If you’ve lost your social share counts because of a domain change or permalink switch, this article is for you!
You work hard to get your content shared and you deserve to be able to display your social proof appropriately. Afterall, social proof is a powerful psychological agent that can give you more credibility in the eyes of readers or customers.
Social Proof can undoubtedly be a powerful signal to your visitors that the page they’ve landed on is worthy of sharing because many others have already shared it. This is especially important for bloggers and people who are professional social media marketers.
But what happens when you’ve amassed a great number of social shares and decide to change your domain? Or maybe you’ve simply wanted a cleaner permalink structure and made the change from within WordPress?
Or maybe you’ve heard about the new emphasis that Google is making on sites with SSL (https) and want to make the jump so that you don’t get penalized.
Well, the sad news is this: as soon as you change your URL, permalink or add https to your site, you lose all your social share counts.
The reason for this is because of the way social networks track these counts– they’re tracking them against a specific URL. And currently there’s no way for these network API’s to have you tell them “this old URL is now this new URL and you should add the share counts to this new one instead.”
So how can you recover all your social share counts after changing permalink structures, adding SSL or switching domains?
Well we have good news. You can have your cake and eat it too with one of the built-in features of our flagship WordPress plugin, Social Warfare.
This new Share Recovery tool will allow you to bring back your Pinterest and LinkedIn share counts permanently if you have done any of the following:
- Changed permalink structures in WordPress
- Changed connection protocols (ie. gone from HTTP to HTTPS)
- Changed your domain prefix (ie. gone from www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com)
- Changed to using a subdomain (ie. gone from yourdomain.com/blog to blog.yourdomain.com)
- Changed domains entirely (ie. previousdomain.com to newdomain.com)
Please note: Due to recent (early 2017) changes to many social network APIs, Social Warfare cannot guarantee recovery of shares from networks other than Pinterest and LinkedIn.
If you have an active license for Social Warfare in your WordPress install, here’s all you need to do:
Background Information: How it Works
In order to recover your social share counts, Social Warfare will make 2 requests to Pinterest and LinkedIn. One request will use your current URL permalink structure, the other will use your previous URL permalink structure. Once the numbers have been fetched, if they are not an exact match, we will add the numbers together before displaying them on the buttons.
If the numbers are an exact match, the plugin assumes that that network is tracking the change and has already compensated accordingly. However, this only usually applies to HTTP to HTTPS or WWW to non-WWW (or vice versa). However, if a proper system of 301 redirects are in place, some networks can detect other changes as well.
Note: Our plugin will only fetch share counts for 2 patterns, the current structure and one previous structure. If you’ve changed more than once then you’ll need to pick the previous structure that you believe has the most shares.
In order to come up with that secondary, previous URL permalink structure, you’ll need to tell our plugin what that structure used to look like. You can follow the steps below to accomplish that.
Step 1: Navigate to the Share Recovery Settings
Inside your Social Warfare settings page, navigate to the Share Recovery tab.
Turn the feature to ON and proceed to the next step.
Step 2: Select previous URL format
Now, you have to tell Social Warfare which permalink structure you used to use. These options are a direct reflection of the options available to select from in the WordPress permalink settings.
Important: If your previous permalink structure has not changed then ensure that this is left on the “Unchanged” setting and proceed directly to the next step.
The options you have to choose from are as follows:
- Unchanged: For when your previous format on this setting is the same as your current format.
- Plain:
http://yourdomain.com/?p=123
- Day and Name:
http://yourdomain.com/2016/02/17/post-name/
- Month and Name:
http://yourdomain.com/2016/02/post-name/
- Numeric:
http://yourdomain.com/archives/123
- Post Name:
http://yourdomain.com/post-name/
- Custom: for when you have a previous format that doesn’t fit into the above structures.
Step 3: Select previous connection protocol
This step is only for those who have added or removed SSL/TLS and their site has gone from HTTP to HTTPS (or vice versa).
