Share Counts

How to configure the perfect share count settings for your share buttons.

With a view to provide optimum performance out-of-the-box, share counters come disabled by default. Switch ON the Enable Share Counts switch to enable them.

If you find you have any issues with your Facebook share counts, there’s no need to worry – Simple Share Buttons Plus has an API that’s exclusive to its users. Switch ON the SSB API to take advantage of consistent Facebook share counts.

Note that the SSB API requires a valid, active license and the PHP extension Mcrypt.

The Full Share Stats feature allows you to see how many share counts you have for your top posts/pages for each social network that share counts are available for. You can view them on the Tracking dashboard.

Note that you must have tracking enabled to take advantage of this feature.

If you’d prefer your less popular posts/pages to not have share counts, you can set a Minimum number of shares. Setting this value to 5 will hide the share counts (but still show the buttons) for any posts/pages with share count totals of 4 or fewer.

Note that the minimum shares applies to both single and total share counts separately.

Share counts (that aren’t yet cached) need to be retrieved from each social network’s API. Depending on your server’s spec and configuration this can take longer than the default of 4 seconds. Set this value higher if needed until share counts are retrieved consistently. If it takes a very long time, it’s recommended that you enable Lazy Loading so that page load times are not affected.

Note that if no share count is retrieved within the count timeout period, zero will be returned where applicable.

Simple Share Buttons Plus creates a custom table for temporarily storing (caching) share counts for your posts/pages. The default for this setting is 600 seconds (10 minutes). This indexed table serves up your share counts in milliseconds.

Note that any extra share counts during the cached period will not be applied to your total/each share counts.