If you’re looking for a simple WordPress plugin that adds a Google+ widget for linking directly to your Google+ profile, googleCards is exactly what you’re looking for.

Authored by mabujo, googleCards is described as:

googleCards is a google+ wordpress plugin. It adds a widget to your blog that will display a link to your google+ profile so people can add you to a circle (follow you). It also displays your name, profile picture and the number of people who have you in circles.

mabujo has put some thought into the development of this plugin as he has minimised the load time for this Google+ profile widget by caching your Google+ profile data. This is what he says:

The plugin uses caching to store your google plus profile data to eliminate checking google+ on every page load. For the caching to work, your web-server needs to be able to write to wp-content. (a lot of plugins require this so it should be fine). If the plugin cannot cache it will still work, but will store the data in the database instead. If caching is working you should see a file called plus_card.txt in /wp-content/cache/.

Ready to setup googleCards? Yes? Fabulous! Read on…

Installing googleCards Google+ profile plugin in WordPress

1. Download googleCards Google+ profile plugin from here.

2. In WordPress, click on “Plugins” and select “Add New”. Click on the “Upload” link and then click the “Choose file” button. Browse to the directory where you downloaded the googleCards Google+ profile plugin to (in step 1 above) select the file and then click “Open”.

3. Once installed activate the googleCards plugin (in the image below the label is displaying “Deactivate” because the plugin has already been activated).

4. In WordPress, click on “Appearance” and select “Widgets”. The googleCard widget will be visible on the WordPress widget options page.

5. Drag the googleCards widget to your sidebar of choice (in this example I’ve added it to the Primary sidebar). googleCards has an optional “Ttitle” field in which you can specify a title for the widget which will display on your site. In the “Google Plus ID:” field, insert your unique numeric Google+ profile ID number. Click on “Save”.

6. Your googleCards Google+ profile details will appear on your WordPress site.

That’s it! Your Google+ profile widget has been successfully installed. Easy, right?

Tell all your buddies…