I don’t click share buttons. I never have.
When I find something worth sharing, I tap the share icon in Chrome on my phone. That’s it. On my desktop I click the little link icon in Arc’s browser bar, or I just double-click the address bar and hit command-C command-V. I’ve never once looked at a row of branded social icons at the bottom of a blog post and thought, “Oh good, there’s the Facebook button.”
I think most people are the same way. And I think the data backs that up.
This idea has been rattling around in my head for years. Back when I was deep in my PhD research at Iowa State, I came across Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media writing about things you should remove from your website. One of them was social icons in your header. Not even the share buttons; the plain follow-us icons. His argument was simple: those icons are exit signs. You spent all this effort getting someone to your site, and the most visually prominent element on the page is an invitation to leave.
But he didn’t stop there. In the same piece, he looked at social share buttons on service pages and product pages and found the same pattern. Share rates around 0.1% or lower. His advice was to cut them and uninstall the WordPress plugin that added them. Visual noise, no value.
That stuck with me.1 And when I started building block themes and thinking about what belongs in a post template, I kept coming back to it. Every WordPress theme I’ve worked with ships social share icons somewhere in the post layout. They sit at the top or the bottom, a little row of branded circles. Nobody questions them. They’re just there, like they’ve always been there.
But should they be?
What the data says
The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors. The most telling part: the feature sat in their backlog for ages because zero end users had ever requested it. In their user testing, people just copied and pasted links.
Moovweb found the same thing when they analyzed 61 million mobile sessions. Only 0.2% of mobile users interacted with social sharing at all. Visitors were twelve times more likely to click an advertisement.
Luke Wroblewski, the interaction designer and author, crowdsourced data from his readers and landed on an average of 0.25% across 18 million pageviews. Different organizations, different audiences, same number.
So where is the sharing actually happening?
Dark social
In 2012, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic noticed a huge chunk of the magazine’s web traffic showing up as “direct” in Google Analytics. Those visitors weren’t typing URLs or using bookmarks. They were clicking links that someone had pasted into a text thread, an email chain, a Slack channel. He called it “dark social,” and the research that followed confirmed the scale of it. RadiumOne found that 84% of outbound link sharing happens through these private channels. Copy, paste, send. That’s how people actually share things.
The share buttons on your blog post are a sideshow to how sharing works in practice.
Smashing Magazine tested this directly. They removed their Facebook buttons and reported that traffic from Facebook went up. Their theory: instead of hitting the “like” button (which does almost nothing for visibility), readers were copying URLs and sharing posts on their own timelines. The buttons were getting in the way of organic sharing.
The cost of keeping them
Share buttons aren’t just decorative. They load third-party JavaScript, CSS, images, and tracking scripts from external domains. The European Court of Justice ruled that websites embedding a Facebook Like button are joint data controllers with Facebook for the visitor data those plugins collect. That’s real legal liability for a button almost nobody clicks.
There’s another signal hiding in the plugin ecosystem itself. For years, AddThis was the default share widget on a huge slice of the web; Oracle bought it for around $200 million in 2016, then shut it down completely in May 2023 as part of a “periodic portfolio review.” ShareThis is still hanging on, but it isn’t what it used to be. Elegant Themes’ Monarch, the premium share plugin everyone reached for during the Divi era, still hasn’t been updated to swap the Twitter logo for X; readers are asking about it in the comments years after the rebrand. AddToAny keeps quietly chugging along, but even it is a thin wrapper around sharing destinations the browser already covers.
The companies that built the share-button economy are walking away from it.
And here’s the thing that should settle this for good: in November 2025, Meta announced it was permanently discontinuing its external Like, Share, and Comment buttons for third-party websites. The shutdown date was February 10, 2026. Meta’s own words were that the plugins reflect “an earlier era of web development” and that usage had “naturally declined.” When the company that invented the Like button walks away from it, that’s the signal.
What to do instead
Your readers already have a share button. It’s the one built into their browser. That little share icon in Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox; it’s been there for years, and it opens the operating system’s own share dialog with all the apps and contacts the reader actually uses. No third-party scripts. No tracking. No branded icons cluttering your design.
Or you could add a simple “copy link” button. One click, URL copied to clipboard, done.
Or, and I think this is the most honest option, you could add nothing at all. If someone wants to share your post, they’ll copy the URL. They’ve been doing that this entire time.
Why this matters for WordPress
I think about this as a template design question. When you’re building a block theme, every element in your post template is a decision. Headers, footers, metadata, navigation, comments. Each one should earn its place.
Social share icons don’t earn theirs. The usage data is clear across every study that’s measured it. The privacy implications are real. And the assumption that people need branded buttons to share content doesn’t match how people actually behave on the web.
I built Tufte Blocks around the idea that every design element should serve the reader. Remove the noise, let the content breathe. Share icons are noise.
If you’re a theme developer or a site builder, I think this is worth a second look. Check your own analytics. See how many people actually click those buttons on your sites. I think you’ll find what the research already shows.
What does your post template include that nobody asked for?
- It’s always interesting that things you read or learn that stay with you forever. This one really hit me in a way that I just keep coming back to it. It may seem like older data or an older resource, but this article I just published proves Andy was ahead of the times. Social sharing icons don’t help your site. ↩︎
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