Important: If your HTTP/HTTPS structure has not changed then ensure that this is left on the “Unchanged” setting and proceed directly to the next step.
Choose the option that reflects what your previous version was (not what it currently is). So if your site was originally HTTP and is now HTTPS you would select HTTP from the list. Remember that you’re communicating to our plugin the link format that you used to use.
Step 4: Select previous domain prefix
If your site was (for example) www.yourdomain.com
and you’ve now changed it to only be yourdomain.com
(sans www.) then this option will allow you to recover shares with this type of change.
Important: If your previous domain prefix (www) structure has not changed then ensure that this is left on the “Unchanged” setting and proceed directly to the next step.
Simply select the previous iteration of your prefix from the list and Social Warfare will now check for those counts in addition to the current version counts.
Step 5: Enter your subdomain
If your site is currently on a subdomain (for example: http://blog.yourdomain.com
) but it wasn’t previously, you can enter your subdomain in this field and we’ll strip it out when we go to check for share counts.
Step 6: Enter your former domain (if needed)
If you’ve changed domains, enter your former and current domains in the provided fields without http/https or www. Just olddomain.com
and newdomain.com
will suffice.
Step 7: Use the debug tool to confirm correct pattern
If you want to double-check that your share recovery is set up properly, simply use our ?swp_cache=rebuild&swp_recovery_debug=true
string on any post permalink to see what alternate permalink is being tracked.
So, for example you would check http://yourdomain.com/post-name/?swp_cache=rebuild&swp_recovery_debug=true
and see what URL shows up at the top of the article. If the URL showing is the one you want to be tracked, everything is working as it should.
Final Notes
You will need to keep share recovery activated for Social Warfare to continue adding the counts together. Actually, Social Warfare has a setting built in that won’t allow it to display counts if it fetches counts that are lower than it previously fetched. This is because every once in a while the API share count request fails and it ends up returning the number zero. However, if it fetches the number zero and it previously fetched the number 10, then we simply keep using the number 10.
With this in mind, here’s how it would turn out if you activate share recovery long enough to recover shares and then simply turn it back off:
- Activate share recovery function
- 10 (current URL) + 10 (former URL) = 20 shares
- Deactivate share recovery function
- Fetch 15 (current URL). Less than prev. Show 20
- Fetch 18 (current URL). Less than prev. Show 20
- Fetch 25 (current URL). More than prev. Show 25
- Activate custom recovery function
- Fetch 25 (current URL) + 10 (former URL). Show 35
So just make sure if you do use the share recovery function on your site that you remember to keep it turned on afterwards.
Conclusion
These settings should cover just about any possible scenario for permalink or URL changes to your Social Warfare enabled site. Please note that if you ever deactivate or remove Social Warfare from your site, your recovered counts will be lost. However, as long as Social Warfare is activated, your recovered counts are safe.
So go recover those precious share counts and sleep better knowing that Social Warfare’s Share Recovery has you covered.
Hi Dustin
Does this tool allow to export the signals from a tool such as Sumo to other as AddThis?
Hi, Vinicius! At the moment we do not have a mechanism that would extract historic data from other plugins/apps. However if the counts remain on the social networks that support them, then they will transfer just fine.
Hi Dustin, you mean, the number will be on the social platform (fb), not in the plugin?
Correct, the platform.
Thank you for sharing in depth. It is very helpful to newbie.
I changed my websites from http to http redirect and boom when I try checking my social shares I was shocked but thanks to you anyways for this great article.
I read the article and all the comments, but because this is all very new for me (I’m learning as I go along), I want to confirm:
If I change my permalink structure at this point, will I “definitely” lose my FB share counts or “maybe” lose them? If it’s a definite, do you see any chance of this changing in the future, or do you know of any way at all to resolve this via a developer?
Hi Joudy! If you’re NOT using Social Warfare already, you will definitely lose all of them. However, if you are using Social Warfare it will store them. However, according to Facebook, you’ll be starting from zero.
