Frequently Asked Questions

Why place AddToAny on my site?

AddToAny is the way millions of sites have enabled visitors to share & save content, resulting in more traffic, larger audiences, awesomely viral content, and much more. Launched in March 2006, AddToAny is the very first universal sharing platform, and the customizable platform that makes it easy for visitors to share your content using any service. AddToAny is built with extraordinary care for end-users, publishers, and developers across the globe.

Get the share buttons for your website, app, CMS or blog, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many other platforms.

What features does AddToAny have?

AddToAny has many features, yet stays lightweight and efficient. We carefully launch new features, and we retire low-use ones when it makes sense. Popular AddToAny features include:

How often is the menu of services updated?

Constantly. Services frequently come and go, they change endpoints, and AddToAny always uses the current sharing endpoint for each service.

How do I customize AddToAny?

Start with the documentation for customizing AddToAny. For WordPress, check out the WordPress sharing docs and the sharing plugin's FAQ. For Drupal, check out the Drupal sharing docs. If you are using AddToAny's button code configurator for any website, click the "More Options" button and additionally see AddToAny's general customization docs.

Does this service cost anything?

AddToAny is free.

How do I get usage stats?

AddToAny integrates with Google Analytics and other analytics software.

See AddToAny & Google Analytics for details on how to access these stats within Google Analytics, and how to setup Google Tag Manager if you use Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager.

Other analytics apps can track sharing usage by hooking into AddToAny events.

To track clickthroughs on shared links, AddToAny integrates with link shorteners and custom URLs and parameters (including Google Analytics parameters).

Is AddToAny GDPR-ready & CCPA-ready for sites & apps using AddToAny?

Yes, AddToAny is compatible by default with the European General Data Protection Regulation, and the California Consumer Privacy Act.

By design, AddToAny does not store personal data. Our technology vendors are compliant and may temporarily store strictly necessary data as the regulations allow.

Why do certain services appear at the top of the menu?

AddToAny automatically personalizes each menu by placing the services each user uses at the top of the menu.

Why must a shared URL be percent-encoded?

Percent-escaped URLs aren't very readable, but this standard URI encoding protects a shared URL from failing as it's passed around between applications, operating systems, and devices.

Without URI encoding, apps make unsafe assumptions about raw characters in a URL, which leads to visitors/crawlers arriving from links to different (nonexistent) URLs instead of the canonical URL. So it's important to keep sharing encoded URLs instead of trying to share unencoded URLs.

Some applications will kindly URI decode non-Latin characters for a readable user presentation of URLs, but the underlying URLs must be URI encoded to avoid pointing to nonexistent URLs. You'll notice this is the behavior of your modern browser's web address bar when you see the URL (decoded for readability) then share the URL (encoded for copy & paste and various sharing methods).

This W3C article gives some technical background on multilingual web addresses.

How should I use AddToAny with a Content Security Policy?

AddToAny supports a strict CSP nonce, as in the AddToAny CSP demo. If you manually include AddToAny HTML code on your site and can generate a nonce per request, add the nonce attribute to your AddToAny script tag.

<script async nonce="{SERVER-GENERATED-NONCE}" src="https://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js"></script>

If you use one of the AddToAny plugins, find a "CSP" plugin/module that can generate a nonce per request and add the nonce to AddToAny script tags.

How should I use AddToAny on HTTPS secure pages?

AddToAny plugins use HTTPS by default and the addtoany.com domain is HSTS preloaded in major web browsers.

If you manually include AddToAny HTML on your site, simply use AddToAny assets from https://static.addtoany.com instead of http://static.addtoany.com.

For Facebook sharing, how can I set the image and description Facebook uses?

Facebook expects the Title, Description, and Preview Image of a shared page to be defined in the Open Graph meta tags of a shared page. To change the title, description or image on Facebook, you will need to modify your pages.

Use Facebook's Sharing Debugger to see how Facebook is reading your pages. "Scrape Again" to have Facebook refetch a page, or use the Batch Invalidator to purge Facebook's cache of multiple URLs.

For more technical information on setting your pages up for Facebook sharing, see the "Open Graph Markup" section in Facebook's documentation.

How should I troubleshoot share counters?

AddToAny gets share counts directly from the official APIs of services, so issues with share counts are between those services and your site.

Issues with Facebook's official share counts API are often resolved by using the "Scrape Again" button from Facebook's Sharing Debugger.

If you're using AddToAny share count recovery and publicly redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Facebook will only return the old share counts if the Facebook Crawler is given special access to the old URL you're recovering. For technical details on exempting the Facebook Crawler, see the first step in Facebook's documentation on preserving engagement metrics. You can safely skip Facebook's other steps regarding the og:url meta tag, because AddToAny share count recovery handles that for you.

The buttons are not displaying. What should I try first?

Something is likely preventing AddToAny's JavaScript from loading. We recommend searching the web for your specific issue and troubleshooting the issue first.

To troubleshoot, try another web browser, device, and/or Internet connection to see what is preventing you from loading AddToAny. The most common cause for this issue is having a browser add-on enabled that blocks ads and sometimes major social buttons such as AddToAny's. If the cause is an add-on, we recommend contacting the add-on's author about whitelisting AddToAny.

If you are experiencing an issue on your site only, try temporarily switching to a default theme (where applicable) and temporarily disabling all other components & plugins on your site. Site-specific issues commonly stem from another website component causing a conflict. Sometimes site-specific issues are caused by invalid website HTML code, so it's a good idea to validate your pages and resolve validation issues. Feel free to contact us with details about your issue — we'll try to help. Point us to your website, and let us know if you're using the general AddToAny code or one of AddToAny's plugins (such as AddToAny's WordPress plugin, Drupal module, or Blogger widget, etc.).

Where can I find the FAQ and changelog for the WordPress sharing plugin?

The WordPress sharing plugin documentation can be found on WordPress.org. FAQ / Changelog

Where are buttons such as Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube?

Services such as Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Vimeo are available as follow buttons. These social media services do not offer sharing endpoints for a proper share button on the web, so AddToAny makes icons available to link to your social media profiles using follow buttons.

For WordPress sites, see the follow buttons for WordPress guide for how to add social media buttons to your site.

Can I use the Subscribe button with FeedBurner?

Yes, you can use FeedBurner with AddToAny by entering your FeedBurner feed URL like https://feeds.feedburner.com/FEEDBURNER_USERNAME in the Feed URL box.