Update!
We have relaunched this plugin as Shared Counts, available on WordPress.org and GitHub. EA Share Count is no longer actively maintained, so please use Shared Counts going forward. For launch details and background, see the Shared Counts launch post.
Social share count functionality is essential for content-driven websites. Displaying share counts provides social proof that an article is popular or useful, encourages readers to engage, and can drive referral traffic from social networks. Using native buttons from each social network works, but those buttons often make external requests that slow page load—especially when many buttons appear on list or archive pages.
EA Share Count was built as a lightweight alternative for retrieving, caching, and displaying social share counts without embedding multiple external widgets. It’s developer-friendly, extensible, and designed to perform well on high-traffic sites.
EA Share Count
EA Share Count is a compact WordPress plugin created to fetch and cache share counts from various services and present them in a fast, flexible way. Co-developed by Jared Atchison and myself, it has been used by clients and on production sites for months, delivering faster load times and cleaner presentation compared to loading many external share buttons.
The plugin is particularly well suited for high-traffic blogs and content sites because it reduces external HTTP requests, offers consistent styling, and enables you to surface popular posts based on share metrics.
EA Share Count is already implemented on sites such as Pinch of Yum, Chris Kresser, and duPont Registry. For additional examples and implementation ideas, see the list of Sites using EA Share Count.
The plugin may be used purely for visible share buttons or just to collect counts for sorting and analytics—both approaches are supported.
Features
- Multiple built-in button styles to choose from, plus the ability to create a custom appearance with your own CSS.
- Query and sort WordPress posts by share count to build popular-post widgets and lists, such as a Popular Posts Widget.
- Smart caching of share counts to limit API requests. Default refresh intervals update recent posts more frequently (for example, posts published within 24 hours refresh more often), while older posts refresh less frequently. These intervals are configurable to suit your traffic and API limits.
- Control which share buttons appear, their order, and whether they display before and/or after post content via the settings page.
- Works with virtually any theme. It integrates easily with Genesis and themes that use Theme Hook Alliance by default, but you can reposition or manually insert the share buttons using standard hooks or template code.
- Includes a combined “Total Count” button to show overall engagement alongside individual network counts.
- Provides built-in Email and Print buttons; the email modal and message are customizable via filters.
- Extensive hooks and filters for developers to extend and customize behavior. Example snippets and integration tips are available for common use cases.
- Automatic update support via GitHub so the plugin can check for updates and be updated from within WordPress like a standard plugin.
Not in the .org repo
EA Share Count is not hosted on the official WordPress.org plugin repository by design. The plugin aims to be developer-oriented and highly customizable, and hosting it on .org would generate support requests that we’re not set up to manage for a free plugin.
Despite not being in the .org repo, EA Share Count receives updates. It uses a Plugin Update Checker that allows WordPress to detect updates from GitHub and install them from the admin interface, so updating the plugin is seamless for site administrators.