WP TikTok Feed Review: Display TikTok Videos on WordPress

In late 2019, the TikTok app officially hit 1.5 billion downloads, with over one billion active users. Those numbers put TikTok firmly in competition with other big social apps like Instagram. And that fact might have you wanting to add TikTok to WordPress.

In this WP TikTok Feed review, I’m going to take a look at a new free plugin that can help you do just that.

You’ll be able to create feeds from TikTok hashtags and user accounts and display them anywhere on your WordPress site.

Let’s dig in!

WP TikTok Feed Review: The Feature List

WP TikTok Feed is a new plugin from QuadLayers, the same developer behind the popular Social Feed Gallery plugin (formerly known as Instagram Feed Gallery before Instagram went on the warpath over its trademark for plugins at WordPress.org in 2019).

The reason I share that is that, while WP TikTok Feed is a new plugin, the developer has plenty of experience with creating plugins that add social media content to WordPress.

So…what does WP TikTok Feed do?

As the name suggests, it lets you create one or more feeds that pull videos from TikTok and display them on your WordPress site.

You can build your feeds from either hashtags or specific usernames. The difference between these two is the same as something like Twitter:

• Hashtag – will pull content from different accounts as long as the content has that hashtag.
• Username – will pull all of the content from a specific username.

To display content, you get two layouts:

• Masonry
• Gallery

You’ll get lots of smaller settings to control how videos function and what content to display. For example, you can choose whether to display the like and comment counts for videos.

You also have the option to display videos in a popup when visitors click on them (as opposed to sending them to the TikTok website to watch the video). And you can also optionally add a button that takes visitors to TikTok.

Finally, to manage the performance effect of the plugin, WP TikTok Feed lets you control how long to cache the feed content. For example, if you set the cache to five hours, the plugin will only fetch new TikTok feed items once every five hours, which limits the resources that the plugin requires.

If you want to see it in action, you can check out the demo page.

Hands-On With WP TikTok Feed

Once you install and activate the free plugin from WordPress.org, you’ll get a new TikTok Feed area in your WordPress dashboard where you can manage your feeds and control the plugin’s settings.

Creating a Feed

A “feed” is one specific collection of content from TikTok.

Again, you have two options for sourcing that content:

1. A hashtag
2. A TikTok username

To create a new feed, you go to TikTok Feed → Feeds → + Feed:

This will open a popup where you can configure your feed.

First, you’ll want to choose your feed Type and enter the hashtag or username that you want to pull content from. For this example, I’ll pull from the “basketball” hashtag.

Then, you can configure the layout, which involves:

• Choosing between a masonry or gallery layout.
• Limiting how many videos to display.
• Choosing the number of columns in your layout.

Next, you can go to the Video tab to control how the videos themselves function. For example, you can:

• Adjust the spacing between videos.
• Choose what elements to display, like whether or not to include the like and comment counts.

The Video type is also important for controlling the thumbnails:

• Origin – the thumbnails for each video will be static images.
• Dynamic – the thumbnails for each video will be short dynamic GIFs. This is more eye-catching, but it can also be a little overwhelming if you display a lot of videos in your gallery.

In the Popups tab, you can control the optional popup functionality. By default, the plugin displays the actual video in a popup when a visitor clicks on the video image. This keeps visitors on your site while they consume content from TikTok.

However, you can disable the popup if desired, which means that visitors will go to the TikTok website to watch a video if they click on it.

If you opt to leave the popup enabled, you can configure some settings about what content to include. You can enable/disable displaying:

• User profile information
• Video text
• Like and comment counts

Finally, the Button tab lets you configure the optional button. By default, the plugin displays a single button underneath your TikTok feed that takes visitors to the TikTok website (either the hashtag page or the user’s profile).

First off, you can enable or disable this button. If enabled, you can customize the text and colors:

And that’s it!

Displaying Your Feed

Once you finish setting up your feed, the plugin will give you a shortcode that you can add anywhere on your site:

Configuring Other Settings

Beyond the feed creation interface, the plugin doesn’t include many other settings.

However, the Settings area does house one very important choice – cache control.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, this lets you control the plugin’s performance effect by controlling how often to fetch new feed items.

If you set a shorter cache duration, your feeds will be updated more often, but the plugin will need to use more resources to accomplish that:

Some Examples of What Your Feeds Look Like

To give you an example of how those settings translate into the real world, let’s finish with a look at a few different feed configurations.

Here’s what the masonry layout looks like with a three-column design. The comments and likes are enabled, which means visitors will see them when hovering over a video:

Here’s that same feed with a four-column gallery layout:

You can also see the button in this picture.

Finally, here’s what the default popup looks like with all of the information enabled. If you wanted to, you could disable all or some of the information on the right side (or move that info to the left):

WP TikTok Feed Pricing

WP TikTok Feed is currently 100% free.

I imagine that there are plans to release a paid add-on with more features in the future. But for now, you’ll never need to open your wallet.

Final Thoughts on TikTok

Overall, WP TikTok Feed delivers on its promises and is super easy to use.

Unlike a lot of other social feed plugins, you don’t need to create an app or go through any verification process to start pulling content from TikTok.

I’m not sure if this is true of TikTok in general or a specific feature in the plugin, but the end result is that it’s super easy to get started – you can have your first TikTok feed up within minutes of installing the plugin.

Beyond that, you get plenty of useful options for controlling the appearance and functionality of your feed.

Overall, if you want to display TikTok content on your WordPress website, definitely give this one a look.

If you want to see it in action, you can check out the demo page.

Otherwise, click below to get the plugin:

Official Website WordPress.org Page