Social Profile Card Studio is a single WordPress plugin that builds a social profile card and publishes it in whichever of four ways suits you. This page covers what it does, how to get it installed, and how to read the screen you land on.
If you already have it installed and just want a card, skip ahead to Your first card, or open the walkthrough which does it screen by screen.
What it does #
The plugin stores a card as its own thing, separate from posts and pages. A card holds:
- Who someone is — a picture, a name, a role or tagline, and a short bio.
- Where they can be found — social buttons, each with its own icon, colour and link.
- What they can do — buttons, email, video and audio players, a booking link, messaging buttons, a contact card, and if you run a shop, a product and a coupon.
- How it looks — one of 72 ready-made palettes, or a palette built from five questions, plus layout, shape, spacing, fonts and borders.
- Where it appears — on a page you choose, on its own address, as a popup, or inside your posts.
And, if you turn it on, how many people looked at it and what they pressed.
Installing it #
- In the admin menu go to Plugins → Add New.
- Search for Social Profile Card Studio.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
- A new top-level menu called Profile Cards appears in the admin sidebar.
If you are installing from a zip file, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip, and activate it. The folder it expects is wp-content/plugins/social-profile-card-studio.
What you need #
| Requirement | Version |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 6.5 or newer |
| PHP | 7.4 or newer |
| WooCommerce | Only for the two shop blocks. Not required for anything else. |
| Elementor | Only for the Elementor widget. Not required. |
NoteThere is one download, not two. The Pro features ship inside the free plugin and are switched on by a licence rather than by installing something else. If you later get Pro, activate it from the link at the top of the Analytics screen — you do not install a second plugin, and nothing you have already built stops working.
The screen you land on #
Click Profile Cards and you are on the All Cards screen. It lists every card on the site, one row each, with the card’s picture, its name, its layout, and three buttons: Edit, Clone and Delete.
Two buttons sit in the top right corner, and which one you want depends on how you like to work:
| Button | What it does | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|
| Generate My Card | Opens a five-step wizard that builds a finished card from a handful of questions. | You are making a card for the first time, or the second. |
| Add Profile Card | Opens the editor on an empty card so you can set everything yourself. | You already know what you want, or you are copying an existing card. |
The row buttons #
- Edit opens the card editor. The editor is three tabs — Display, Profile & Links, Customize — with a live preview down the side that changes as you type.
- Clone makes a copy, settings and all. This is the fastest way to build a second card for a second person, or a second card for the same person in a different place.
- Delete asks first. It is the only deletion in the plugin that asks, which is deliberate — see what happens when you delete the plugin itself.
The shortcode #
A card set to Manual display gives you a shortcode. Open it and you will see it next to the title, with a Copy button:
[spcad_card id="548"]
Paste that into any page, post or text block and the card appears there. The number is the card’s own ID. Each card has its own, and each has its own shortcode — the card in the screenshot above is card 548, so its shortcode says 548.
TipYou do not have to remember the number. Every time you open a card for editing, the shortcode is sitting on the screen with a Copy button next to it. Copy it, then paste it wherever the card should go.
Your first card #
There are two good ways in, and which one you pick only depends on how much you want to be asked.
Option A: let the wizard do it #
Click Generate My Card and answer five questions. The wizard asks what kind of card you are making, who it is for, which social links you want, whether you want any extra buttons, and what the colours should feel like. It then builds a finished palette, shows it to you, and only creates the card when you press the button.
The whole walkthrough, with every question and every option, is in The Generate My Card wizard, step by step.
Option B: build it yourself #
Click Add Profile Card. You get an empty card with a random preset chosen for you, and three tabs to fill in:
- Display decides how the card is published. Manual, Automatic or Link in bio page. This is the first thing to decide, because the other two options appear and disappear depending on it.
- Profile & Links holds your name, tagline, bio, picture, and the social buttons. It also holds the Save contact panel and the Custom blocks panel.
- Customize holds everything about how it looks: presets, the style generator, the Style panel, the Header panel and Typography.
Save when you are done. Nothing is published until you do.
Publishing the card #
Whichever way you built it, the card is not on your site until it has somewhere to be. Pick the display type first, then put it in place:
- Manual — paste the shortcode, add the block, or drop in the Elementor widget. Full detail in Where to publish a card.
- Link in bio page — the card gets its own address. See Walkthrough: create a link in bio page.
- Automatic — the plugin places it, either as a popup or inside the content, according to how you set it.
Each card is one of those four types. If you want the same person in two places, make two cards and use Clone to avoid the typing.
What the plugin will not do #
Two things are deliberately absent, and neither is an oversight:
- No badge. There is no credit under the buttons unless you ask for one. It is off by default and can be switched on per card from the Display tab.
- No cookies. Even with analytics on, nothing is written to a visitor’s device and there is no tracking script to block. Analytics identifies a reader by a one-way hash computed on the server and thrown away.
Next #
- The Generate My Card wizard, step by step
- Walkthrough: create a social profile card
- Free versus Pro — what the free version already includes, before you go looking at the paid ones.