Is there any new information about recovering lost comments that were on our sites pre-https switch (using the Facebook Comments plugin )? I’m pretty devastated that they are gone.
Unfortunately not Karen. I’m not entirely sure how Facebook’s commenting plugin works and we’re unable to support it at this time.
You state above:
Our plugin will only fetch share counts for 2 patterns, the current structure and one previous structure.
So if I am planning on switching my permalinks to remove the dates AND switching to https, would Social Warfare recover my shares? What if I had already switched the dates like three months ago and am now switching to https? If it do both settings (ssl and permalink), will Social Warfare pull the share counts from the old protocol AND permalink structure (http://mydomain/05/07/postname), or will it just pull the share counts from one change?
Basically, it will only pull from two different URL’s. So if you made two changes but both changes were made at the same time, you can easily pull from the old URL’s. For example, you can pull from the current https://mydomain/post-name and http://mydomain/05/07/post-name. Hopefully that makes sense.
Thanks for sharing..but how can one recover facebook comments?i recently moved my website to https and lost all the comments and they had great information. Kindly help.
Because of the way Facebook is now treating redirects, it is no longer possible to recover shares/comments for a domain. 🙁
Hi Dustin,
do you mean that if I’ve changed the protocol (from http to https) Social Warfare is not going to be able to recover shares for each article?
In a blog of mine I’m usign the swp_recovery_url with quite success and I am able to recover even today the share count.
The problem is that in this new blog where I’ve changed protocol nothing seems working anymore…
Thanks in advance!
If you made the switch before Facebook started dumping/deleting 301 url data, then your old Facebook counts will remain safe in your WP database.
However, any site that tried to make the switch after Facebook made that change will not be able to recover Facebook counts in the switch. At least that’s the last I’ve heard from our developers. Might be best to open up a support ticket to have them take a look at your specific case.
Hi Dustin and Team,
Thanks for a great product! I just switched FinancialSamurai.com from HTTP to HTTPS and version 2.3.2 on August 27, 2017. When I click Settings, I don’t see the menu list in this post, with Share Recovery option.
I see: Display Styles Social Identity Advanced
In Advanced, I just turned on Force New Shares feature. Is that the same thing that automatically does all this in the blog post you guys wrote?
If not, is it because I need to upgrade to Pro? If so, I’m happy to do so to get my social count back. Thanks!
Sam
Hi Sam! The Share Recovery feature is a Pro feature, so you would need a Pro license in order to access it.
Great! Thanks.
Thanks bro, its was helpfull, i tut i had lost all my social counts
I have lost my share counts when i switched to https://www.iassolution.com/. If i go back to http again then will i get my share counts revert back using this plugin..pls reply
Whether or not the plugin can fix your issue 100% will be determined by all the factors listed above Sreejith. If you read through it, you should have a good idea.
Hello, I recently changed my domain name on WordPress and lost my share counts. A majority of the shares were on Facebook. Will Social Warfare recover the number of facebook shares?
Thanks!
Unfortunately Facebook’s API is now no longer storing links that have been 301 redirected. So, if you’ve done things the right way and redirected all your previous links to the new domain, Facebook will detect this and delete the old counts. At the time of this comment there is nothing we can do about that.
Hi
I think I know the answer to this, after having read all the previous comments, and also your various FAQ’s, however just wanted to double check.
If I was to move my website to a new domain name, so from: imjustcreative.com to thelogosmith.co
would I be right in saying the Recovery of Social Shares in this instance would not be possible?
I’ve previously made the switch from http – https on the imjustcreative.com domain, and your plug-in worked brilliantly to recover my previous shares, but the next step in my rebrand is this domain name change, which for a 11 year old blog and website, is a scary thought.
Thanks
Graham
For the most part, it should work. The plugin is now designed to handle full domain name changes.
