Social Share Buttons Have Lost 37.9% of Their Websites in Two Years

Not long ago, many blog posts and product pages carried a row of buttons inviting readers to share it on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and email. Today a reader who wants to share a page copies the link or uses the share button built into their phone. The buttons on the page are left over from another era, and websites are quietly removing them.

A social share button tool is a script from a provider such as AddToAny, ShareThis or AddThis that adds those buttons to a website. Each one is extra code that loads on every visit. Counting how many websites still load them shows how fast an old feature is leaving the web, and how many sites still carry scripts that do nothing.

They are going steadily. Share button tools were on 222,470 homepages in September 2026, against 358,044 in October 2024, a 37.9% drop, and their share of websites fell from 2.18% to 1.44%. Every one of the eight tools tracked lost websites. 39,812 homepages still load AddThis, a service that stopped working when Oracle shut it down in 2023.

We used 24 monthly snapshots of the public HTTP Archive crawl, from October 2024 to September 2026. Each month it loads the homepages of 15 to 16 million websites on a mobile device and records the software each one uses; September 2026 covered 15,470,478 homepages. For each month we counted the homepages that load any of eight share button tools and divided by the number of homepages checked, so the share adjusts for changes in the number of websites checked.

The eight tools are AddToAny, ShareThis, AddThis, Ultimately Social, Shareaholic, Super Socializer, GetSocial and Social9. A homepage counts once however many of the tools it loads.

The combined count fell from 358,044 homepages to 222,470, a 37.9% drop. A year ago the share was 1.84%, so the fall is spread evenly across both years. It is also steady rather than sudden: the share slipped a little in 22 of 23 months, with no single month accounting for the fall.

The one rise, in November 2024, came from a one-month jump for ShareThis, from 93,359 homepages to 114,578, which reversed the following month to 88,305. A slow, even decline like this is what cleanup looks like: sites drop the buttons one by one as they redesign, switch themes or strip unused plugins.

AddThis fell 57.2%, from 93,092 homepages to 39,812, the steepest drop among the larger tools. Oracle shut the service down in 2023, so these are leftover scripts that no longer show working buttons, loading on every visit for no benefit. Ultimately Social, Shareaholic and Super Socializer each lost between 38.8% and 47%.

AddToAny, now the most common tool at 96,185 homepages, declined least of the large ones at 24.7%, and ShareThis, second at 60,991, lost 34.7%. Even the tools that still work are losing websites, which points to a wider move away from share buttons rather than only the AddThis cleanup.

Check whether your site still loads AddThis or another share tool. If it is AddThis, remove it: the service no longer works, and the script only adds load time. If it is a working tool, look at whether anyone uses the buttons; on most sites, visitors share by copying the link or through their phone, and a leaner page loads faster.

If sharing matters for your content, keep one lightweight option on article pages, where readers might share, rather than on every page and the homepage. Then use the same review to clear out other scripts that no longer earn their place, such as retired social widgets and pixels for ad platforms you no longer use.

Ongoing website management from Suff Digital removes dead scripts and plugins so your site stays fast and current.

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