There have been reports of social share counts on some sites being affected when an SSL certificate is installed. This is because social sites see the http and https versions of websites as two completely different sites.
Some social share plugins do a good job of maintaining social shares after the change. Generally, they do this by storing the shares from the http version of the site in their system, then adding on the new, https shares to give a total. We've found that these plugins do a good job of this:
So if you have one of these plugins, it is very likely that your social shares won't be affected.
If you don't have one of these plugins, or if you have one and find that your social share counts are affected after moving to https, purchasing Social Warfare after the upgrade is an option. It can gather the shares from the http URL even after the site has been moved to https.
If social shares are really important to you, you might like to consider purchasing and installing Social Warfare before you move to https.
Important note:
Please be aware that these plugins rely on the social media networks making the old share counts available. If Facebook changes their system to make it harder to access the old share counts, there’s not a lot the plugin can do about that.
We’ve been speaking to the Social Warfare developers about this, and they commented:
“We’ve noticed recently that many social networks (including Facebook) are changing their APIs to make recovery more difficult. From their point of view, maintaining old count numbers creates unnecessary workload for the API and it’s much easier to only calculate shares for current/accessible URLs. Obviously this is very distressing for us since recovery is a large part of our plugin’s appeal.
Right now LinkedIn and Pinterest are still 100% recoverable, but the other networks are hit or miss. Our development team is working to find a way around the API changes, but it doesn’t look good at this moment.”
This increased risk of lost social shares isn’t great. However, we still recommend you go ahead with the upgrade — it’s better to get on to https sooner, to start building new social shares on the new URL.
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