Counting shares

Networks → Share Counts.

We count presses on your own buttons, per post and per network. A row is a post id and a network name; nothing about the reader is recorded, and nothing leaves your site.

This is deliberately different from how sharing plugins usually work. Facebook, X and LinkedIn all removed their public share-count endpoints years ago, so a plugin showing you "12k shares" today is either paying a third party for an estimate or making it up. A number you counted is one you can stand behind — and it is also the more useful number, because it measures your button rather than the network.

Show count on button puts the count on the button itself. Social proof only works upwards: a button reading 2 is worse than a button reading nothing, which is what Minimum count to display is for. In the Stack style the count would be a third line under the name rather than a word beside it, so it shows in the flow of the post and not in the floating rail or the pinned bar, where one row's height is fixed before anything is drawn.

Add UTM tags to shared links is off unless you switch it on. When it is on, every shared link carries utm_source (the network, such as whatsapp or copy), utm_medium=social and utm_campaign=social-share, so the visits a share brings back can be told apart in Google Analytics, Matomo or any other analytics tool. The count of presses is unaffected.

If you switch Count button presses off, the Dashboard's panels say that counting is off, with a link to switch it back on, rather than waiting for data that will never come.

How one post did#

The Posts, Pages and Products lists in wp-admin have a Shares column, as does the list of any other content the Display rules can reach. It shows the post's total in bold and, underneath, the three networks it was shared on most, such as Facebook 12, X 4, Copy link 3, with +2 more when there are others. A post nobody has shared shows a dash. The totals are written the way the Dashboard writes them, so 1,500 reads as 1.5k.

Press the column's heading to sort the list by shares, most shared first; press it again for least shared first, which puts the posts nobody has shared at the top. To hide the column, untick Shares under Screen Options at the top of the list.

Open a post and the Share buttons box in the sidebar says how often it was shared and on which networks, every one of them this time, with every digit: Shared 23 times: Facebook 12, X 4, Copy link 3, Email 2, Print 2.

The column is there only while Count button presses is on. With counting off, the box says so instead of saying the post was not shared. The numbers are presses on your own buttons, the same ones the Dashboard adds up, and nothing is loaded for your visitors to show them. They are not the networks' own counts, and a share made some other way, such as a link copied from the browser's address bar, is not in them.

To start again — after testing the buttons before launch, say — use Reset share counts at the bottom of the Dashboard. It asks first, clears every count for every post, and cannot be undone. It only appears once something has been counted.

The Dashboard's Posts card counts published posts that have been shared at least once, and Most Shared Posts lists published posts only — trash a post, or put it back to draft, and it drops off both until you publish it again.

The Shares card is different on purpose: it is every press this site has ever recorded, including presses on a post you have since taken down, because it is the site's history rather than a list of what is on it now. So the two numbers are allowed to disagree.