Issue with domain name change and social media share tool counters-they zero.

  • Unknown's avatar
    mysticalmobius · Member ·

    Issue with domain name change and social media share tool counters. Counters at the bottom of all archived blog posts reset to zero.

    I feel it is important that the social media share tools accurately report the number of shares a post has evoked. I feel zero, or a scant number shares indicated, acts as a negative filter for many potential new readers.

    Shares are gained when a post is fresh, when regular readers are engaging and sharing, it’s a time sensitive window that this domain change issue complicates.

    I feel potential new readers check to see if a post has been shared and that if shares are indeed indicated, then it increases the likelihood a reader will engage to read.

    I recently acquired a new, more on target domain name for my blog page.

    I kept the old registered domain name to link to the new registered domain so all the links to archived blog posts that have been shared across the internet would not be broken.

    However when i switch my new domain name to primary, the counters on the social media tools on the bottom of all my archived blog posts (~50) reset to zero because, I’m told this is because there have technically been no shares of the post with the new URL. True but not helpful.

    I feel like having those shares correctly reported may be very helpful when potential new readers browse. It’s why i’m hesitating changing to my new url because of this issue. I feel this has implications for how the readership potentially grows.

    I need to make the change to the new domain name because I am OVER the old one. However, this issue has caused me to hesitate making the change and therefore I’m frustrated.

    So, wondering, would it be to fix that problem? Is it possible for an engineer or coder to create some code or whatever to automatically update the counters across all the archived posts when changing domain names?

    Thanks for your attention and assistance!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    The share count showing on share buttons come directly from Facebook. Facebook provides that count based on the number of times a particular URL has been shared or liked directly on Facebook.

    If you change the URL of your site on WordPress.com, Facebook has no way of knowing on their end that the original link of your post and the new link are for the same post, so they have no way of returning a total share count for the two different URLs. They will only return a share count based on how many times the current URL of your site has been shared on their end.

    There is also no way for us to tell them both links are for the same post, as their API does not offer us the option to do that.

    So there is no way to prevent share counts from resetting to zero if you change your site’s URL. This is how Facebook designed their button to work, and we do not have any control over that.

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