My website was changed from a www to just the domain name.com. All of my pinterest counts (which were 20,000+ on many are completely gone). I really want to restore the pinterest counts. I noticed this plugin is a cost per year. Is it a one time fix? Or is this something you have to continue to use to get the counts right? Just curious on that. Thank you!
Hi Alexis. I feel your pain on this one. So because of our caching mechanism once the counts are recovered they are stored in your database. Your counts will never lower. However, if you cancel your subscription to Social Warfare – Pro, the plugin can no longer use both versions of your URLs to add the old counts to the new. So what that means is if you had 20k shares on the old URL and 1k on the new URL, Social Warfare – Pro will add them together to get 21k. If you remove Social Warfare – Pro, the number will stay at 21k (because it will never lower the counts) but until your new URL exceeds 21k shares, the number will never increase. This is because the plugin will check the new version and see that it’s lower than the number it has stored and make no change.
I hope that makes sense. It’s a very complicated mechanism to try and explain in text.
Please disregard my previous comment – the counts were at zero but immediately after I posted my first comment and rechecked they were back! Which is awesome 🙂
I’m using the free plugin for now. I installed the plugin a few days ago and my previous share counts are all at zero. Will it take a while for the counts to repopulate or are they gone? Thanks so much.
Selecting http as previous connection protocol seems to cause an issue with rich pins not showing up in Pinterest. Any suggestions on how to fix this?
I have the same issue, and answer guys?
Hi, I’m using shareaholic and recently convert some post into a custom post type, set 301’s using the quick redirects plugin and now I have lost all my share counts and FB comments.
Do you think I’ll be able to recover the share count and fb comments with this plugin?
Many thanks
Hi Darrell! I’m not sure it would work in this case.
Hi Dustin,
I switched to SSL one week ago and I lost all previous Facebook likes.
I’d like to know if your share recovery function works only if Social Warfare plugin was installed before the date I switched to SSL.
Please also consider that I set a permanent redirect 301 from http urls to https ones in .htaccess file.
Thanks for your reply!
Hi WhiteHat! The plugin should work just fine with all social networks in recovering your lost counts. However, Facebook’s API has been making some changes as of late that may or may not make it impossible to retrieve http version of the shares.
Hi there
We’ve just changed to https, and we’d also like to change our permalink structure shortly too. We’ve lost our social share counts, most of which were Facebook shares. You’ve recently mentioned the below, has the Facebook issue for http to https been resolved yet?
Thanks.
Dustin W. Stout says
February 1, 2017 at 3:40 pm
Since Facebook sprung this change up out of nowhere, we haven’t yet found a good solution. Our developer assures me he’s working on it though.
Reply
We’re still working on the issue with Facebook’s API. Our support team would have more insight about this.
I would like to buy this plugin if it can help restore share count. I am using Sumome social share plugin in my WordPress site. Sumome share plugin detects shares on the basis of URL if Open graph and twitter card are not defined. In this situation, can this plugin help me restore share count?
Any help is highly appreciated!
Hi Gaurav! If your URLs have been shared and stored in the social network APIs, Social Warfare can look up multiple different versions of the URL and add all the counts which have been lost due to a permalink change or going from http to https.
I am nervous, to lost my social signals after changing to ssl. Our blog has a lot of social shares, the work of years. can your plugin really help? It is not the question of counter on blog (we don’t display) it is the question of google ranking. some of our pages has thousands of likes. how your plugin is working? does it effect google too or only the social media pages by themselve to beware the links? is it compatible with complex systems (caching, plugin, woo commerce shop and a lot other tools).
Currently there is no proof that social shares affect SEO in any significant (or even measurable) way. Your SEO will benefit more from going to SSL than keeping share counts as long as you have a proper 301 redirect in place. I’m not an SEO, so I would definitely recommend you consult someone who is. However I do know a lot of SEOs (some of the best in the business) and they would back me up on this point.
