and category pages independently from single post pages.
Guest Likes Allow non-logged-in visitors to like posts. Guest likes are tracked by a SHA-256 hashed IP address — no raw IP addresses are ever stored in the database.
Shortcode Place the like button anywhere manually using [simple_post_like] — in post content, page builders, widget areas, or PHP templates.
Statistics Dashboard The Statistics tab in Settings shows total likes, posts with at least one like, and a leaderboard of your top 10 most liked posts. The Posts list table also gets a sortable Likes column for all enabled post types.
CSS Custom Properties The button exposes its full visual language as CSS custom properties on :root, so you can restyle it entirely from your theme’s stylesheet without touching plugin files.
What’s in the Plugin?
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Like Button | Three display styles — button, icon + counter, icon only |
| Auto-Injection | the_content filter with before/after/both/none placement |
| Archive Injection | Independent toggle for blog index and archive pages |
| Shortcode | [simple_post_like] with post_id and style attributes |
| Guest Likes | Optional, SHA-256 hashed IP tracking |
| Statistics Dashboard | Total likes, posts with likes, top 10 leaderboard |
| Posts List Column | Sortable Likes column on wp-admin/edit.php |
| CSS Custom Properties | Full theme-side restyling without touching plugin files |
| Settings Page | Single admin page under Settings → Simple Post Like |
Requirements
| Requirement | Version |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 6.8 or higher |
| PHP | 8.0 or higher |
License
Simple Post Like is released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license — the same license as WordPress itself. You are free to use, modify, and distribute it in personal, client, and commercial projects at no cost. No license keys. No upsells.
See the full license on GitHub.