Share Buttons: Yay or Nay?
Nobody clicks your share buttons By Derek Hanson
I saw this blog post on bubbles.town, and the title caught my attention, so I clicked through to read it. It was also timely because just a few days earlier I had added share buttons to my own site.
I don't know if I agree with the conclusion of the post. If share buttons are done tastefully, selectively, and with privacy in mind, I think they're perfectly okay.
We're seeing a trend toward making websites personal again, a little like they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social sharing buttons started becoming common as services like Twitter and Facebook (UGHHH!) grew in popularity. Email, of course, has always been around.
I think the more ways people have to share something, the better, as long as those options are implemented tastefully and don't track visitors. Especially today, when people may prefer one platform over another, whether that's Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter (I still can't bring myself to call it X), Threads, or something else.
So when Derek says:
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.”
— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons
I don't know that most people necessarily behave the same way. Derek does cite data showing very low usage of share buttons. But I also think the type of website, the audience, the content, and even the way the sharing options are implemented matter.
Especially within IndieWeb circles, share buttons can be implemented without the tracking and third-party scripts that caused many of the problems associated with older social-sharing widgets. A simple link doesn't have to phone home to Facebook or another large platform every time somebody loads the page.
There is even some evidence that the implementation makes a difference.
Google's Santa Tracker team had previously removed its individual social-sharing buttons from mobile because they took up too much space. In 2016, though, they added a single Share button using the Web Share API, which opens the device's native sharing interface. According to Google's web.dev documentation, users who had that option available shared about 20% more than users without it.[1]
That was a mobile experiment, so I wouldn't use it as proof that a row of sharing buttons on a desktop blog is going to suddenly make everyone share your posts. It does suggest to me that the conclusion shouldn't simply be that share buttons don't work. How they're implemented seems to matter too.
Maybe people don't want a row of intrusive Facebook and Twitter widgets. That isn't necessarily the same thing as not wanting an easy way to share something.
I do agree more with this part:
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.
— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons
That's one reason I think putting share buttons at the end of a post makes sense. They seem natural there. How do you know whether you want to share or save a post until you've read it?
I also think the type of site makes a difference.
Derek cites GOV.UK's experiment showing very low overall usage of its sharing buttons. During the ten-week experiment, visitors used the buttons 14,078 times across roughly 6.8 million pageviews.[2]
But when you look at GOV.UK's own report, things get more interesting. Sharing varied depending on what people were reading. World-location pages had a sharing rate of 0.58%, while consultations were only 0.06%. Individual news stories varied even more, with sharing rates ranging from 0.18% to 1.6%.[2]
GOV.UK's own researchers said there was more work to do. They wanted to compare their numbers with other types of websites and test things like button placement.[2]
That seems important to me. Someone visiting a government website to complete a form, check a regulation, or find information about a government service may behave very differently from someone browsing personal blogs because they're interested in what people are writing.
The GOV.UK results are useful. I don't think we can automatically assume people behave exactly the same way on every kind of website.
There is another issue with some of the evidence being used here and it is its age.
The GOV.UK experiment ran from December 2013 through February 2014. Just look at the social-web landscape represented in the original article itself.[2] This was the era of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Pinterest, Blogger, RSS, and rows of branded social icons everywhere (evidenced by the own articles feature image).
GOV.UK's actual experiment measured Facebook and Twitter sharing, and the researchers themselves said more comparison with other kinds of websites was needed. Their conclusion was also qualified as applying “at least on desktops.”
That matters because the web of 2026 is not the web of 2014. Today we have native operating-system sharing, the Web Share API, Copy Link buttons, email sharing, new platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and lightweight links that don't require loading third-party tracking code.
So I don't think a study of Facebook and Twitter buttons from more than a decade ago should be treated as the final word on whether a privacy-respecting share option belongs on a personal website today.
I would concede that bookmarks, RSS readers, copying links, browser sharing features, and private sharing through email or messaging are probably doing much more of the heavy lifting than share buttons. But I don't think that makes share buttons useless.
There's also an interesting overlap here with Derek's own recommendation. He says people already have a Share button built into their browsers and operating systems. That's true and the modern Web Share API lets a website put a simple Share button on the page that opens that same native sharing interface. The website doesn't have to decide whether you use Mastodon, Bluesky, email, Messages, or something else. Your device handles that.[3]
To me, that's quite different from the old Facebook and Twitter widgets.
On a personal website, if a sharing option adds almost no additional load, doesn't track visitors, and stays away from those old FAANG-style embedded widgets, I don't see much harm in offering it.
Then there's this:
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.
— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons
I actually see that as more of a win for the web than a loss, rather than confirmation that sharing buttons themselves need to disappear. Good riddance to the giant third-party widgets that tracked people across the web.
But a small, privacy-respecting link that says “Share on Mastodon,” “Share on Bluesky,” “Email,” or “Copy Link”? Or even one simple Share button that hands things over to your operating system?
I think there's still room on the web for that.
As you can probably tell, Derek's post really hit a nerve with me, probably because I had just finished putting the share buttons and other sharing options on one of my websites and making them look tasteful and modern when I came across his post.
That's my two cents on the matter. What's yours?
- Google, ["Web Share API"](https://web.dev/articles/web-share), web.dev. The Santa Tracker team reported that users with Web Share enabled shared about 20% more than users without it. ↩
- GOV.UK, ["Social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks"](https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-buttons-the-first-10-weeks/). The experiment ran from December 2013 to February 2014 and found substantial variation in sharing rates between different types of content. ↩
- MDN Web Docs, ["Navigator: share() method"](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/share). The Web Share API allows a website to invoke the operating system's native sharing mechanism rather than embedding third-party social widgets. ↩