-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 16
Count Sources
There are 3 available options for the Count Sources plugin setting.
- SharedCount.com
- Native
- None
Note: Twitter share counts are not included in the primary count sources. To use and collect Twitter share counts there are a few additional steps needed. See the documentation.
This is our recommendation. Unless a special use case is at play, you should use this. SharedCount.com is a service that collects and returns all the share counts.
With this setting, all (non Twitter/Yummly) share counts are pulled from the SharedCount.com API. We prefer this because using a single API is more reliable and performant.
Signing up for an account on https://sharedcount.com is free and takes 2 minutes. Afterwards you will copy the API key from the account area and paste it in the Shared Counts plugin setting. After that, we do the rest!
Free accounts receive 1,000 API calls per day. This limit will accommodate small sites.
If you connect your SharedCount.com account to your Facebook account (look in your SharedCount.com account area), you receive 10,000 API calls per day. With the caching methods in Shared Counts, this limit should large sites. For reference, a site with ~3,000 posts uses between 500-2000 API calls per day. API usage will depend on the number and age of the posts, if you a tracking/preserving http URLs, additional arbitrary URLs, etc. This is recommended and so far has worked will with medium to large sites (A few sites have thousands of posts with millions of pageviews/month).
The native setting collects the share counts from their respective sources. Facebook counts are pulled from the Facebook API, Pinterest counts are pulled from the Pinterest API, etc.
This setting has no real advantage over the SharedCount.com count source, other than it does not depend on a third party API. We recommend avoiding this setting unless you are unable to use SharedCount.com.
Using this method also will increase the API calls, and thus the overhead, when updating the share counts. With the SharedCount.com source we can retrieve all non-Twitter counts with a single API call. Using the native source we must make a API call for every count type desired.
For example: You wish to track Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn. Using the native count source this requires 4 API calls (where as with SharedCount.com all these counts are included in a single API call). If have Shared Counts configured to also track non-HTTP URLs, this will double the API calls as we will need to check both versions of the URL (8 total API calls).
The last thing to note about the Native count source is with Facebook. Some users, depending on other sites on their IP, have issues collecting the Facebook share counts. This is because Facebook throttles/limits the number of count lookups by IP address. If you share an IP address with other sites leveraging share count plugins, you may notice Facebook counts are not properly updating because your IP is over the limit. In this case you will need to provide and use a Facebook Access Token. More details on this are found in the Share Counts settings.
Share counts are not tracked. This setting should be used only if you want to use Shared Counts to display social sharing badges, but do not want/need to display the share counts.
Using this setting will also disable the share count metabox in the WordPress admin.