Hi Guys, what a great plugin and feature!
Just one question: how do you fetch share counts from Facebook from a http page once the 301 redirect has been implemented to https, since they both result in the same share count?
Keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Roy
Since Facebook sprung this change up out of nowhere, we haven’t yet found a good solution. Our developer assures me he’s working on it though.
Hi guys, I just migrated frrom http to https and have lost all my share counts with Sumo Me. Will this plugin help me add back those share counts? Thanks.
Actually, I think I will switch over to using Social Warfare instead of Sumo Me. Fingers crossed i can get my likes back!
Yes, Johnny! That’s exactly what our Share Recovery feature was built for.
Hi there,
I want to buy this but have questions, which looks like you answered before.
I used ShareThis and moved to HTTP and lost the share count.
Twitter
G+
Aggregate of all shares
These were the buttons displayed, some of which with 20K shares that would be mostly email, etc.
1 – Can these be recovered?
2 – I think you say above Twitter is not?
Will social warfare replace ShareThis to work? Work in conjunction with it or can social warfare be deactivated after the recovery and continue to use ShareThis?
Thank you
Hi Pedro! This article should answer all your questions.
Is this still an option in 2.2.0? I can’t find it.
Hi TJ! Yes, as long as you’ve installed the Social Warfare – Pro add-on. See details of the transition in our Release notes.
Thank you, that did the trick, but I still don’t see my Twitter shares showing up.
I thought your team had “worked hard and were able to bring back Twitter share counts in version 1.4.1 of Social Warfare”?
I’m on 2.2.0, but I can’t seem to get Twitter shares working. Am I missing something?
I recently changed my site to HTTPS and lost all of my social shares. Will your plugin recover my share count if I did NOT have it installed prior to the switch?
Hi Torey! Yes it will. Now, it will not be able to recover Twitter share counts, but any share counts from the other networks are no problem.
Hey Dustin, Will the way in which it recovers and displays the share count negatively affect SEO and ranking?
Good question Christina! No, it would not affect SEO in any way, shape, or form. The reason is because it’s just a number being displayed on a page. Search engines are not reading the page for share counts, they’re reading social network APIs for share counts. If putting a number on a page affected SEO, all you would need to do is build a fake sharing plugin and use fake numbers, right?
All Social Warfare does is check the social network APIs for both the previous and current versions of the permalink for a given page and displays the sum total of the network API counts.
Until now I’ve been using Shareholic plugin on my site and now I’m planning to buy Social Warfare. Mine has been a popular website so I don’t want to lose my share counts some of which are in thousands. How can this be achieved?
Hi Neha! Thanks for reaching out! The good news is, we’ve answered this question here but the short answer is: you don’t lose share counts by switching plugins. 😀
Hey Guys,
I just bought the plugin.
So this blog changed from a subdirectory to subdomain.
i.e xyz.com/blog to blog.xyz.com
And I’ve set the settings as per the above instructions. Quick doubt though. In the subdomain field, should I type in the entire new subdomain URL or just the prefix, i.e blog?
Numbers don’t seen to show correctly at this time. But looking forward to fix this.
Thanks for this amazing plugin!
Recovery doesn’t work for domain name change. The code snippet (or logic thereafter) is not correct. Are you sure the ‘str_replace’ isn’t reversed? Or that your fetch logic is correct?
When we moved our plugin into the WordPress repository they told us to replace our two digit prefix with a three digit prefix instead. So we switched from sw_ to swp_. As such, we JUST right now updated this post to reflect the new names of the functions.
But basically, you just need to update that prefix in steps 6 and 7 and then everything should start working exactly as it is documented in this article. Sorry for the confusion on that!
Hey Nicholas. For those on any platform, kayaker Nick Heer offers this technique for preserving or recovering shares when upgrading to HTTPS or migratong a new domain via his 3-part article series posted to our blog. – Randy
Woukd live to have the feature for more than one redirect…i.e we’ve had some posts under two different URLs due to a permalink plugin issue (it was a whike befire I caught and fixed this), but want to switch to HTTPS in the future…would live to capture ALL of the shares.
Do you think this feature will be added?
I found this plugin mentioned on Estine’s blog at https://enstinemuki.com/how-to-recover-social-share-counts/ but unfortunately, it’s only for WordPress sites.
Any option for custom code?
Hi George! Unfortunatley we’re only a WordPress plugin company because that’s what we know best.
Hi,
is it possible that you switched domains ?
$current_domain = ‘http://currentdomain.com/’;
$former_domain = ‘http://formerdomain.com/’;
so that current_domain variable is actually former_domain ?
Thanks
No. We’ve got it right. Basically, we’re taking your current permalink structure and putting it into a variable. Once that’s done, we’re going to search for your current domain and replace that section of the link with the former domain. Now we have the link as it existed on the previous domain. Once that’s done, we check for shares using both the current permalink that WordPress gives to us, and the former domain link that we created with that function. Once we fetch both sets of counts, we add them together before saving them and displaying them. Does that make sense?
Yes, that makes sense .. thank you.
I am having trouble getting share updates …
Once I had: http://www.domain.com/en/article
Now I have: https://www.domain.com/article …
What do you thing you could solved this ?
Thank you in advance
Would this work if I previously had a custom permalink structure?
My old permalink was month/day/postname but also there was “.html” at the end of each URL.
Hi GS! I know we just solved this in our support system but for everyone else’s sake who might have this same question– the answer is yes. 😀
Hi there. We’ve followed up with support system on how to do this – with exactly the same issue – but so far it hasn’t been resolved. Would you mind letting us know how to achieve this? Thanks!
Hi Tina! If you’ve got a request in the support system, it’s probably just waiting for our lead developer to have a look. He’s been off on Military orders and hasn’t been able to get to tickets as quickly as he would like. He’s the expert on this, so we will have to wait to hear his input on your ticket.
Is it possible to change from one custom permalink structure to another as well? Need to switch from domain.com/lessons/ tot domain.com/lesson/ because of a plugin clash, but would like to keep the share count!
Hi Freek! This is totally possible now with the updated version.
This is now possible using the “Custom Permalink” box mentioned above!
Recently switched from vonwong.com/blog to blog.vonwong.com and hoping to recover the social share count. Would your plugin help solve that and do you offer it as a standalone service?
Hi Von! Unfortunately that’s a much more complicated task than what our current Share Recovery tools is capable of. However, a good developer who is experienced with redirects should be able to custom develop something for you. Our co-founder, Nick, has done similar jobs in the past for that.
Hey again Von, this is now possible! 😀
Hi,
I’m planning to switch-off multi-language site where /en/ was present in the permalinks. Could your solution deal with such kind of change?
Thanks,
Tigran
Tigran,
At this time our share recovery only covers switching from one standard WordPress permalink to another or switching from HTTP to HTTPS (or vice versa).
This is now possible using the “Custom Permalink” option!
I removed the category from my posts a while ago. And I plan to switch to https in the future. Can this feauture handle these two changes?
Hi Wouter! At the moment, no. However, we’ve now added it to our feature request list on Github. Thanks for the suggestion!
Just an update– this is now possible! 😀
Wouldn’t I pick HTTP as my previous protocol if I switched to HTTPS?
Absolutely correct! Good catch– post updated.
Hi Dustin,
This is one of my favorite features of Social Warfare! I’ve been looking for a solution for quite some time to preserve social shares/proof when migrating from HTTP to HTTPS. I will be singing its praises all over and will recommend it to all of our clients.
Thank you to the whole team for creating such an amazing social sharing plugin!
I’m so glad you liked it Robin! A bunch of my SEO friends all told me how big a deal this is for them, and that makes our day to know that we’ve solved yet another pain point for people like us. 😀